Chris Jericho

[ohtani's jacket]

I used to hate Jericho, but his '00-02 stuff has gone up in my estimation since I started visiting and revisiting those years. So, he's off my shit list. 

[strobogo]

I don't know if this is a hot take or not, but Jericho to me is basically the original version of Dolph Ziggler. Hyped as this great worker who was clearly a level below the actual great workers that were his contemporaries, solid dependable performer who once in a while would have a great performance or feud and otherwise is 25 years of making me groan whenever I see him.

[El-P]

Funny how perception works. I never got the feeling he was hyped as a great worker, and I never ever got the impression he was hyped as being as great as his contemporaries, some of which who were overrated during their time (Malenko). Even back when it happened, the talk was all about Jericho being super entertaining but not as good in-ring as the Rey, Benoit, Eddie, Malenko's of the world. Maybe that changed in the early 00's when he got to WWE (and got better also), but I never got this impression of Jericho being pimped a great worker, surely not on a constant basis. (I probably made that same post a while ago too !)

I have no idea if he would make my list. Not quite sure actually.

[Reel]

I think a lot of 'Jericho is an all-time great' is, and props to him for this, is that he has spent a lot of time talking about how great his career was on his podcast, and he's been saying it long enough that people started to believe it.

I'm not sure there's ever been a year where he was one of the top 5, maybe 10 wrestlers in the promotion he was in.  I'm not entirely ruling him out, but I just don't really see him sniffing even my top 200 wrestlers. 

[funkdoc]

The impression i get lately is that him wearing out his welcome in AEW (seriously, people were PISSED at him going over Hook this weekend) has really hurt his legacy these days.  It just feels like he's far less often talked about among the all-time greats in the way that he was after, say, his first few successful reinventions in WWE, and now he has major go-away heat with a significant chunk of AEW's core audience.

[Kadaveri]

Chris Jericho was like a better version of Sid Vicious in that he was generally a lot more over than his talent level would normally warrant as he had the knock of disappearing for long periods whenever fans were close to tiring of him. Now he's gone and been a consistently pushed act for 5 years in the same promotion and, oh no.

[DMJ]

I'm far from a Jericho superfan, but he's on my list and will probably remain in the top 50 despite how rough the past few years have been (to be honest, I'm not sure any of his AEW run, in terms of actual matches, has been better than "okay"). 

But...I've reviewed 120 Chris Jericho matches for my blog (Kwang The Blog) over the past decade and his resume is just too long to dismiss him. If he was getting carried all the time, that'd be one thing, but, no, he's had some good-to-great matches against Shawn Michaels, Rey Mysterio, Triple H (another guy I often loathe), Eddie, Benoit, Batista, Christian, and gave Chyna her career match. They can't all be flukes. The longevity is there too. He was a dependable TV performer in WCW as a cruiser/TV Title guy and then was reliable for many years in the WWE on Raw and SD in singles, tags, up and down the card.

As for his character work...its grating now and he's always had misfires ("Get It? Got it? Good!" comes to mind, as does the lame King Diamond face paint more recently) and I do think, based on his books and his podcast, he believes he is smarter and funnier than he really is. His band sucks...but "Judas" did get over. He's struck out a bunch, but he's hit plenty of homeruns. The stuff with Ralphus - mostly stolen from Spinal Tap, sure - was great. The huge list of moves when he feuded with Malenko? Classic. Calling out Goldberg. The Y2J countdown debut against The Rock. The Christian/Trish love triangle. Punching Shawn Michaels' wife in the face. The Festival of Friendship. The first Stadium Stampede (and, to be fair, he and MJF were the best part of the not-nearly-as-good second one). I actually liked some of the initial heel Inner Circle promos too and some of the segments with Don Callis. 

I don't think his peaks are high enough for him to be The Simpsons of pro-wrestling, a once-all-time-great show that, at some point, became heralded more for its longevity and ubiquitousness than its cleverness, but he's kinda like The Price is Right or General Hospital. When all is said and done, he's had too many iconic moments, too many great matches, and been too important of a figure in pro-wrestling to be left out of the story. I think that helps his case if you're at all trying to be objective. If he sucks so bad, if he's so lame, if he's such a bad worker, then...what explains the career he's had? His size? His look? Nepotism? 

If you had to write a history of American wrestling over the past 30-40 years, Chris Jericho's name is going to be in it and I don't think that's him just being in the right place at the right time. I think he built a case for the top 100 across those decades more than, say, someone who was "hot" for just 2-3 years. I really do think, though, that Jericho is *actually* obnoxious and has overstayed his welcome in AEW for so long that he really has made people forget that, a long time ago, his shtick was considered a breath of fresh air in WCW in 97'-98' and that, when he debuted in WWE, it was one of the biggest moments of the Attitude Era.