Chris Jericho Opens Up About Vince McMahon Threatening To Fire Him

Nowadays Chris Jericho has a great relationship with Vince McMahon, but when he first joined WWE it took him a while to form a working relationship with the boss.

Jericho recently opened up about what his interactions with McMahon were like when he got to WWE during an appearance on Sean Waltman’s X-Pac 1,2,360 show, and he said that Vince once threatened to fire him if he didn’t have a good match with Waltman.

“So when I got to WWE, I’d been working for 9 years and I’d been over in every company that I ever worked for so you know there’s certain guys like when Daniel Bryan came into the WWE I knew he’d get over no matter what. He’s been over everywhere he’s ever worked, he’ll figure it out and that’s what I did. I figured it out and it didn’t take long but there was a huge bullseye on my back and I smartened up to it very quickly. And the other part of the story…what Vince {McMahon} told me was ‘you’re working with X-Pac tonight, if you don’t have a good match you’re fired.’ Which was a guillotine over my head… and then afterwards Vince was super cool, he pat me on the back, ‘hey pal, give me a call tomorrow and oh by the way every match that you have from now on run it past Sean Waltman first and make sure that it makes sense…In retrospect there’s a reason Vince did that. As we know Vince is a f***ing genius and we were peers but Sean you knew how to work that style {WWE STYLE} so he put me with you to figure out how to do it. I’m really happy he did that because I learned right away…That’s why Vince did it and it worked.”

Jericho also talked about his feud with Chyna, and what Vince McMahon told him about how he wanted Jericho to treat her.

I remember the first real feud that I had was with Chyna. And he {Vince McMahon} said to me, ‘Do you mind working with a woman?’ and I said ‘No I don’t mind, I’ll be happy too.’ And he goes ‘ I don’t want you to treat her with kid gloves, I want you to work with her like you would work with a guy. I don’t want you to pull any punches, I don’t want you to stiff her but do what you do.’ So I did that and I remember as a result she did get a little bit of a black eye once. By the way her forearm strikes were stiff as f***.”