It doesn’t happen often, but Chris Jericho has returned home.
With All Elite Wrestling’s weekly flagship show Dynamite set for the Canada Life Centre on Wednesday night, the eight-time world champion is back in Winnipeg and it’s a trip Jericho is savouring.
When he defends his recently won FTW Championship against Katsuyori Shibata on the show, it will mark just the ninth match for Jericho in Winnipeg in nearly 30 years and his first singles contest in the city in more than 15 years.
You can catch three hours of AEW action LIVE from Winnipeg with Dynamite followed by Rampage beginning at 8pm et/5pm pt on TSN2, streaming on the TSN App and on TSN.ca.
The rarity of the occasion is not lost on the 53-year-old Jericho, who wrestled in a three-way trios match in AEW’s first-ever show in the city last March, but neither is the timing. Having recently turned heel, Jericho is unlikely to receive the heavy booing from the crowd he has elsewhere of late.
“It’s funny because it’s probably the one building in North America where I’m not going to get booed out of it, so timing-wise it’s kind of funny,” Jericho told TSN.ca. “It’s almost like ‘Oh, I wish we would have done Winnipeg two months ago.’ But it’s still going to be amazing and it’s always fun to work in my hometown. Obviously, it’s not the same arena where I used to go to the matches when I was growing up, but still, this is where I became a fan of the wrestling business and that magic still lives on whenever I come back to Winnipeg and get the chance to get in the ring.”
There tends to be two schools of thought when it comes to booking heels in their hometowns over the years in professional wrestling. You could have the performer attempt to verbally attack the crowd and get booed by their hometown or you can simply let the people cheer for the wrestler who comes from their city and achieved national fame. Jericho leans towards the latter and doesn’t see the sense in fighting things.
“It’s one of those things where you can go ‘F--- this, I’m a heel. I’m gonna insult the crowd,’ but doing that in your hometown, you’re just gonna end up splitting your reaction,” Jericho explains. “Half the people are still gonna cheer you anyway, and the other half will kinda boo you because you’re supposed to. But they wanna cheer you, so don’t fight it. Don’t go against the tide and be proud. Listen, I’m from a small town in Western Canada and there’s a handful of famous people from here, but not a lot, so let the people enjoy the fact that Chris Jericho is in town and let’s all party together, and then the next week I can go back to being a heel again.”
While being a heel is old hat for Jericho, his latest persona is a brand new one. In March, Jericho attempted to strike up a relationship with Hook, the 24-year-old son of AEW announcer and Extreme Championship Wrestling legend Taz, positioning himself as a potential mentor. From the beginning, it was clear that Hook saw an ulterior motive in Jericho and didn’t commit to the partnership.
Angered by the rejection, Jericho challenged Hook for his FTW Championship at the Dynasty pay-per-view earlier this month. After a low blow and several shots with a baseball bat, Jericho defeated his younger adversary for his title. This past Wednesday night on Dynamite, Jericho christened himself as “The Learning Tree,” a veteran voice open to imparting his wisdom to the younger generation.
“It’s kinda taking 33 years of experience and reading the room and seeing some people just angry that I still exist," Jericho said of the new gimmick. "Okay, so let me do the exact opposite of what some people think [I do] like burying talent and all that stuff, which I’ve never done ever. I think I’ve built more talent in my career than anybody at this point. It’s just leaning into that. I think you just want to go with the flow and that’s the best thing about wrestling. People start getting sick of you, so you turn heel. They start to like you, then you turn babyface. You kinda go back and forth depending on what the crowd is reacting to and that’s the fun part of the business. The character is way more important than the match itself and the character is always the money maker. Matches are great and good matches are important, but you have to have the right characters doing these matches for this to matter.”
For Jericho, the new persona feels reenergizing.
“It’s always fun when you kinda strike gold with a new character, a new persona and realize ‘Okay, this could work. This could be pretty good,’” Jericho said. “Sometimes it takes a while to get it rolling, and we’ve built this for a while. This character I’ve had in mind for a few months now and you don’t just start it right away. You kinda slowly tell the story that you want to tell to get to that point and start unleashing the different parts of the storyline you want to do.
“That was kinda the whole idea with Hook and the Jericho-Hook story, but it changed. Once again, you gotta read the room and let the story lead you. You don’t try to lead the story. The story can get a little awkward, but if the story leads you and you’re smart enough to twist and turn with it, it’s usually pretty successful.”
As for real-life “learning trees,” Jericho cites the likes of Arn Anderson, the Undertaker and Pat Patterson as the kind of veterans he could approach for straight talk and honest advice when he was coming up as a younger performer.
“There were always guys like that you could go to who would always give you straight advice and not necessarily tell you what you want to hear, but what you needed to hear, and there’s a big difference,” Jericho said. “Guys like that, you believed them because they would tell you straight up what they think.”
Just as he did when he was coming up himself, Jericho says it’s up to today’s younger performers to heed the advice on offer from veterans or to strike out on their own.
“That’s just part of the learning experience, where you’ve gotta just figure out things for yourself and sometimes you’re not at the point where you want to listen to somebody,” Jericho said. “There are times where people told me stuff and I was like, ‘Well, I’m not going to listen to that. I don’t think they know what they’re talking about’ and then you realize ‘Oh my gosh, they totally knew what they were talking about.’ There’s a lot of guys who ask a lot of questions and there’s a lot of guys who want to be a part of this storyline and who are reaching out and asking if they can be involved. And that’s good. That’s what you want.
“I can’t say, ‘Oh, the new generation, they’re just a bunch of jerks.’ They’re exactly the same that my generation was. There are some guys who are super inquisitive and wanting advice and other guys who don’t want it and will never use it, and hopefully they’ll figure it out for themselves at some point.”
