Chris Jericho recently had Dave Meltzer as a guest on his podcast: ‘Talk is Jericho’. The two spoke at length about the life and death of Chris Benoit and shared many interesting stories and details. One of these details had to do with Benoit’s self-confidence issues.
Meltzer told the story about how he once watched a tag team match in Japan where Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit were involved. Meltzer says that they tore down the house. He congratulated them after but he remembers they both were not satisfied with the match, going over the smallest details and mistakes that no fan would have noticed.
Jericho told a similar story about one time he wrestled Benoit and they made a mistake:
“I remember I worked with Chris [Benoit] once in Japan — tag team match when I started going to New Japan when I started with WCW […] I went for a spinkick and I missed. But I only missed to the point where no one would see it because Chris bumped so fast that we just continued on. It wasn’t like when you screw up or a blatant mistake. It was like I didn’t hit him as crispy as I should of but he still bumped.”
Jericho spoke about some of the self-confidence issues of Benoit:
“After the match was done I went looking for him. I couldn’t find him anywhere. I found him in the boiler room doing squats. And I said, ‘what are you doing?’ — and he said, ‘you know I never should have bumped off that that was so unprofessional of me and it was such a bad rookie mistake, I had to do squats.’ He did five-hundred squats as like purging himself for making that mistake…..You know, when you hear things like that then you kinda equate it to the last few days. There was a lot of issues with him. Even though he was so good, maybe one of the best ever, maybe the best ever in a lot of ways. He still had that self confidence problem — like you said, asking you if that match was good. Really?”
Meltzer and Jericho went into more details about the life and death of Benoit. A great listen for anyone interested.
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[h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcript]