10 Biggest Heat Magnets In WWE History

Chris Jericho’s WWF debut in the summer of 1999 wasn’t the smoothest transition in the world. Interrupting an in-ring promo by The Rock to a huge pop after weeks of buildup and months of planning, he fizzled like a FUBARed firework.

Roasted by Rocky for daring to cut in, Jericho blustered and pouted when he should have kept some of the badass credibility he’d come onstage with, and ended up evoking exactly the wrong kind of heat. That misfire meant that the intended opening feud with The Rock was cancelled immediately.

Things didn’t get any better for a while. On his second night, he called the Undertaker a “giant slug” and “the personification of boredom”, again without clearing the remarks first. His first match on RAW was a damp squib against The Rock, where Jericho, having not been instructed as to how a WWF heel worked a match, looked listless and apathetic. A singles bout against X-Pac at Unforgiven in September was worse.

Writing his own promos with minimal input from the office, no one had told Jericho that his cowardly braggart character wasn’t working out, or the extent of the heat he was accruing. Since he’d assumed that things were going well, he hadn’t asked for any advice, which meant that, unbeknownst to him, he was coming across as monumentally arrogant as well as inept. As the new boy, he’d not yet made enough friends to have his back against all the whispers.

Relegated to Sunday Night Heat after his biggest supporter, Vince Russo, left the company, the angle with Chyna over the Intercontinental Championship was a massive step up… but Jericho had a habit of working stiff, and practically gave her a black eye when he defeated her for the title at Armageddon in December.

Vince McMahon tore bloody strips off him backstage the following night at RAW, telling him he didn’t know what he was doing in the ring and that he was to run his matches past X-Pac, someone who was trusted to always put on a good showing, before he went out there from now on.

Part of the problem was that, in the Attitude Era, the competition for a top spot was far fiercer than at any other time in the company’s history. To make matters worse, Jericho had made what name he had at WCW, back when they were a credible opposition for the WWF. He came straight into a good spot on the card for a guaranteed salary of nearly half a million a year, and then wouldn’t stop talking about how things used to be done in Atlanta.

No wonder he had a bullseye painted on his back. It took months for Jericho to acclimatise, and until then he had what Triple H referred to as “nuclear” heat.