Chris Jericho has been in the professional wrestling business for decades, and throughout the course of his career he’s worked with many different opponents.
Jericho has earned himself a reputation for trying to help the younger generation, but he wasn’t very happy when he found out he had to lose a match to Heath Slater back in 2010 when Slater had just arrived as part of the original NXT.
During a recent Pat Patterson tribute episode of Talk Is Jericho the first ever AEW World Champion revealed his reaction when he found out he had to lose to Slater, and he also noted that he went straight to Pat Patterson.
“We were doing something where I had to work with Heath Slater, and Vince wanted me to put him over. You know me man, but I flipped out. I’m like, ‘What? This guy’s nothing. Why do you want me to put him over?’ Whatever reasoning was, I went straight looking for Pat, and I went to Pat. I said, ‘Can you believe what this f–king guy wants me to do? He wants me to put over Heath Slater. Can you believe that? What should I do?’ Pat’s smoking a cigarette in a no-smoking area. of course.
“He goes, ‘Do it!’ I go, ‘What?’ He goes, ‘Just do it!’ And he was basically telling me that everyone knows you’re going to beat this guy, but you’re a heel. If he beats you, you can flip out. You’ll get way more over by losing this match. You’ll have much more of a bone to pick and meat to chew on for a promo. He said, ‘No one’s even going to remember this guy beat you next week. They don’t even know what his name is, and they still don’t know what his name is.’ This actually gets you moreover as a heel to lose this match to this opening match jobber, and I never thought of it.
Jericho continued by saying that Vince McMahon doesn’t know how to speak wrestler talk in the way that Pat Patterson does, and once Pat explained the loss he understood why it made sense.
“And if Vince could have described it that way, I wouldn’t have had problem, but Vince did not speak like Pat did. Pat could speak wrestler talk. Vince does not know how to speak that because he’s never been a wrestler. So instantly, you think, well, Vince is out to get me, or he’s trying to screw me or whatever, but Pat could explain it in a way that I understood it. And he was right.”
H/T Wrestling Inc.
