Chris Jericho recently appeared as a guest on the Gabby AF podcast for an in-depth interview covering all things pro wrestling.
During the discussion, the AEW star spoke about Sting's recent retirement at AEW Revolution 2024, as well as WWE announcing Paul Heyman as one of the inductees for the 2024 class of the WWE Hall of Fame for WrestleMania XL Weekend.
Featured below are some of the highlights from the interview where he touches on these topics with his thoughts.
On Sting’s retirement: “Sting is one of those guys that when he came in, he’s super humble. No one ever says anything bad about Sting, ever. I think his retirement match is kind of one of those things where like, you could probably never duplicate that with his sons and just the match with Darby being out there and The Bucks. Sting worked his ass off when he was in AEW and I really respected that because he really didn’t have to. He wasn’t here just to collect the check. He was working hard and taking crazy bumps. The match that Sammy and I had against him in Darby in Hamilton, Ontario, when he jumped off the ladder to the table and slipped and hit his head. It’s like Sting can’t continue and he comes back in the ring and he’s like, ‘Fu**ing right I’m going to continue. What are you talking about?’ He never gave anything less than 1,000%. I think once again, it’s almost like Kiss, like Paul and Gene when you have the makeup. You don’t think of him as being 64 or whatever, 65, whatever he is. He’s just Sting. He did such a great job of evolving his character and still being relevant and still being cool. What a great story. It’s sad to see him go, but nobody’s career lasts forever and nobody’s career lasts until you’re 65 and still working great matches. He was really smart. If you look at him, he never had a singles match in AEW. He had a couple of the cinematic ones, but in AEW, he never wanted to have a single match. He always wanted to do the tags. As much as he helped Darby, Darby helped him. That’s one of the greatest mentor/student, one of the greatest tag teams of all time for that reason. It was great to be a part of that. Once again, what an inspiration. In a company where I’m kind of like the seasoned vet, when Sting came in, it’s like, man, I was learning from him. When we did our matches together, you fall back on what Sting wants to do first and then work from there. He was great. I’m glad that we got to do some matches together because we had never been in the ring before, ever. With both the careers we had, we never had that opportunity, so we had a couple of really good matches and a couple of really good moments, promos, bat wars, like it was really a lot of fun to be there with him.”
On Paul Heyman being inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame: “Not just in the ring, but behind the scenes too, Paul is just one of those guys. He gets it. He’s a genius, but he also knows how to play the game. He knows how to play the wrestling business game. I mean, that’s a first ballot Hall of Famer for me. He knows exactly what to do to tell the story. He knows exactly what to do to build his guys. Whoever he attaches himself to becomes a better performer and a bigger star. He’s just one of those guys. He’s very smart. He’ll be in the business until he’s 80 years old if he chooses to be and he started when he was 15. So definitely a no-brainer for the Hall of Fame and like I said, one of my favorite characters I’ve ever met in the wrestling business.”
Check out the complete interview at Apple.com. H/T to WrestlingNews.co for transcribing the above quotes.
