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.