It’s been pretty busy days here in the wrestling blogosphere, so even though it hit Peacock early yesterday (April 11), I didn’t get a chance to watch the latest edition of Broken Skull Sessions see you this morning.
As you may recall, Steve Austin’s guest for this one is Chris Jericho. The announcement that one of All Elite Wrestling’s biggest stars would be appearing on a WWE Network show surprised many people. That sparked a lot of interest and some skepticism about how much Jericho would talk about Tony Khan’s fledgling company.
The answer is … quite a bit! Most of the over two-hour interview is devoted to Jericho’s overall career, and includes many stories that hardcore Jericholics have probably heard a few times. Even the reruns are entertaining as both men are great talkers and they have the kind of chemistry you’d expect between two old friends.
More on that later, but here’s a quick rundown of the hook of the show for the diehard wrestling fan – what got through the Forbidden Door.
- Jericho never expected to work for anyone other than WWE again (something he often said before he left), and he never thought there would be another national company (sorry Impact) after Vince McMahon bought WCW. But its return to New Japan before Wrestle Kingdom 12 started the perfect storm of events: Tony Khan as a passionate wrestling fan with the money to start a promotion and the contacts to get a television contract, and Cody Rhodes, Kenny Omega, The Young Bucks, Hangman Page and himself all available as free agents Khan could build a company around it.
- He’s not saying AEW is competing with WWE, which raises eyebrows somewhat given its “Demo God” approach to the Wednesday Night War, but his explanation makes sense. It’s a combination of the ‘we’re just focused on ourselves’ topic of conversation that everyone on both ends offers, and an interest in providing wrestlers and fans with an option that has been absent for most of this century.
- Like Undertaker (and unlike another dude Jericho and Cody have mocked for it), he doesn’t want to say he’s a locker room leader. But that’s part of his role in AEW, and Jericho says he sometimes feels like Vince because there’s a long line of people waiting to talk to him backstage on DynamiteThat’s because he will tell them what they want to hear, as well as what to hear. Jericho also tells of a speech he gave for the first Everything or nothing where he emphasized to everyone the importance of having the success that they were.
- Another story told elsewhere, but one that is particularly noteworthy for being discussed on a WWE show: The fact that his feud with Kevin Owens was downgraded to the undercard of WrestleMania 33 was the impetus for Jericho to join WWE. leave. It was then that he realized that the second game on the map was where the company had seen him, and if he stayed he would be doing his “List of Jericho” schtick forever. He saw himself as more than that. AEW is the first opportunity in his long career that he has had the chance to be the CEO of a company, and he loved it.
- He later also tells the story of Raw’s Festival of Friendship segment pre-approved by McMahon, only for another backstage player he won’t name (here it is concluded that it was Triple H, and Jericho said elsewhere that it was Triple H to want it everything changed on the day of the show when Vince wasn’t there because they felt it was too comical. Jericho had to get the chairman on the line to get the segment on the air as planned. He does say that the person he argued with later admitted they were wrong and the segment was great.
- Original plans called for Owens to introduce the universal title WrestleMania 33 where Jericho would beat him for it, which earned him a big baby-face moment on The Grandest Stage Of Them All. He knew he would be leaving for music and other work soon after, so he would soon drop the belt to Brock Lesnar. He thinks he and Brock would be a draw, but he understood the decision to go for Goldberg instead. However, Jericho still thinks he and KO deserved better than second place on the map.
- They will return to talk AEW towards the end as they talk about struggling during the pandemic. Jericho pledges each company’s efforts to continue, name Dynamite’s Jacksonville lineup and praised the ThunderDome. He mentioned drops of Orange to Cassidy while explaining how the lack of fans and personal responses make it difficult to give advice to guys and girls on things like how long to sell.
So that’s the tea as far as AEW / WWE content is on the show. But like I said, it’s a fun show to watch, even if they avoided that material. That’s especially true if you have friends who are more casual / run down fans. Someone who isn’t too deep in the wrestling bubble, and hasn’t listened to a lot Talking is Jericho or The Steve Austin Show podcasts, whether being kept up to date with the mud sheets on every aspect of Y2J’s career, or watching Raw week in and week out for years, can bring this up and get lost in fond memories.
That’s a feeling Jericho evokes about the show towards the end:
“This is really cool for me because it’s not alone [the interview] historically the fact that like, ‘WWE and AEW, oh my god., awww.’ It’s not about that … It’s about wrestling. We respect it, and we love it, and I don’t care what the brand of it is, I want it to last forever. And I want people, like kids … to find out … but to see all these things – to do this show, as a retrospective career, because I’m not one to look back … look back and watch all these clips and all these amazing things you’ve shown, it’s really heartening to watch this.
“And thank you for allowing this, and also thank you to WWE and Vince for letting me be here, as well as Tony Khan, because he had to give his consent too. This goes beyond a company. This is about the love of wrestling. And no one in the world loves wrestling more than Stone Cold Steve Austin and Chris Jericho, and the fact that we’re talking about all these great times, I’m really happy and proud to be here. “
Amen.