Chris Jericho has revealed that one of his best-ever creative pitches to Vince McMahon was shot down not because of the idea itself but because McMahon was preoccupied with a tough steak, responding to the entire concept with two words before moving on.
Speaking with GamesHub, Jericho described what he still considers one of his strongest unrealized WWE ideas, a program built around the Wyatt Family targeting him and forcing him to call in Shawn Michaels for backup despite their own long-running rivalry.
“The idea was a storyline involving Bray Wyatt and Shawn Michaels,” Jericho said. “The premise was that the Wyatt Family would attack me, and the only person I could call who was crazy enough to have my back was Shawn, even after our rivalry. He comes back to confront me, and just as we’re about to go at it, the Wyatt Family attacks us both. Now you don’t know whether Shawn was going to take my offer or not, but he’s involved. It would be Jericho and HBK against the Wyatt Family, with a SummerSlam match in mind.”
The circumstances surrounding the pitch made getting McMahon’s attention difficult from the start. “When I walked into his office, Triple H was there, which is never ideal because you want to be one on one with Vince,” Jericho said. “And then on top of that, he hadn’t eaten yet. And when Vince is eating, he’s not paying attention to anything else.”
The steak proved to be the pitch’s undoing. “It was a really solid pitch, but Vince just sat there eating his steak, and when I finished, he said, ‘Bad cow,'” Jericho said. “I said, ‘What? He goes, ‘Bad cow, the steak is tough. I said, ‘What do you think of my pitch? He goes, what else you got? The steak killed the whole angle. But that’s the nature of working for Vince. If he doesn’t like it, you’re done. Same with Tony, to a degree. You have to please your boss.”
