Chris Jericho is one of the busiest pro wrestlers there is. That’s because he’s also a musician that is currently on tour in Europe with his band Fozzy, and he’s also organizing his own themed cruise. If you follow Jericho on Twitter , then you know he plugs ChrisJerichoCruise.com all the time.
The cruise takes place from October 27-31, 2018 so there’s almost a year to prepare for it, yet people are booking now because it looks pretty fun. The cruise is a mix of wrestling, music, standup comedy, some DDP Yoga sessions and a number of wrestling legends will be there including Mick Foley, Rey Mysterio, Diamond Dallas Page, Jim Ross, Jerry Lawler and more.
When Jericho first mentioned the cruise, he also noted that Ring of Honor will be having matches on the cruise with most of their top stars as part of it. That led to people wondering why Ring of Honor and not WWE? As we have noted when talking about Jericho working for New Japan in January against Kenny Omega, Jericho has only wrestled for WWE since 1999 and is very loyal to the company that he considers his wrestling home.
On a recent edition of the Killing the Town podcast hosted by Lance Storm and Cyrus on Jericho’s Podcast One Network, Jericho mentioned that he offered WWE the chance to have matches on the cruise, but they turned it down. Here’s how Jericho explained it with thanks to WrestlingInc for the quotes:
“Here’s the thing. I did my due diligence. Obviously, I was working for WWE at the time. I took it to Triple H. I wanted to see if NXT would do it and to see if they’d be interested in doing that. We had some conversations, and, basically, typically WWE, after three months of talking about it, I had a 35-minute conversation with three executives that I’ve never heard of before just to tell us that they’re passing. And I was like, ‘why didn’t you just tell me in, like, three minutes, ‘we’re passing?’
“I had to sit there for 35 minutes and hear all the reasons why: I mean, Vince doesn’t like doing cruises; he saw somebody got food poisoning on the cruise once and now he’s terrified that the whole crew ship was going to be poisoned. I was like, ‘is he scared that we’re going to hit an iceberg as well as we go to Mexico? And I knew that was going to happen because WWE doesn’t play well with others and I understood that, but I wanted to do my due diligence, like I said, at least present them the opportunity. And the day they said, ‘no,’ I told Triple H, ‘I’m still going to do this. This is happening either way.’ And he said, ‘yeah, sure. No problem.’ I made the call to Ring Of Honor and signed them on later on that week.”
The lesson here is never mention a cruise to Vince McMahon. Apparently, he’s not a fan of them.
Jericho also explained how long the planning took to set up the first ever Jericho Cruise and why he thought about Ring of Honor:
“It took me two years to get it rolling because there [were] a lot of reasons why it can’t work and [the cruise company] not understanding what wrestling fans are, how big wrestling can be. And then, once I started thinking about that, ‘who do I bring onboard the ship?’ Do you know what I mean? ‘Do I try to book a card, Don versus Lance and Chris versus Rey Mysterio? I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do. Well, what happens if you get hurt? What happens if you get signed by the WWE? What am I going to do?’ Well, then I thought, ‘maybe I’ll bring a company onboard. That way, no matter what happens, the company exists, so if this guy’s signed by the WWE or this guy gets hurt, I’ll still have the company name on the bill and that’s all I need.”
It sounds like it’s going to be a great time and Jericho has obviously put a lot of thought into it since he’s planned it for two years. He’s a smart man. No doubt about that.
