Chris Jericho Details “Secret Meeting” At Vince McMahon’s House, WCW’s Horrible Environment, Apologizing to Chyna

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Chris Jericho recently appeared on Ric Flair’s podcast (transcript viawrestlinginc.com), here are the highlights…

On His Secret Meeting at Vince McMahon’s House: “I go to Vince’s house in Connecticut, and this was the only time I’ve been there, and I knock on the door and Shane McMahon opens the door and he’s like, ‘hey, Chris! How are you?’ and I go inside and sitting at a table is Vince, Shane, Bruce Prichard, Vince Russo, Jim Ross, and another cat, I think his name is Ed, another writer guy. And they were having a booking meeting to discuss that week’s [WWE Monday Night] RAW and they invited me to sit down with them, okay? So think about how crazy this is. I’m under contract with WCW, sitting down at a booking meeting for next week’s RAW at Vince McMahon’s house, right?” Jericho continued, “that would never happen again and I’m still not completely sure why it happened then. I did ask Vince about it years later and he said, ‘well, I wanted to see if I could trust you. I wanted to see if I could bring you in here and have this booking meeting and see if it would get out the next day. And when I knew I could trust you, that’s when I knew I wanted you to come work for me’.”

On The Horrible Environment in WCW: “At the time, I don’t know what was going on in that place. It was the pressures or the stress, but everybody, I mean, like, not everybody, but so many people were just total assholes there at the time. Like, so many people. I don’t want to start naming guys, but when they got to WWE, they all had different attitudes. I’ll tell you one now because I talk to you about him all the time and he’s one of my best friends, The Big Show. The Big Show was a total dick in WCW and he’ll admit it. It’s just the environment that it [bred] that environment of being a jerk and then you get out of that environment and you go to work for Vince and you lose that attitude pretty quickly.”

On Working With Chyna: “At the time, [Chyna] was Hunter’s girlfriend and when I went to talk to Vince, he said, ‘do you have any problems working with a woman?’. I said, ‘well, no’ and he said, ‘I don’t want you to go easy on her. I don’t want you to think of her as a woman. I want you to go in there and work’.” Jericho recalled, “the next day in Tampa [Florida], I show up and I’m called into Vince’s office. And I’m thinking, ‘I’m going to get, like, a pat on the back for having this great match with Chyna’ and when I went in there, man, he went ballistic on me about how dare I give Chyna a black eye because she’s a woman.”

On Having to Apologize to Chyna: “I think it all came down from Hunter’s crew. I think they didn’t like me. They didn’t like the way I was conducting myself. And they had Vince’s ear and a lot of stroke and a lot of influence.” Jericho added, “[McMahon] made me go apologize to Chyna, which was brutal because I don’t like to apologize to anybody, especially for that. But actually, I told [Chris] Benoit this and he talked to Bret Hart about it and Bret said that Vince did something similar to him when he first started. He said [McMahon] likes to break people down and build you back up like a soldier. Maybe at the time, that’s what he was doing. I don’t know.”

Jonathan Widro is the owner and founder of Inside Pulse. Over a decade ago he burst onto the scene with a pro-WCW reporting style that earned him the nickname WCWidro. Check him out on Twitter for mostly inane non sequiturs