Chris Jericho maintains a binder of his matches, reveals first big payday
Chris Jericho is a legend of the pro wrestling business. He's wrestled all over the world and held championships in the biggest wrestling promotions in the world.
Jericho's beginnings were humble and he had to carve a path for himself to reach where he is.
Le Champion, who was one of AEW's early signings, revealed several fascinating facts about his journey to the top of professional wrestling. In a recent episode of Busted Open Radio, Jericho said he has maintained a binder throughout his career, keeping track of all his matches.
Chris Jericho alluded to the ease of finding a match now on wrestling databases online but added that many of his obscure matches in Mexico, Europe, etc. could not be found easily.
"You can see on the inside of the book, that’s the actual, that’s the real, legit, first page. You can even see the binder clips. We were able to kind of recreate that when you open the book up. I did carry this binder with me around the world. Now keep this in mind. In about 2010 or so, Cagematch.com started keeping track of all the matches of everybody. So now it’s a lot easier, but what I have here is the first seven or eight years. WCW you can probably even find those matches. But the matches I had in Mexico, Japan, Europe, even ECW in the early 90’s. You can’t find that stuff," said Chris Jericho. (H/T: WrestlingInc)
Jericho continued, saying he had information in his binder about great workers most people wouldn't know of regardless of them being household names.
"This is a whole history book of even the early ’90s in Mexico. I mean, just going by match #186, July 25, 1993, (me) Oro and Transformer vs. Villano IV, V, and Masakre in Mexico City. All of these guys, it’s like ‘who the hell are all these guys?’ You can go through and find all this information. Some of them are huge stars, some of them are not. But you can just see how the business was back then when you were doing stuff overseas, basically on your own," said Chris Jericho.
Chris Jericho and his first big payday
Like it does for most, the start for Jericho wasn't particularly heavy on his pocket. He spoke about having to wrestle several matches for no pay and getting $30 as his first payment at a time when the average was $50.
"Well obviously zero appears quite a bit in here. My first payoff was $30. $50 was kind of the average back in those days, and sadly it still is kind of the average these days. $50 minimum is what you’ll get. If you look at my first tour of FMW, October 16, 1991, six man with Lance Storm and Mark Starr vs. Sambo Asaka, Tarzan Goto and Masashi Honda in Nagasaki, Japan. My pay off for that was $160. Because whatever I was making for the week, I took that and divided it by how many matches I had, so that was $160," said Chris Jericho.
His first big payday came in Monterrey, Mexico where he faced Norman Stiley and got a fortunate break as the announced challenger Vampiro was ruled out and Jericho was called upon as his replacement. Le Champion was generous in his praise of Norman Stiley.
"Monterrey was kind of an offshoot of Mexico City (CMLL), which was, let’s say AEW or WWE. Monterrey would be Ring of Honor or ECW. So I kind of started out there. And what happened was there supposed to be a championship match. Black Magic, who was Norman Smiley, versus Vampiro, who was the challenger at the time. Vampiro hurt his leg so he couldn’t do the match," said Chris Jericho.
Chris Jericho lost the match but secured his first major payday as championship matches fetched double the money and he was in the main event. He went on to rate his match as well.
"So I lost to Black Magic, obviously, but because it was a championship main event they paid me $500. And back in those days, if you had a championship match, you’d get double your pay. So I literally got paid $1000 to have this championship match in the bullring against Norman Smiley, I gave it four stars. But that was the first big payoff I ever had," said Chris Jericho.
At the moment, Chris Jericho is involved in a heated feud with MJF. On this week's episode of AEW Dynamite, the Pinnacle leader laid down the stipulations for Jericho so that he can get a rematch with him.