– Chris Jericho spoke with LeftLion.co.uk to promote Fozzy and more. Here are some highlights:
You seem to be part of a select few who have been able to come and go in the wrestling world as you please. You don’t seem as tied down to it half as much as others are.
It wasn’t a conscious decision. I’ve always had other things I wanted to do, and I always had an opinion, which can be a dirty word with certain people. I stopped wrestling for no other reason than my contract ended in 2010, and there was a huge glut of Fozzy opportunities, so I moved on to the next thing that was happening for me. Hey, I love wrestling, and I never say never about going back – but right now I wanna see Fozzy as big as we can get it, and that’s my goal.
As a currently former wrestler, what do you think to the proliferation of shoot videos on the internet? Are you surprised that people are so interested in backstage gossip from twenty years ago?
Not at all. When you’re a fan, you love hearing insider talk. Personally, I’d never do the three-hour sit-down shoot video; I’d write a book about it instead.
Would you mind if we asked you a really personal question? What’s it like to have worked in a profession where so many of your peers have died long before their time?
It sucks. I was watching Raw earlier, and Hunter (HHH) was talking about how lucky he was to have all these friends in the business and he gave a list, and I thought, fuck, my friends died. It’s not happened in recent times, thank God, but there was a period not so long ago where guys were going down one after the other. It is a very tough business, and I feel so lucky that I never got into the drugs and pills. I was always a drinker – I still am to this day, and I can probably drink more than most, but if I want to go a week or two between having those drinks, I can. I don’t know, man. Maybe because of the music side of my life, and because I didn’t have all my eggs in one basket, wrestling wasn’t the be all and end all.
What do you think of pro wrestling at the moment? It seems to have suffered from the WWE effectively having a monopoly…
Its an experience thing. I think my generation of guys was one of the best because we were going around the world learning their craft before we ever got to the WWE. Now there’s a lot of guys there who have less than five years experience. And I don’t think I really, really knew exactly what I was doing until I came back in 2008 when it came to manipulation of a crowd. I had great stuff before that, don’t get me wrong – but it wasn’t until then that I felt on certain nights that I was the best in the world. It takes years to become truly great at anything, and the guys there at the moment haven’t had five years experience, never mind ten or fifteen.
