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What’s the story?
Chris Jericho revealed something that took place early on in his career that would have changed the entire course of his remaining career on a recent episode of Talk is Jericho.
The Ayatollah of Rock n Rolla was discussing Chris Benoit’s career with Dave Meltzer on the podcast when he revealed that he was almost cast as Benoit’s little brother.
In case you didn’t know…
Benoit enjoyed a 22-year career in pro wrestling working for numerous promotions including the World Wrestling Federation/World Wrestling Entertainment (WWF/WWE), World Championship Wrestling (WCW), Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW), among others. He held 22 championships and is considered to be on the greats, despite a controversial and abrupt end.
In 2007, Benoit murdered his son and wife and proceeded to hang himself two days later which tainted his name forever.
The heart of the matter
Recalling the incident, Jericho said:
“When I first started in Calgary I was training at the Silver Dollar Action Center with Lance Storm and a cast of miscreants that will never be heard from again — and there was a local promoter called Bob Puppets, that was actually his real name believe it or not. And he said he was gonna book me on my first show and he said he wanted to call me Rob Benoit, Chris Benoit’s little brother because he thought I looked like him so much.”
He further went on to tell another story of how hard Benoit was on himself. Jericho had made a mess of a spin kick and had missed completely. However, Benoit had taken the bump promptly and the match went on as usual. It wasn’t a glaring mistake, just that Jericho did not hit Benoit as hard as he should have.
After that match. Jericho caught up with Benoit in the boiler room where the latter was doing squats.
On being asked why he was doing squats, Benoit had replied, “You know, I should never have bumped off that. That was so unprofessional of me and it was such a bad rookie mistake, I had to do squats.”
What’s next?
Jericho will return to his duties as the frontman of Fozzy very soon. On the wrestling front, though, we won’t be surprised if his appearances become few and far between.
Author’s take
It has been a decade since the horrific events surrounding Benoit’s death. If you can take that particular incident off your mind, then it’s hard to argue that he was not one of the greatest of all time.
His standards were unattainable and if Jericho was cast as his brother, we would have seen a very different Jericho to the one we see and know today.
