Chris Jericho Shares Funny Memory Of Wanting To Punch Vince McMahon
Chris Jericho was the first Undisputed WWE Champion on the road to WrestleMania 18 and even though he faced Triple H at that event, there was a time when he wanted to punch Vince McMahon.
The Undisputed WWE Champion name was bestowed upon Jericho when he beat The Rock and Steve Austin on the same night at Vengeance in December 2001. Those matches weren’t clean by any means, but it was one of the biggest nights of Jericho’s career
Jericho held the Undisputed WWE Champion into 2002 while Triple H went on to win the Royal Rumble in January to set up their WrestleMania 18 main event match.
During a recent Inside The Ropes live show, Jericho shared a funny story about an angle on television involving Triple H and himself where former WWE Chairman/booker Vince McMahon wanted Jericho to be very aggressive during rehearsals. It led to Jericho becoming so angry with Vince that he wanted to punch him in his “stupid face.”
“The last couple of weeks, right before the match, I did get some serious heat on Triple H. I think I hit him in the leg with the sledgehammer and all this sort of thing. I remember one time we were rehearsing it, me hitting Triple H with a sledgehammer, and Vince [McMahon] would want you to rehearse as if it’s real.
You can’t rehearse if you’re really doing it because there’s no crowd, the crowd is where you get the vibe and the adrenaline, and your whole energy comes [from] that. Plus, you’re in character when you’re in front of the camera, when you’re not in front of the camera you’re just hanging out, you’re rehearsing.
Vince would be like, ‘Do it harder! Do it harder!’ and I’m like, “I’m not in the moment yet,’ and I remember he goes, ‘Oh you don’t wanna do it? What are you on the rag or something?’ I remember thinking, ‘You big-eared, big nose motherf*cker. I’m going to punch you right in your stupid face right now. Knock that toupee right off his head’.”
The main event of WrestleMania 18 saw Jericho lose the Undisputed WWE Title to Triple H. It was Jericho’s first run as a WWE Champion and he went on to be a six-time WWE World Champion in his career along with the first World Champion in All Elite Wrestling in 2019.
Currently, the 51-year-old Jericho is one of the biggest stars in All Elite Wrestling. He nearly became a two-time AEW World Champion on August 10 when he faced Jon Moxley for the Interim AEW World Title, but Moxley managed to win the match. On this week’s AEW Dynamite, Jericho did a cheap attack on Bryan Danielson that could lead to a match at All Out on September 4 and he also had issues with his Jericho Appreciation Society member Daniel Garcia.