Eric: I let my newsletter readers know that I would be speaking to you and the overwhelming majority of them wanted to know when are you coming back to the ring and are you part of those “Save Us 222” videos?
Chris: I don’t know when I’m coming back. I’ve always said that when the time was right I would know when I was ready to come back better than ever. So I’m not sure. It could be tomorrow. It could be a year from now. There has always been a lot of speculation from the moment I have left as to when I would be coming back. It seems that I’m always involved with things and I am always the last one to know. As far as the vignettes that are going on, I don’t think things are exactly the way people think they are. And if they are, I’m usually the last person to know. If someone out there knows please tell me.
Eric: Let me ask you about the book. Could you tell me a little about it and why did you decide to end it with you WWE debut?
Chris: I had so many stories and tales from the early years of my career when I spent so much time overseas. I really wanted to delve into that side of my career. I didn’t want to downplay or have to rush through any of those stories or any of those times because there are so many things that people just don’t know about. I started in 1990, obviously pre-Internet, pre-insider newsletters. I thought there was such an interesting story and not just from a wrestling angle but from a travelling standpoint. I had this dream from such an early age and these are all the trials and tribulations I went through to achieve that dream. So it’s a book that wrestling fans will love, Jericholics will love, and people that don’t know about wrestling and don’t care about who Chris Jericho is still dig this because it’s more about this journey I took to achieve this dream than anything else.
Eric: Is there a part 2 in the works?
Chris: Not right now but we’ll see what happens. It’s definitely wide open for a sequel. The first one deals with my journey to achieve this dream of being a WWE Superstar and the second one could continue literally seconds after the first one ends. It’s perfect for a sequel. We’ll see what happens. There’s already interest, just let me out it that way.
Eric: In the book you had mentioned that there was a drug policy in WCW. This is the first time that I have ever heard about them having one. I was wondering if you could tell my readers a little about the policy?
Chris: There’s really not much to tell. They would just have testing, urine tests at the shows randomly. I guess this was about 98/99. It was pretty much standard drug testing. Everyone would have to go in and pee in a cup. Whoever was doing bad things would get in trouble.
Eric: In the book you have a picture of Chris and Nancy Benoit. You had a caption under it saying that you debated for weeks whether or not to include the picture. Could you describe to me the thought process of what you were going back and forth with?
Chris: Well the book takes place mostly from 1990 until 1999. The book was done. I had worked on it for 18 months and had finished it in May 2007. How it works in the book industry is that you hand in a book and then they print out pre-copies and that’s pretty much the end of it. What happened was that in June all the events with the Benoit family transpired. I really wanted to go back in and revisit it a little bit. Chris Benoit, in this book, has a very huge part because I met him in 1992 and we were very, very close. He was kind of like a big brother and a mentor to me and our careers mirrored each other. So he’s all over the book. I wanted people who maybe don’t know much about wrestling to understand why he was remembered so fondly in this book and why he’s talked about in such a positive light. During those years, this was a guy I knew that was a very good friend of mine, a very good person, that sort of thing. When I went back in and was able to make some changes to the book, I had originally wanted to take out the picture of Chris, Nancy, and myself at Owen Hart’s funeral. But then I thought to do that would be to suggest that these people never existed and these times never existed and these memories that I had weren’t there. That would be wrong. That wouldn’t be true to what I wanted to do with the book. So I decided to leave it in there. Like I said, to me, this book deals more along the time between 1990 and 1999 and the Benoit issues aren’t relevant to this story. They wouldn’t be talked about. But I thought there had to be some kind of an explanation given at some point as to why Chris was so fondly remembered in this book. So I went back and wrote a little bit of a forward to the book explaining my thoughts and those types of things.
Eric: Related to the two previous questions, with the upcoming Congressional hearings, what would you like to see accomplished by them?
Chris: I don’t know what they want to accomplish with them. To make awareness towards the business, that’s great. I’m really not familiarized with what they want to do or what they want to do so I’m not sure.
