Chris Jericho Talks About Retirement, Fans Talking About Him Losing All The Time

Chris Jericho recently spoke with Zap2It.com about his new web series and more. Here are some highlights:

Speaking of tour dates, it looks like after December there’s nothing on the books. Is there a possibility you’ll be back in a wrestling ring anytime soon? Your last return was at the “Royal Rumble” in January, maybe a chance of seeing that again?

That’s the thing. “Again.” We’ve been there and done that. Plus people seem to put too much stock in the Fozzy dates. It doesn’t really work like that, for me. We’re in the studio in January to work on a new record.

Not that I couldn’t come back to wrestling, but it would have to be under the right circumstances with the right angle. I enjoyed earlier this year when I came back, it was one of the best runs of my career, but I found it to be a bit listless. There wasn’t a specific mission, like when I came back in 2012 and it was the CM Punk story. This time it was just working with random people, which was fun. At this point though, to come back to wrestling, which I still love, it would have to be for a specific angle that I could really sink my teeth into.

If not, I don’t know that I would come back and I don’t know if they’d want me to come back. It’s very egotistical of me to think I can come and go whenever I want. They say it’s cool, but Vince [McMahon] could change his mind and say, “I think you should stay for a year and if not we can’t really use you.”

Who knows? I’ve spent the last ten years working on my life after wrestling. I’m 43 years old. I still feel great and I can still work great, but eventually I’m not going to be able to do a Chris Jericho match at the level I can do it, which is five-star, balls-out every night, whether you’re at Madison Square Garden for “Wrestlemania” or in Covina, Cal. for a house show. Ten or 10,000, I work the same.

Beyond that, there’s a lot of stuff going on in my world. I just signed on to do a podcast with Podcast One. They do Steve Austin’s, Adam Carolla’s, Seth Rogen’s. There’s always things like that popping up and I think a lot of the time wrestling fans want you to be tied to wrestling for the rest of your life and unfortunately it doesn’t really work that way. For me, I’ve never though of myself as just a wrestler, but as an entertainer. Anything that falls under the umbrella, I’m going to do it.

You seem to be one of the few in the business that has been able to do that, branching out to create entirely new careers outside of wrestling.

Yes! Thank you! And it’s really kind of rolling now, where cool opportunities are popping up quicker and quicker. That takes away time for wrestling. When I come back, I like to do all the shows. I don’t want to just do TV or pay per views. I like being on the road and working with the guys.

I don’t know what the future in wrestling holds, because I haven’t gotten a lot of feedback from WWE either. I don’t know exactly where I would fit in with them at this time. They’ve got their storylines locked in, and you can already kind of see what they’re going to do for “Wrestlemania.” But it would have to be something very special for me to come back to. If not, and wrestling fans might hate me for this, I don’t need the big retirement tour. I don’t need the last match, I don’t even really want to do that, like the [Ric] Flair thing and the Shawn [Michaels] thing.

I’m not that type of guy, I like doing the opposite of what people want. I just want to fade into the sunset and never be seen again.

That seems to be how you go when you do disappear, and the immediate fan outcry is “What are they doing to Chris Jericho?”

Yeah, it’s kind of the way that I do things. And I think I’m real easy-going now when it comes to wrestling, which people get mad about as well. They complain that I lose all the time, which I don’t. But they think I do. It’s show business, man. Having said that, I’m not going to come back to lose every night, but if I’m going to work for Steven Spielberg and he tells me that my character in “Saving Private Ryan II” dies 15 minutes into the show and I say, “No, I’m not going to do that.” Well, he tells me to go away and hires somebody else to do that. If I’m going to go back and work for WWE for two months, I have to do what the boss says