After his appearance on the Broken Skull Sessions, Chris Jericho brought on WWE Hall of Famer “Stone Cold” Steve Austin on Talk Is Jericho. Austin and Jericho discussed their conversation on Broken Skull Sessions, and Jericho spoke on the night after recording the show.
“It was at the very end of the Broken Skull Session conversation that we had, you hit the nail right on the head because everybody’s thinking, ‘Hey, how can this happen, WWE and AEW?’ As you said, this is bigger than wrestling,” Austin said. “This is about the love of the business. You can’t sum it up any more than that. It was a process to get this thing going as you know, but like you said, it was all about the love of the business, and I was just glad to have you on the show and reconnect with you.
“You know me man, I’m like you, always closing, always thinking of business and different angles,” Jericho added. “So doing your show, I said, ‘Well, would you like to do Talk is Jericho, and we can talk about some stuff. We were thinking about maybe doing it after we did the Broken Skull Sessions, but I don’t remember how that night ended. It’s of those ones where I woke up in my bed in my hotel like how did I get here?’
“Man, I’ll tell you what, it took me a few days to get back on track because they just showed me a good time, and I’m willing to stay in the good timezone for quite some time,” Austin admitted.
Jericho and Austin discussed Austin’s career in WCW. Austin admitted that working house shows was his favorite experience mentioning names like Rick Rude and Ricky Steamboat. Jericho recalled the advice Rude gave him regarding taped promos.
“Rick Rude was great,” Jericho stated. “The one lesson that I got from him was he said, ‘If you’re doing multiple takes of a promo, and if you don’t like it, you can never trust that they won’t use that one so always swear at the end of it. That way they can’t use it,’ because he said, ‘They always pick the one you don’t like.’”
On the topic of Steamboat, Jericho talked about his WrestleMania 25 match against Roddy Piper, Jimmy Snuka and Steamboat. He revealed what it was like to work with Steamboat, and he revealed what Vince McMahon’s original list of opponents were.
“When I worked with him at WrestleMania, we had the match where it was me vs. Piper, Snuka and Steamboat,” Jericho recalled. “It was kind of the Legends thing, and I was going to kill all the Legends. And Steamboat hadn’t worked for probably 15 years. He was barely in the match in the first place because Vince wanted it to be Piper, Snuka and [Greg] Valentine, and I was like, ‘What am I going to do with that?’ And he’s like, ‘Well, it doesn’t have to be good.’ Well, it’s WrestleMania I want it to be some semblance of good.
“So I was able to get Steamboat in there, and he was better than 70% of the roster after not working 15 years that night. Then Vince liked his work so much he put him in the ring for about six months as a player / coach, and that son of a b**ch got to better than 85% – 90% of the guys. So I got a chance to work with him quite a few times, and you mentioned house shows to really get the idea of who Ricky Steamboat was as a wrestler, and I agree with you a 1000%. Even at that later stage, he was still excellent, excellent, excellent.”
