Chris Jericho and Goldberg having heat with one another is no big secret, and it’s been documented before (clip has NSFW language) that the two got into a little scuffle when they were both in WWE in the early 2000s.
However, when Jericho came onto Ric Flair’s Woo Nation podcast this week, Y2J added in some more backstory about his history with the former WCW star.
As Jericho tells it, he and Terry Taylor came up with the idea for the angle, where Jericho kept getting faux victories over Goldberg by doing things such as beating up imposters and winning via countout when he wasn’t in the building. The payoff to the feud was to be that the WCW champ would win a glorified squash match at a PPV, but a squash that Jericho would make more memorable than Goldberg’s usual wham-bam-jackhammer slam pinfall victories.
WCW, however, wanted to finish off the angle during a regular episode of Nitro where Lionheart would lose in the same way as all of Goldberg’s opponents did, via a minute-long beatdown.
Jericho had precisely zero interest in having the blow off to the angle he built happening on free TV, so he did what any sane person would do: He hid in the upstairs part of the arena until WCW officials forgot about him.
“‘I said we’re doing the pay-per-view, we’re doing the five-minute squash just like we talked about, I’m not doing it.’ And then I went and hid, I went and hid in the upstairs. It’s a trick I learned from Benoit. I went and hid upstairs until the show started, and they couldn’t find me, they just forgot about it. So, I didn’t have to do it. “
Although he got out of it once, Jericho was once again booked to get squashed on the next week’s Nitro, and when he once again refused, he was called into a meeting with Goldberg himself along with Eric Bischoff and Hulk Hogan, who yelled at him for not doing the job, while Jericho argued that the angle was over with the fans and it should be built up to a pay-per-view like they originally agreed upon.
It was there that the prickly relationship between Jericho and Goldberg appears to have begun, as Y2J told Flair about this interaction they had during that meeting.
“Goldberg was just flipping out, he’s like, ‘I’m the guy that stands in the sparks! I breath in smoke, I breath in fire! I’m the world champ.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, if I kick you in the nuts right now, you’d go down like everybody else.'”
Jericho finally got his point across, though, as they agreed with his idea to tease the angle out one more week, resulting in Goldberg doling out a massive spear on the entrance ramp. The pay-per-view match never happened, though, as, according to Jericho, Goldberg went hunting instead.
The whole thing is fascinating, but by far the best part of the entire conversation is this interjection by Flair, which may be the most Ric Flair quote of all-time.
“Where was I? I must have been in the bar at the hotel.”
Never change, Naitch.
