Chris Jericho says his match with Goldberg could have been the best squash match ever, but WCW’s inability to capitalize on a great situation led him to leaving the company.
Jericho is the guest on the new episode of Broken Skull Sessions with Steve Austin and he spoke about the events that led him to leaving WCW in 1999. As he explained it, a one-time joke about Goldberg led him to continue pushing for a match with Bill, but it never materialized for a multitude of reasons, including Goldberg not wanting to do it. Jericho explained that he never thought he’d have a chance of beating Goldberg, but fans were so into it that they should have built it up for pay-per-view as the best squash match ever.
“That kinda started it and Bill was very young in the business at the time, he was very angry at me for doing it. We kept pushing it and pushing it and pushing it to where we’d built up to a match with Jericho and Goldberg. It never happened because Bill didn’t want to do it, one thing led to another, and I was like, ‘We have an angle here’ and people were super into it. What I wanted to do was, I wanted to do the greatest squash match of all time,” Jericho explained. “It just never transpired because we could never get the match in the ring.”
“I remember that I was even [thinking] that if I wore amateur shoes and he spears me, he could spear me out of my shoes and I could kick my shoe out into the fifteenth row. And it just never happened, so when that didn’t happen due to the politics and opinions and attitudes, that sort of thing, I said ‘What else can I do here?’ I created an angle out of nothing that wasn’t supposed to be anything, and people would pay to see this,” Jericho said, “but [WCW] kept wanting him to beat me on TV and I [asked] why. I said ‘Let’s do it on pay-per-view! I have no grand illusions that I’m going to beat him, of course he’s going to beat me. He’s going to beat me definitively, he’s going to beat me like Goldberg, but let’s make people pay to see it, not just be number 150 [in the streak] after you beat Hugh Morrus and George Johnson, whatever.’ And they were never able to do that, and that’s when I was like ‘I’ve got to get out of here.’”
Austin asked how he was able to leave WCW, asking if his contract had expired. Jericho said that it didn’t, mentioning that he has never had a problem leaving a promotion when it was time to go before explaining how he was phased off of TV. Jericho said he didn’t have a contract for the first seven months he was in WCW and didn’t sign it “just to see how long [he] could go without signing it” and felt the same might happen with his contract expiring on his way out.
“I thought the same, they probably will—my contract will just expire and they won’t know, they just won’t even realize it. But Bischoff did realize it, and then he started to track me down and he wanted me to sign a new contract. I avoided him and avoided him, and finally I made a deal,” Jericho explained, “and it took another six months where he didn’t actually give me the contract. We had a verbal deal, and there’s like three or four months where I was like, ‘If this was [Hulk] Hogan, that contract would be done the next day.’ So 3-4 months and now I’m starting to avoid him, and then I remember the famous line, he said ‘Sign the contract now, or ‘no tickie, no laundry.’’ And I was [confused]. He says ‘no tickie, no laundry.’ I said ‘OK…’ and what he meant was, if I don’t sign the contract, you can’t keep the US Championship. So, I lost the US Championship to Konnan that night in D.C. and I decided to kinda run it out.”
“The last two months that I was there, they only had me do house shows—which is not a problem at all because house shows are fun—and that was it. He thought by taking me off of TV that would screw me with WWE, but in reality it made it even better. I was expecting them to job me out, and I had this whole thing I was going to do. ‘If they take away my ring music, I’ll pull a ‘Rock N Roll Buck Zumhofe’ and walk to the ring with a ghetto blaster. If they give me a losing streak, I’ll make a t-shirt with ‘Jericho 0-10’ and I’ll make something out of it,” Jericho explained, “but they just left me off of TV and that was it. I basically just coasted into WWE. And once again, as long as you put me on live TV there’s nothing you could do because I’m going to make it good. I don’t care if it’s losing to Ice Train in 30 seconds, I will make sure you remember Jericho with the boombox coming to the ring, whatever it may be.”
