Chris Jericho is a genius at shooting from the hip, but an impromptu promo in London one night led to being showered with glow sticks from the crowd.
Jericho was a recent guest on the “Inside Of You” podcast with Michael Rosenbaum, and talked about how important being able to call audibles in the ring was as a wrestler. Asked by Rosenbaum to recall a time where he had to work on the fly and made something more successful, Jericho recalled an infamous promo that resulted in him being pelted with DX glow sticks in the ring.
“Honestly, that happens [almost] every night. When you get to—and [I’m] not being a jerk—but when you get to my level of experience, you just go with the flow. I’m very good at being quick [and calling audibles]. I remember we were in London one time and they had these stupid glowsticks that they were selling as merchandise. It was for DX, these green glowsticks that [you cross together to form an ‘X’] you’d find at a rave. They were £10 for a pair or something like that, and I was in the ring,” Jericho explained, “I was a bad guy, so I’m cutting a typical promo on English people and how they had bad teeth. Whatever I was saying, and it was a non-televised show, but as I was talking this thing comes flying by. It was a glowstick and it hit me right in the eye. And I [grabbed my eye] and was like ‘Mother fucker!’ So I was like, ‘OK, you want to throw a glowstick? C’mon! Who is going to hit me? Throw a glowstick, I dare you!’”
“And you can see it on YouTube but there was a blizzard of glowsticks, like a hundred of them coming down and it felt like a Jedi, just [trying to dodge them]. It was just this night of raining down glowsticks because of what happened on the fly, but I’m thinking afterwards—and I got in trouble, whatever—but I was laughing because these people just paid ten bucks, they’re literally taking their [money] and they were so mad that they’re throwing glowsticks at me. That’s the true embracing of the moment. I didn’t plan to have a glowstick riot,” Jericho said, “I didn’t even know there were glowsticks until I got hit in the face with one. So, you can just ignore it or take advantage of it. Now I’ve got even more people booing and yelling because they’re not only throwing objects at me, but then they realize that they just wasted £10, so they got more angry. It’s little things like that where you take advantage of that, living in the moment.”
Jericho went on to note that the main downside to being taught to be so scripted is you don’t get to have authentic moments like that. Check out the full show with Chris Jericho below:
Read More: Chris Jericho: You Never Want To Deal With Vince McMahon When He’s Hungry
