Chris Jericho Recalls Laying Out WrestleMania 19 Match With Shawn Michaels, Michaels’ Reaction to the Match’s Reception

Chris Jericho battled Shawn Michaels in an all-time great match at WrestleMania 19, and Jericho recently talked about putting the match together and more. The latest episode of Talk is Jericho was a live Q&A episode, and Jericho talked about the match and Michaels’ amusing reaction to how people (including John Laurinaitis) received the match. You can check out the highlights below:

On his match with Shawn Michaels at WrestleMania: “He had no intentions of wrestling after that one match he had with Triple H at Summerslam. And we had just done a one-off highlight reel in December where I had him on the Highlight Reel and I started burying him, saying he was an old man — he was 39 at the time. Think about that. And then he ends up superkicking me, and that’s the end of the segment. That was all it was supposed to be. We go to the back, and Vince is there. And he goes, ‘You smell that?’ ‘No, what?’ ‘Smells like money!’

“So he then decided that he wanted to do Jericho and HBK at WrestleMania. And Shawn was like, ‘If I’m gonna do WrestleMania’ — because keep in mind, he’s Mr. WrestleMania, right? He had the best string of WrestleManias ever to this day. And he said, ‘If I’m gonna do one, I’m gonna do it with Jericho.’ And we did the storyline of kind of the student and the teacher, where the teacher becomes more evil and then wants to kill the student like every karate movie that you’ve ever seen.”

On coming up with ideas for the match: “It was a great build, the story was there, the anticipation was there, the history was there. And now, we just have to put together the match. Now, when you do a WrestleMania match, they have rehearsal times where you go to a ring that’s set up — or maybe its the ring in the stadium — and you go over your match. And they have kind of a docket where you go and put down, ‘Thursday between noon and two, Jericho and Michaels.’ Let’s say that’s what it was.

“So about a week before this, I was in a sporting goods store buying a black pair of Speedos to wear underneath my wrestling tights — which now you know what I wear underneath my wrestling tights. There you go… and I was there looking at these, like, what size am I, am I a medium, am I an extra large? And I was like, ‘Whoa.’ And this idea hit me. And then another one hit me, and they all like dominos. I went up to the lady at a cash register and was like, ‘Can I please borrow a piece of paper and a pen?’… And I just write down idea, idea, idea, idea on the back of a Dick Sporting Good’s receipt printout.”

On laying out the match with Michaels: “So I take it to the stadium where we’re having out practice. Noon Thursday, the match is Sunday. I sit down, Shawn sits down, and he asks me, ‘You got anything?’… I said, ‘Well, I got an idea for the beginning of the match.’ He says, ‘Wow.’ I said, ‘You got anything?’ He says, ‘I have an idea for the end of the match.’ I show my idea for the beginning, which is about 20 ideas in a row. He shows me his idea for the finish, which is about 20 ideas in a row. We both agree. ‘See you later,’ we’re up and out of there in about 10 minutes.”

On the reaction to the match: “There’s people who were saying at the time that the two best matches were Jericho and Shawn, and Brock and Kurt Angle. And Shawn kept hearing that, and he goes, ‘I don’t understand it.’ Remember, this is where Brock did the shooting star press and landed on his head. And he goes, ‘How can their match be better than ours when the finish was Brock Lesnar landing on his f**king head? Doesn’t count, we win.’

“And then we go backstage, and Johnny Ace is back there. He was our agent, the coach of the match. We had 25 minutes and we went 29. And I don’t even know what the f**k Johnny was thinking, but I remember one of the first things he said was, ‘You guys went over! You went four minutes over!’ And Shawn goes ‘Hey, when you have a five-star match, you can tell me I went over. Until then, shut your f**king mouth.'”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit Talk is Jericho with a h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.