Eric Bischoff isn’t buying the idea that wrestling fans have suddenly turned on Chris Jericho. As far as he’s concerned, social media has everyone fooled.
Jericho recently predicted that many of his haters will end up appreciating him once he’s gone. That caught Bischoff’s attention on the 83 Weeks podcast, and he didn’t just agree with the former AEW World Champion—he went after social media itself, arguing that the constant negativity online paints a completely false picture of what wrestling fans actually think.
“I think in social media, yeah. I mean, that’s the nature of social media. You hit it right on the head when you said it’s not just wrestling. It’s not. How many times have you heard people say, and I believe it to be true, social media is not real life? Reacting to it like it is real life is a mistake. It’s a mistake business-wise. It’s a mistake on a personal level. If you let yourself get riled up and manipulated and angry and depressed or whatever by stupid stuff you see in social media, you should probably get away from social media because it’s having a negative effect on you and your life.”
He isn’t saying fans never get tired of seeing the same faces every week. In fact, Bischoff thinks that’s completely normal. The problem, he says, is that once those complaints start piling up online, they suddenly look much bigger than they really are.
“Now, the last year or so, has the audience kind of gotten Jericho fatigue? I don’t know. It seems like that might be the case, as it often is with especially older, established talent that kind of camps out at the top of the card, so to speak. People do get tired of it and they tend to forget about or not count some of the previous great stuff that’s been done.”
According to Bischoff, that’s exactly why opinions change so quickly after a wrestler disappears. Once they’re no longer on television every Wednesday or Monday night, fans stop focusing on what they’re doing now and start remembering everything that made them great in the first place.
“But once someone like Chris or Hulk or Ric Flair—or Randy Orton or John Cena—you just pick anybody. Anytime those guys leave and they’ve been gone for a while, you’re not seeing them every week on television. So what do you do? You start reflecting back on some of their previous work, and that’s where people will fall in love all over again. It’s just more of a social media phenomenon than it is anything else, I think.”
That’s exactly why Bischoff believes Jericho’s prediction will eventually come true. Right now, the conversation is centered on “Jericho fatigue.” Give it a few years, and he thinks fans will be talking about the incredible body of work that took Jericho from WCW to WWE to AEW instead.
“People are going to go back and start looking at some early Chris Jericho stuff. They’re going to look at WCW and then they’re going to do the same thing with some of the great WWE stuff that Chris did. His body of work is amazing to me.”
Whether fans agree with him or not, Bischoff clearly isn’t convinced the online backlash tells the whole story. As criticism of Jericho continues to dominate social media, the WWE Hall of Famer believes time—not Twitter—is what will ultimately decide how Le Champion is remembered.
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