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Chris Jericho


Grimmas

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Jericho would have had a much better resume of matches if he'd remained a journeyman ECW/lucha guy through the 90s. He could have been a really satisfying ace in ECW, almost like a babyface Shane Douglas. It never would have happened: like so many other talents who could have contributed, he got tired of Paul's scumbaggery and inability to pay him. I would have loved Jericho as babyface bleeding a ton in American indy brawls while sporadically working hair matches with Hector Garza, Shocker, etc. He still could have been hired by WWE, though he probably would have ended up a Christian-level star in that case. So much of his fame seemed to come from the Y2J stuff of immediately working with the Rock and being presented as a huge talent that WCW blew it on.

 

"What if" aside, he's not nearly good enough in-ring for a top 100, and I say that as a viewer who likes him more than many here. His best strength right now is that experience and veteran status allows him to put WWE matches together in a way that I suspect most of that roster either isn't allowed, or lacks the knowledge of how to execute. He can go to MSG or Japan and have the type of match that a lot of us think should be happening more often: slower-paced, awareness of the crowd, building to a crescendo of callbacks and variety rather than a series of 2.9 finisher kickouts. He's still too indulgent at times, but his capacity is there and I disagree with the idea being expressed in this thread that he doesn't "get it". He's akin to someone like Raven, Bubba Ray, Bret, Douglas, HHH, etc: he gets it, he just doesn't always practice what he preaches.

 

His finest hour is the Mysterio feud in '08. On PPV and Smackdown they had some of the best matches of the year. But "looked better than he ever had when working Rey Mysterio" is something you can say about a lot of dudes, and says more about Rey being a legit top 10 all-time guy than it does about Jericho.

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  • 5 months later...

I wanted to make a post about Jericho because I think he's a total wildcard when it comes to his final placement on this list, perhaps more than anyone. As I mentioned in the jack of all trades vs doing one thing well thread, Jericho could work face or heel in any spot on the card and get over doing it. I think there's something to be said for that, and I'd definitely hear an argument that he's the greatest utility player in WWE history for that reason. He has definite flaws though, most of them magnified by overexposure, related to execution. There are spots like the springboard dropkick and Lionsault that I think most people would love to never have to see again.

 

When I think of Jericho's case, I think of the worker from 2002-2005 or so. His championship run bombed and he was now being pushed more as a strong upper midcarder, and I think these are the years we saw his best work. It's almost like the end of his title run gave him the freedom to deliver good matches without the pressure -- he was no longer over in a way where there was a fan demand for him to reach the top. Unfortunately, I don't see him as a guy who delivered his best matches when it counted the most -- Shawn at WM XIX doesn't really ring as a great match to me, and I'm terrified to rewatch Rock-Jericho at No Mercy '01 after reading Sleaze's review, even though I loved the match in the past. I think more of his tag team with Christian, which produced some excellent TV tag matches against Booker T and Goldust during a time most people were ignoring Raw and raving about Smackdown. I think of his miracle match with Kane on Raw in September 2002. I think of his time as a babyface in 2004 where he had a really strong blowoff cage match with Christian on Raw and was a key guy in a lot of the better Evolution tags. I think of the guy who gave Hogan, Nash, Goldberg and Scott Steiner their best WWE matches in 2002-2003. I watched the 2005 Elimination Chamber from New Years Revolution recently and thought that was a great match, mostly because Jericho carried the action without placing the spotlight on himself.

 

I don't see him in my top 40, but I do see him on my list for sure, and mainly because of the good work he did at times in his WWE run when people were paying less attention to him. It seems like his periods as a "hot" wrestler didn't coincide with his best in-ring periods, which creates a weird paradox. Jericho is nothing if not inconsistent and frustrating, but there's too much good in his career to write him off completely, even if many of us wish he'd just go away now, even though he's still much better in the ring than the staleness of his act would suggest.

 

Within every positive about this guy is an insult. Within every critique is something good. I've managed to confuse myself even more with this post.

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I just wanna counter what Parties said about the Rey feud by saying that was one of the top highlights of Mysterio's WWE run and not simply a case of Rey being Rey. I don't think Jericho is a great worker by any stretch of the imagination. I mean Reed Richards or Plastic Man could stretch further than any notion of Jericho being a great worker, but that was a good match-up that went beyond being a beneficial match-up for Jericho to the pair simply having chemistry.

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Not that I've done any sort of sustained rewatch of Jericho, but OJ's assessment strikes me as being overly harsh.

 

Without really thinking about it, I'd see Jericho as being comparable to several other workers I rate highly, Hase most obviously, but also Ted DiBiase, which coming from me is huge praise.

 

Why is it such a stretch to call Jericho a great worker? Seems to me that he can do a lot of things very well. Bump, sell, good array of offense, great charisma, work any number of different styles, can work basically any opponent. Doesn't seem like much of a stretch to me.

 

What qualities do you look for in a great worker OJ aside from matwork ability? Just seems weird to me that you'd be this critical of a talented worker like Jericho while also telling us that Tibor Szakacs is god's gift to wrestling.

 

It's just not clear to me what is driving those two assessments. Do you look at Jericho and punish him for not being able to do the pretzel stuff that Szakacs can?

 

Or is it simply the case that you value WOS style workers but don't value a US-style worker like Jericho?

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Not that I've done any sort of sustained rewatch of Jericho, but OJ's assessment strikes me as being overly harsh.

 

Without really thinking about it, I'd see Jericho as being comparable to several other workers I rate highly, Hase most obviously, but also Ted DiBiase, which coming from me is huge praise.

 

Why is it such a stretch to call Jericho a great worker? Seems to me that he can do a lot of things very well. Bump, sell, good array of offense, great charisma, work any number of different styles, can work basically any opponent. Doesn't seem like much of a stretch to me.

 

What qualities do you look for in a great worker OJ aside from matwork ability? Just seems weird to me that you'd be this critical of a talented worker like Jericho while also telling us that Tibor Szakacs is god's gift to wrestling.

 

It's just not clear to me what is driving those two assessments. Do you look at Jericho and punish him for not being able to do the pretzel stuff that Szakacs can?

 

Or is it simply the case that you value WOS style workers but don't value a US-style worker like Jericho?

I had a talk with Loss yesterday that covered Jericho in a way that was so different from anything mentioned here that it's not even worth it to recap it at this stage, because it'd feel like a completely different language and frankly, no one wants to hear the two of us go at it again this close to the end of the process. It's enough to make me just shake my head though. We're just a few weeks from this all being over.

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I absolutely disagree that Rey carried Jericho in their feud, if that was the implication. Jericho was pretty clearly the driving force for that feud creatively, and contributed just as much, if not more, to the matches. I can understand criticising it as derivative (in the sense that he aped the finishes from the Casas/Mistico feud) but the last thing he was in that feud was a passenger.

 

Jericho is rarely a passenger, actually. I just did a long bit about Foley being creative, and Jericho is another one, a guy who has a naturally fertile creative mind and wants to really sink his teeth into his work and develop stories. I like that in a guy. Like, take the current AJ feud, for example. I think if AJ was having this feud with most other people, it would just be the same "trade wins with a guy on TV" thing that literally everyone is doing all the time. But with Jericho the creative touches are there - winning the first match with a rollup, doing the one-upping partners thing, using Miz to do the heeling while Jericho is still a face, but having Jericho cut delusional rock star promos, the roundabout way they set up the PPV match with Jericho initially refusing...all of it is classic Jericho, touches that create not just a storyline but storyline progression, and progression that is borne out in the matches as well.

 

The Jericho/Shawn feud is the best example of this, and honestly probably the biggest feather in his cap. That thing is so intricate in a way that feuds rarely touch, it ran from March to November and every single week there was something going on, some progression, and they kept it going for that long, had four PPV matches that were all unique and all developed the story, incorporated peripheral characters and titles.... They went from babyface rivalry to soap opera drama to a heel turn and a blood feud, to a fake retirement and revenge quest, to a world title match to cap it off, and it all made sense and never lost the audience.

 

(As an aside, complaining about the Jericho/Shawn ladder match is fashionable around here, but this is one of those times when I have no fucking idea what you're all watching. I think it's a great match, it builds off the feud up to that point and the themes they'd built, and it's a great capper to the entire story, especially with using the eye for the finish. I have no idea what the problem is with that match.)

 

I think Jericho was really great in 2008-09 and that run goes a long way with me. The degree to which he changed his entire character and performance to get over as a top heel is kind of lost these days, I think, and the effectiveness of his heel character has been diluted by the thousand imitators since, but it was apparent at the time. That run from the Shawn feud to the Legends feud to the New Smackdown Six stuff to the Jerishow team is a brilliant run.

 

As Loss has been saying recently he was also great in that 2002-05 Raw midcard run. Being an upper-midcard heel (and then face) was kind of the perfect position for that character at that time, and it gave him the freedom to do some work. I like Christian team from 2003, I absolutely love the Trish storyline and everything that involved (and again, is another example of a super involved and creative Jericho feud). Jericho vs Christian at WMXX is such a forgotten great match, nobody ever talks about it but it ruled and they did a great job of having a grudge match with no gimmicks or overt violence, just showing the animosity through how snugly they wrestled with each other, if that makes sense. Basically any Christian match is good, as is any Evolution match from 2004. The Cena matches from 2005 were a great swansong for his first WWE run.

 

He has largely annoyed me in the 2010s as Midlife Crisis Jericho but I'm trying not to let that override the bulk of his career, and what he was capable of.

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Not that I've done any sort of sustained rewatch of Jericho, but OJ's assessment strikes me as being overly harsh.

 

Without really thinking about it, I'd see Jericho as being comparable to several other workers I rate highly, Hase most obviously, but also Ted DiBiase, which coming from me is huge praise.

 

Why is it such a stretch to call Jericho a great worker? Seems to me that he can do a lot of things very well. Bump, sell, good array of offense, great charisma, work any number of different styles, can work basically any opponent. Doesn't seem like much of a stretch to me.

 

What qualities do you look for in a great worker OJ aside from matwork ability? Just seems weird to me that you'd be this critical of a talented worker like Jericho while also telling us that Tibor Szakacs is god's gift to wrestling.

 

It's just not clear to me what is driving those two assessments. Do you look at Jericho and punish him for not being able to do the pretzel stuff that Szakacs can?

 

Or is it simply the case that you value WOS style workers but don't value a US-style worker like Jericho?

 

I dunno Parv, why don't you think that Shawn Michaels is a great worker or AJ Styles? Why do some people think Hiroshi Tanahashi isn't a great worker or Edge? Did you read back over this thread? Not rating Jericho as a worker is hardly controversial, and I was defending him. If anything I'm surprised you rate him so highly since he doesn't seem anything like Hase or DiBiase to me. I mean regardless of how I feel about Hase, I can see him being linked with Ted. That makes sense to me, but Jericho? Where's that coming from? It almost seems antiquated like we would have believed that in 1998 when we wanted him to be pushed and feud with Goldberg, or jump to WWF and have Vince find some way to make a star out of him.

 

I'm not sure where the reference to Szakacs is coming from. Jericho seems more directly comparable to a Robbie Brookside or Danny Collins to me. Maybe a Doc Dean. Are you asking whether I think Tibor is a better wrestler than Jericho? Of course I do. What's a great worker to me? Someone who gives great performances or has great matches time and time again, or someone who just plain strikes me as great. I don't think it needs to be any more complicated than that. I've seen enough wrestling that I know when I think someone is great. The WoS is weird to me. I don't think I've ever tried to claim that anything WoS is categorically better than US style wrestling. I've always tried to judge it within the parameters of European wrestling. If I watch US wrestling, I switch into US wrestling mode and view it slightly differently. If pressed I'll make a comparison, but it's not important to me and what I actually said was that Tibor was a British wrestling God, i.e. a god of British wrestling not all wrestling. I was reared on US wrestling, have favourite US wrestlers and would be more enamoured with US wrestlers if I was focusing on them at this point in time, but I'm not and they're not a crux to my fandom.

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Just to say that, despite my personal hatred for him, Shawn is definitely gonna rank for me, and AJ still has every chance of ranking too.

 

I can see not being high on Jericho as a matter of indifference, but I was wondering more where "biggest stretch ever to call him a great worker" was coming from.

 

He's a weird case in a way, I mean I don't have any strong feelings about him at all, but if someone put him at 40 or 60 or at 89, he wouldn't look out of place, and if someone didn't rank him at all, it would scarcely feel like it matters.

 

The Ted / Hase comparison comes less from working style and more from the fact that both of those guys, like Jericho, had a lot of tools at their disposal, could work face or heel, could effectively slot into a main event or cycle down to work an upper midcard or tag feud, or even a match in the midcard. They were dependable and charismatic workers who would give you a solid and sometimes even great performance no matter the opponent or match. And Jericho seems like a similar guy for his generation. And as I said, this is with giving it no real thought.

 

Szakacs reference just comes from the fact that he's one guy I'm certain you are high on.

 

I don't know where the testiness of the tone has come from, because I had nothing of the sort in mind when I asked. Just genuinely want to know why you're so down on him.

 

Incidentally I thought he truly sucked in the match last night, and I don't think Ted or Hase ever sucked like that in a match.

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Also, one argument that I've made throughout this process is that it's worth looking at a wrestler's post-prime. It was never about penalizing them or rewarding them accordingly. It's about understanding. These are human beings, not wrestling machines. Last night revealed tendencies of Jericho's work that I think you can find throughout his career, even if rarely as clearly as they appeared last night. He's a wrestler who was never good at working up to his limitations. AJ Styles is quite possibly one of the best wrestlers in the world. Jericho, as someone who's had good matches in the last year, even, could have had a great match with him. He could have had twenty great matches with him, each one different. He absolutely could not have the great match that he WANTED to have with him. There's something to learn from that which can be extrapolated, like a lens, to examine Jericho's previous work.

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I'd certainly agree, Matt, that last night Jericho worked basically the exact opposite of a smart match. It was a hideous performance by a guy who doesn't seem to understand that he's now a veteran who can slow the pace down if he needs to.

 

It's kinda weird to me because a few years ago I thought he'd settled into that role quite well. I think the 08-09 run Jimmy is talking about. Her description of "Mid-life crisis Jericho" strikes me as a very apt description of what I saw last night.

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Also, one argument that I've made throughout this process is that it's worth looking at a wrestler's post-prime. It was never about penalizing them or rewarding them accordingly. It's about understanding. These are human beings, not wrestling machines. Last night revealed tendencies of Jericho's work that I think you can find throughout his career, even if rarely as clearly as they appeared last night. He's a wrestler who was never good at working up to his limitations. AJ Styles is quite possibly one of the best wrestlers in the world. Jericho, as someone who's had good matches in the last year, even, could have had a great match with him. He could have had twenty great matches with him, each one different. He absolutely could not have the great match that he WANTED to have with him. There's something to learn from that which can be extrapolated, like a lens, to examine Jericho's previous work.

 

I thought Jericho looked pretty bad last night and brought the match down a ton, though AJ looked very uncomfortable as well. But I don't understand for a second how we know what match anyone wanted to have last night, much less whether they had the leeway to go in their own direction. Unless I'm missing something I don't see how we can come to any conclusions about that kind of intent.

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Also, one argument that I've made throughout this process is that it's worth looking at a wrestler's post-prime. It was never about penalizing them or rewarding them accordingly. It's about understanding. These are human beings, not wrestling machines. Last night revealed tendencies of Jericho's work that I think you can find throughout his career, even if rarely as clearly as they appeared last night. He's a wrestler who was never good at working up to his limitations. AJ Styles is quite possibly one of the best wrestlers in the world. Jericho, as someone who's had good matches in the last year, even, could have had a great match with him. He could have had twenty great matches with him, each one different. He absolutely could not have the great match that he WANTED to have with him. There's something to learn from that which can be extrapolated, like a lens, to examine Jericho's previous work.

 

I thought Jericho looked pretty bad last night and brought the match down a ton, though AJ looked very uncomfortable as well. But I don't understand for a second how we know what match anyone wanted to have last night, much less whether they had the leeway to go in their own direction. Unless I'm missing something I don't see how we can come to any conclusions about that kind of intent.

 

That's the sort of lack of confidence that leads someone to wrestling a match like last night's.

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One thing Matt and I talked about is Jericho's tendency to build matches entirely around coming up with brand new counters or reversals into his own signature spots. He's obsessed with it. He doesn't try to go overblown epic like Foley or Shawn most of the time (although he tries here and there), but he seems to think the key to a good match is giving people counters they haven't seen before. That requires a level of athleticism to pull off that I'm not sure Jericho has ever fully had, but more than that, it's a one-note way to build a match.

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I have just never come away from one of his matches thinking, "Wow, Chris Jericho is a great wrestler." Not once.

 

He did have very good chemistry with Mysterio. I did love his character when he was trying to break out in WCW. He was a handy guy for WWE to have on the roster for a long time. But he was never great at any aspect of between-the-ropes wrestling. I don't think he'd make my top 200.

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Maybe I'm just a deconstructionist at heart, but I'm not really interested in trying to divine whatever intent Chris Jericho brought to his matches. (The same mostly goes for evaluating if somebody was really "working hard" in a match, as though pro wrestling was otherwise a leisurely pursuit.) There is no limit to the amount of post-hoc bullshit that someone can use to cover mediocrity.

 

So, yeah, I feel like there's plenty to criticize in Jericho's matches that doesn't require any of that conjecture. Dangerously sloppy execution at various points throughout in his career, overly contrived and hammy tendencies once he settled into the WWF, and a dearth of all-time classic matches as a whole. I like late 90's heel Jericho as a character too and it's true that Jericho eventually adapted to and ended up excelling in the modern WWE house style of storytelling. But he has ranged from corny to truly dreadful as a babyface and I don't know that excelling in the WWE house style makes him great or even good as much as it makes him consistent because consistency is the aim of that particular design. Even when he's a half-dozen steps slower than someone like AJ Styles, he can be counted on to deliver a decent, if ultimately unsatisfying, match to fill PPV time...which puts him on par with about 20 other people on the WWE roster right now.

 

If being a solid hand for a long time is the sort of thing is valuable to you, then I can certainly see an argument for including him on a ballot, but I just don't know if that's enough to make the cut for me, especially given the gigantic list of candidates that are also worthy of consideration. I wouldn't say that he's outside the top 200 for me but, if I'm not putting Shawn Michaels on my ballot, there's no way in hell I'm penciling in Chris Jericho's name.

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One thing I will say is that he's not been very good in the 2010s at "putting people over".

 

The AJ match yesterday was frustrating for me to watch, not because of any botches, but because of the story of the match. Jericho took SO MUCH of this match it was ridiculous. He had an answer for everything AJ did, he countered all of AJ's signature spots and big dives, kicked out of his finisher, and then lost. AJ didn't really have a chance to show anything because Jericho cut him off at every turn. And I get the idea of Jericho having counters as the wily veteran character, but it was way too much and AJ never really got any shine. For a guy you're trying to bring in straight away as a big deal from outside, it's not the way to do it, because anyone who isn't familiar with AJ isn't going to see what the fuss is about if he can't show off his stuff in the ring.

 

Same deal with the Fandango match at Mania. Jericho took that entire match and made it very, very clear he was trying to lead a broomstick around the ring, instead of working the match in a way to actually put the guy over. I understand now that Jericho was unhappy about the match and so threw a bit of a tantrum, and it's just...not a good look.

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I always find the finishes to his matches (win or lose) to be very clever. There is always a clever little sequence at the end of his matches that sort of seperates him from other guys. An example would be when he grabbed Rey's mask mid 619. I can't think of a bad Jericho match.

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  • 1 month later...

I'll briefly comment on Jericho's pro wrestling philosophy with a particular example I'm sure many will remember.

 

In either 2013/2014, maybe it was 2015, I don't know, it doesn't matter, Jericho turned babyface and changed his offence accordingly. This included use of old man Diving Crossbodies and such, and also and addition of a Diving Double Axe Handle. The aforemention move looked bad, got no heat and served no purpose-at first glance. I do believe there was a purpose. Jericho concluded that run by feuding with Randy Orton-and in their match at Summerslam Orton counter the Diving Double Axe Handle into an RKO. It was a terrible counter spot with a poor set-up that everyone saw coming (though angry dad Jericho argued otherwise). I fully believe Jericho had a match against Orton and that counter in mind when he started using that move. A lot of wrestlers do counter spots where they go for moves they usually don't or go for moves they usually use but don't use them in the manner they do when they actually hit them so you can see the counter coming. Jericho's reaction to this was adding a shitty move to his move-set that harmed his matches for months and didn't fulfill its final purpose. It shows a level of thinking about his matches a lot of wrestlers might not have but also his inability to come to effective solutions. He does have a lot of interesting ideas. I'm sure he'd make a great match writer for an E-fed or help out with the Smackdown vs Raw games. But as an actual wrestler he just doesn't cut it for me and the more wrestling you watch the more frustrating a lot of his work becomes.

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I'll briefly comment on Jericho's pro wrestling philosophy with a particular example I'm sure many will remember.

 

In either 2013/2014, maybe it was 2015, I don't know, it doesn't matter, Jericho turned babyface and changed his offence accordingly. This included use of old man Diving Crossbodies and such, and also and addition of a Diving Double Axe Handle. The aforemention move looked bad, got no heat and served no purpose-at first glance. I do believe there was a purpose. Jericho concluded that run by feuding with Randy Orton-and in their match at Summerslam Orton counter the Diving Double Axe Handle into an RKO. It was a terrible counter spot with a poor set-up that everyone saw coming (though angry dad Jericho argued otherwise). I fully believe Jericho had a match against Orton and that counter in mind when he started using that move. A lot of wrestlers do counter spots where they go for moves they usually don't or go for moves they usually use but don't use them in the manner they do when they actually hit them so you can see the counter coming. Jericho's reaction to this was adding a shitty move to his move-set that harmed his matches for months and didn't fulfill its final purpose. It shows a level of thinking about his matches a lot of wrestlers might not have but also his inability to come to effective solutions. He does have a lot of interesting ideas. I'm sure he'd make a great match writer for an E-fed or help out with the Smackdown vs Raw games. But as an actual wrestler he just doesn't cut it for me and the more wrestling you watch the more frustrating a lot of his work becomes.

That is one of the best posts I have ever read.

 

Jericho is one of those people who thinks they are really intelligent, but are actually really dumb.

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