Chris Jericho On Vince McMahon's Reaction To The List And Change He Made, Who Came Up With The List
As noted, WWE United States Champion Chris Jericho recently joined Busted Open Radio to accept his 2016 Comeback Of The Year Award. You can check out some highlights from their interview with Jericho below:
Getting so many things over this year:
"The List, 'Stupid Idiot,' 'Gift Of Jericho,' 'Drink It In,' all that sort of stuff, that used to get heels heat. If you go back and watch after I turned on AJ Styles back in March or whatever it was, you see me getting heat by calling the crowd 'Stupid Idiots.' People legitimately booing and 'The Gift of Jericho,' what an arrogant thing to say. But then after a couple of months everyone started loving it. Then it became like these beloved catch phrases that people would pop for, and that's when I kind of started having fun with it, like I'd stay quiet like 100 times in a row to see what happens, trying to get the word 'it' over. The List came up and that was really my co-writer for most of the year, Jimmy Jacobs, he actually came up with The List Of Jericho. We were like, 'Oh let's give it a try' and after the first night it really worked. After that I was like 'Let's actually get a list.' If you see the first couple of weeks it was just a clipboard, and then Vince was actually off for a few weeks because I think that's when he tore his quad or something along those lines, so I went to the props department and I said, 'can you make me a list but I want it made out of steel, I want it to be thick like a tablet. So if you hit somebody with it, it'll knock em out.'
Vince McMahon's reaction to the list:
"When Vince came back I kind of told him, 'here's this list that I got and I had it made so I can use it as a foreign object.' He thought it was great. The first idea was for me to take it to the ring and use it for finishes, but he didn't want that, he just wanted it to be this entity. Next thing you know The List Of Jericho is more over than 80 percent of the roster. Now everyone wants to be on the list and the only way to get heat off of it is if I tease putting people on the list, and then don't put them on the list. That actually gets heat now.
"You just never know what's going to work and what's not going to work, and doing this as long as I've been doing it you have to recognize when something is gonna catch. Like I said it is like catching lightning in a bottle and when that happens you just want to stick with it — my original plan was to be in the WWE for four months, January to Wrestlemania, then some things got moved around on Fozzy's schedule and some other things that I had going on, then I just decided 'Why don't we take 2016 completely off and with Fozzy?'"
You can check out Jericho's full interview on Busted Open Radio at this link. If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit Busted Open Radio with an H/T to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription. Busted Open with Doug Mortman and Dave LaGreca can be heard Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday from 2p-4p Eastern Time only on SiriusXM Rush Channel 93 and any time on the SiriusXM App.
Source: Busted Open Radio