That Time Chris Jericho Was WWE Champion For 30 Minutes

To be as critical as Jericho—and none of this matters now, though it did matter then—the man unleashed no less than five catchphrases in the opening minute. He stumbled, slightly, over his words at times. He spent an eternity burying the WWF, to inform his deeply deluded über-arrogant heel schtick—but that was the stuff of a (very entertaining) midcard heel in the fiction, and in reality, it did not endear him to the fleet of over megastars in the back. The Undertaker et al., shovels at the ready, wondered just who the in the blue f*ck this WCW cruiserweight thought he was. It was a phenomenal production, even then—but that promo is actually far from Jericho’s best, genius work. If it was, people might have carried Jericho’s optimistic “Go Jericho, go!” chant forward into the next few months.

Really, it wouldn’t have mattered whether Jericho, desperate to impress, had reined in his scattergun instincts.

Jericho, and this next take is more difficult to dispute—your writer was one of legion fans desperate to see the Ayatollah vs. The Great One at SummerSlam at the time—failed to strike the balance of an act already precarious in the eyes of Vince McMahon, imported as it was from the dreaded dubya-see-dubya.

What made us gravitate towards Jericho—here was a man who could talk like a showman and wrestle like a technician, the manifested ideal of our nascent, aspirational hardcore fan ideology—repelled McMahon. He didn't look upon Jericho as some polymath maverick, but a self-indulgent mess of a performer. How could he balance it all, with such a hot mess of a gimmick table?

Jericho, by his own admission, failed to strike the balance of backstage conduct. Aiming to position himself as a man of ambition and confidence, his new colleagues perceived him as hot sh*t. Too big for his boots, he was also too small for his boots, a curious irony that plagued his early matches.

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