Chris Jericho explains why his WWE debut wasn’t as much of a surprise as you’d think it was.
Chris Jericho appeared on Gresh & Keefe to promote his new book, The Complete List Of Jericho, and was asked to reflect on his WWE debut in 1999. Noting how it wasn’t widely known by everyone, many fans still knew he was coming to WWE, or at least had a good idea it was happening. The internet was still a new thing back then, and he noted how it was the first time fans could really discuss stories like that in wrestling before they aired, and they ended up being right about his arrival as “The Millenium Man.”
“It was more than a few. There was tons of people there [that knew], I almost felt like, to me, it felt like there was thousands of people that had received kind of a private invitation on ‘Come see the debut of Jericho.’ I think the reason for that was that was August of 1999. The internet did exist and there hardcore wrestling fans. And the people that were hardcore wrestling fans knew that I had a falling out with WCW and knew that I hadn’t been around for a while. There was no social media then,” Jericho explained, “but there was kind of a buzz in internet groups and chat rooms and that sort of thing. And I just think the word got around when this countdown was happening. You know, who could it be? It could be somebody completely new, but what if it’s Jericho? What if it’s him?”
“And I think a lot of people just took a chance and thought it’s gotta be Jericho, just the way that they’re building this and it’s gonna be really big. And they were right because you could see, if you watch it back,” he noted, “there’s a lot of people that have signs in the crowd for Jericho and all that sort of stuff. So I think people just took a chance because it was kind of the dawning of this new era where you could kind of discuss these things with other fans and kind of make your own ideas of what’s gonna happen before it even does. And they were right.”
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