Chris Jericho recently spoke with Jan Murphy for the Calgary Sun to promote this week’s AEW Dynamite.
During it, the former AEW World Heavyweight Champion stated he wouldn’t be in the wrestling business without Owen Hart.
“When we started AEW, it was one of the missions that Tony Khan and I had was to get Owen involved in wrestling again.” Chris Jericho said. “I’ve really always felt over the years that people have just focused on Owen’s past. The last 10 minutes of his life have kind of erased his amazing legacy of being one of the greatest professional wrestlers of all times, and not to mention being a huge influence on me.”
“I wouldn’t be in the business if it wasn’t for Owen. I really wanted people to think about him in a positive light. Rather than this cloud of negativity. I wanted to do the same within pro wrestling, where people think of Owen Hart in wrestling, they can think about him in AEW. We have an Owen Hart action figure, Owen Hart’s in the video game and you can actually do things with this guy who was one of the greatest ever and basically wasn’t even (mentioned in) the business for many, many years. That never sat well with me…..Owen was a new kid on the scene, he was so acrobatic and so explosive and not the biggest of guys, not six-foot-eight or six-foot-five and 240 pounds of muscle. I knew I could go to Calgary. I knew I could learn to wrestle there and I knew I was as big as Owen was. Or I could be at least because of my stature was similar to his. And that was it. That was it, it was like ‘I can be like that guy.’ I know where Calgary is and this is what I want to do.”