Chris Jericho: Without Owen Hart I wouldn’t be a wrestler

Without Owen Hart, Chris Jericho would not be a professional wrestler.

The wrestling legend is a huge fan of the younger Hart brother. Both men are small in stature and come from sports families in Canada. There are many similarities between the two, which explains Jericho’s reverence for the former WWE superstar.

Chris Jericho recently spoke with Jan Murphy for the Calgary Sun where they discussed the influence Owen Hart had on him. He revealed that when they created AEW, he wanted to honor AEW and didn’t want his legacy to be erased.

The former AEW Champion claimed he wouldn’t be in the wrestling business without Owen Hart. He is glad the company can honor the Canadian star 25 years after his death.

“When we started AEW, one of our missions was to bring Owen back into wrestling,” said Chris Jericho. “I’ve always felt over the years that people only focused on Owen’s past. The last 10 minutes of his life kind of erased his incredible legacy as one of the greatest professional wrestlers of all time, not to mention that he had a huge impact on me.”

“Without Owen, I wouldn’t be in the business. I really wanted people to think positively about him. Instead of this cloud of negativity. I wanted to do the same thing in pro wrestling, where people think of Owen Hart in wrestling, they can think of him in AEW. We have an Owen Hart action figure, Owen Hart is in the video game and you can actually do things with this guy who was one of the greatest of all time and basically wasn’t even mentioned (in the) business for many, many years. I never liked that.”

Chris Jericho was inspired by Owen Hart to become a wrestler

Chris Jericho continued to talk about Owen Hart’s impact, revealing that seeing a man of Owen’s size flying around the ring made him realize that he too could be a professional wrestler.

Coming from Calgary, just a 14-hour drive from his home in Winnipeg, made the idea of ​​becoming a wrestler all too real for a young Chris Jericho.

“I grew up a huge wrestling fan,” Chris Jericho said. “I loved Hulk Hogan. I really liked Ricky Steamboat. Randy Savage, The Rockers, those guys, but those guys were like they lived on another planet to me. They wrestled in Madison Square Garden, or they wrestled in Texas, or they wrestled in Oregon or California. I was at those places, but only with my parents and I had no idea how to get there, whereas Stampede Wrestling was 14 hours west of Winnipeg.”

“I knew I could do it. Owen was a new kid on the block, he was so acrobatic and so explosive and not the biggest guy, not 6’4 or 6’5 and 250 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. Or at least could be because I had a similar build to him. And that was it. That was it, it was like ‘I can be like that guy.’ I know where Calgary is and that’s what I want to do.”

Read more: AEW Dynamite results (10/24/2018): Bryan Danielson faces Hangman Page in the final of the Owen Hart tournament