Ever since Chris Jericho turned heel around WrestleMania, he’s consistently been one of the best — if not the best — things about WWE in 2016. We’re sad that he’ll be leaving soon to tour with Fozzy and prevent us from drinking it in (maaaaannnnn) for months on end. Sin Cara is probably happy he’ll be gone, though. One of the latest additions to Jericho’s repertoire of amazing heat-generating tricks is The List of Jericho, an inanimate object so popular that it has its own T-shirt.
So who is the marketing genius who came up with this one? Well, surprisingly, it wasn’t Jericho himself. And even more surprisingly, it was actually an indie wrestling legend who has been flying pretty spectacularly under the radar ever since he took a behind-the-scenes job with WWE. It’s Jimmy Jacobs!
Jericho spilled the beans on a recent episode of The LAW. In his own words:
“So what happened was the gift of Jericho and I wish I could take credit for saying I came up with it but Jimmy Jacobs, who has become a writer in WWE, his name is Chris Scobille but his wrestler name is Jimmy Jacobs, no stranger to anybody who is a fan of Ring of Honor or any of those big independent companies. He said I’ve got this idea of the List of Jericho and you put a couple names on it. Oh yeah, that’s a great idea and we did it. Of course you do it once and it was kind of funny, that’s pretty funny, let’s do it again. So we do it again the next week, it gets a little bit of a buzz and then I go to the props truck and say can you make me big, thick list in case I want to use it to hit somebody over the head with and engrave something on. Then, they just put a red piece of paper on it that said the List of Jericho. Meanwhile, this thing is growing. Then, the one week where I said you just made the list and people cheered, it’s like holy (expletive) this is not what we expected. Then, the week we were in there with New Day and I put all three of them on the list, I said the secret is when I put you on the list, you have to sell it like it’s a horrible thing and Woods was great. If people are laughing at it, then it doesn’t get over but because it’s a serious thing, to be on the list is horrible then suddenly we have this whole new world of stuff to deal with.
“I was talking to Vince the other day and I said the list is more over than half the roster and he said yeah, I wish the list could work. The entity of this thing that doesn’t even exist and is now a character on the show. The best gimmicks and best things that work always happen organically. You can’t shove something down people’s throats. It just happens and it becomes a thing.”
Vince McMahon lamenting that the list can’t wrestle matches is pretty much the perfect kicker to this whole story and lives up to 100 percent of however it is you imagine Vince. I love everything about this story, and I love that Jericho is publicly giving a shout-out to Jacobs and giving him credit. We just hope it wasn’t also Jimmy’s idea to book an entire episode of Raw around the List. (It almost certainly wasn’t.)
