PWInsider - WWE News, Wrestling News, WWE

CHRIS HERO DISCUSSES HIS JOURNEY TO RING OF HONOR, GROWING UP A KAMALA FAN, CHANGING HIS APPEARANCE AND MORE

A quick note:

This interview even happening is due to the work of Ring of Honor’s Mike G., Adam Pearce, and Syd Eick. Thanks to the work of Mike and Adam, this interview was originally supposed to take place with Davey Richards, and was to be published on thewrestlingdaily.com. I had spent a month preparing for it, from getting some quality questions from the wise-asses on the fantastic DVDVR message board, to listening to PWInsider’s own Mike Johnson’s interview with Richards last year, and doing what I could to come up with the most interesting, non-obvious questions possible.   Within two weeks of the event, TWD had disbanded and was no more, and PWInsider’s fearless leader Dave Scherer was kind enough to allow me to publish my interview here. 

So having seen what time Nakajima had to go and get ready when I had interviewed him last fall, I made sure to get to the venue in Mississauga, ON at 5:15, over two hours before bell-time, to ensure that I was able to get enough time with Richards. (Much to the chagrin of my friends. Okay not really, they were playing IPhone Monopoly.) Except, there was one small problem...Davey Richards wasn’t there.

Several members of the Ring of Honor crew had been held up at the Michigan border that morning after having wrestled the previous night.   Richards, along with his weekend travel partner Kenny Omega were held up for several hours before being allowed across the border.

So instead of interviewing Davey, I sat along a wall, listening to Austin Aries crack jokes and tell stories from the night before all the while trying to figure out what to do about my lost interview.  It quickly dawned on me that I had wanted to interview Hero, but hadn’t because another writer on TWD already had. Since this was going to be for PWInsider.com however, I figured why not.   I spent 5 minutes editing questions and jotting down a handful of new ones, and then as soon as I saw RoH's fearless VP, pretty much literally jumped in Syd’s face.

“Syd, I’ve got an idea of someone who...”

“Just say who.”

“I’ve love to have 10-15 minutes with Chris Hero - ”

I’m not even sure if Syd said a word, he was just gone.

Two minutes later, he was back, with the one and only, Chris Hero. Thanks Syd, you’re not half-bad.

Part 1

MC: Were you a fan of wrestling growing up?

CH: When I was about 10 or so, I started watching wrestling regularly. I was a big WWF fan – I did watch NWA as well, but I was a big WWF fan. I’m from Dayton, Ohio, and WWF ran the Hara Arena in Dayton once a month, so my Mom would take me to the shows, and it would just be me & my Mom. So we’d see like Hogan every now & again; we’d see Warrior, Andre the Giant, Demolition, all them, and actually I believe I was there at the TV taping when they had the first Ric Flair-Hogan match. It was like a countout finish, something like that.

MC: All the Hogan-Flair matches around that time seemed to be a countout...

CH: Yeah...

MC: He wouldn’t do clean to Flair...

CH: Yeah yeah, and it wouldn’t make sense to do it that early...

MC: Ya exactly.

CH: They were just doing the match to do the match. As I got a little bit older and time got on and I got into high school, I stopped following it, there wasn’t anything too entertaining going on. I think Mabel was KOTR...

MC: *laughs*

CH: And WCW was like...I just wasn’t really interested. I had a lot of other things going on and just fell out of it. I started watching it again by watching Nitro actually and then transitioned back to RAW shortly thereafter, and then it just kinda...you know, as a kid I wanted to wrestle, but I didn’t. I also wanted to be a GI Joe...

MC: I think we all did...

CH: Yeah! So...I saw Full Metal Jacket so that kinda turned me off on the whole GI Joe thing. So I just didn’t really know it was possible. I had seen a couple of things on the (WCW) Power Plant before, and just heard how ridiculous the training was, and I’m like ‘Uhhh.’ They’re talking about like 1000 squats, 1000 push-ups, whatever whatever, and I was really intimidated by that, so I just put it in my head that I couldn’t do that.

Then as I was graduating, a friend of a friend got into wrestling in the local scene, and I didn’t know there was a local scene. I didn’t know that wrestling – I mean I had been reading PWI (Pro Wrestling Illustrated) since I was little so I knew there was other companies, but I didn’t know how to get in touch with them or whatever. So I started training locally, and ‘training’ I put that about as loosely as possible, it was just a place with a ring & a couple guys. There were some guys who showed me some stuff, and eventually I found my way to Les Thatcher, did a couple camps with Dory Funk (Jr.), and that’s how that progressed there. But ya it just started out as something...I went to that first independent show and the guys, not to knock on the guys but they just looked kinda like normal guys, and it took that intimidation away from me, like “Oh, maybe I can do this” or whatever, and then the ball started to roll. I met the right people, put in the right amount of effort, and fortunately things paid off, and here I am now.

MC: I’m glad you are. Going back to the WWF days, were you more of a Hogan fan or a Warrior:

CH: Warrior, I loved – I liked Hogan too, but I loved Warrior. My Mom actually used to paint the little Warrior thing on my cheek. Uh, ya I liked facepaint, I liked colours, I liked Kamala...Tatanka...the British Bulldog with the long hair. I didn’t really have any knowledge of the British Bulldogs as a team, but when Davey Boy Smith came in I was a big fan of his.

Have you heard Kamala’s music? He has this Casio beat machine, and he’s been doing this for three or four year now...ya he has like “Let’s make love in the rocking chair.” He has a very controversial song about Pat Patterson and things you’d have to do in the WWF to get a push, like...and make an illusion to Chris Benoit and killing his family. Some of it’s light-hearted and some of it’s like “Whoa!” So when this came out – I’ve actually been on a show with Kamala, he threw me out of a battle royal, it’s one of my career highlights – when that happened, I ordered his CD, and like sent him the money, and I think I’d given him some of my pins, and he sent me back an 8x10, and I was like “Ooh Kamala.“

MC: That’s awesome. Okay one more old-school WWE question, and I apologize in advance for how markish it is...

CH: That’s okay.

MC: Was Demolition’s theme song as cool in person as it was on TV?

(Interviewer’s note: Hey, you only live once!)

CH: Absolutely. And before I knew that the Piledriver album existed, what they would do at the house shows is they would loop it while people were walking in. So I would hear all these songs, like Girls in Cars, & Rock n’Roll Hoochie Coo, and Jive Soul Bro, and I’m like ‘These are awesome WWF songs,’ but I had no clue how to get them, I didn’t know that there was an album. I ended up seeing it in a Flea Market somewhere. But ya, “Here comes the Ax, here comes the Smasher,” ya...

MC: To this day, to this day.

CH: And like now on all the DVD releases, they took it out, right...

MC: Honestly, I won’t buy the box sets because of that – because of that song and because of the Slick song.

CH: Ya the Slick song, that’s my favourite song of all time.

MC: For someone who’s held in such high regard as you are in terms of the guys who aren’t in WWE or TNA, it seemed like it took you a while to get into Ring of Honor. I think it was – correct me if I’m wrong, the CZW feud...

CH: That’s correct.

MC: ...that got you through the door. Was it your allegiance to CZW that took you so long to get to Ring of Honor, or what was it?

CH: No, it was my look. For the longest time, I was wearing baggy hot topic pants, and a sleeveless Superman shirt...

MC: I liked the Superman shirt, in all seriousness.

CH: Yeah! It’s what I wore and my emphasis was on my in-ring work, rather than my appearance. I’ve come to figure out that you need to put an equal amount of emphasis on every area to get the most out of everything. You’ve got guys who are great wrestlers with no charisma; you’ve got guys who have great charisma and aren’t good wrestlers. But if you have guys who put in effort in every little category, you just get so much further. So I had to get some professional looking gear, which made sense. Even though it was working for me at the time I had to move past that. And then once I had moved past that, I already had that stigma attached to me. I came up with Punk & Cabana, so it was ‘Punk & Cabana & Hero,’ and I was like the lesser of the three, just because I wasn’t in the shape that they were in. Maybe I didn’t have the charisma they did, but also, my ring gear, my shape, etc. So I think that there was a stigma attached to me. Because I had a very specific style, I had accrued some very diehard fans, people who followed me through whatever. You know, the more diehard the fans get, the more those fans can grate on people’s nerves, if the person doesn’t have the same opinion. So, my fans would get on the Ring of Honor message board about how shitty Ring of Honor is for not having me. Ring of Honor fans would take offence to that, like ‘F@#$ Chris Hero, he’s never gonna be in Ring of Honor.’ I know Gabe initially was not a fan of my work...

MC: Really?

CH: Ya he just, you know I don’t think...you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression, right? I’m sure he saw me and was just like ‘Eh, I don’t believe the hype.’ I doubt he was sitting there watching Chris Hero match after Chris Hero match thinking ‘You know what, he is pretty good,’ and why would he? He already had his company full of talented guys, I was just another name.

Basically what led into...I would say even before the CZW thing, IWA Mid-South, the Ted Petty Invitational 2005, Bryan Danielson (a/k/a Daniel Bryan) was the (Ring of Honor) World Champion, and I pinned Danielson clean in the Ted Petty Invitational, which led my way into getting a match with Bryan (in Ring of Honor) representing CZW. It was meant to be a one-off thing, but because of the effort I put into it on the CZW end, and how passionate the CZW fans were, and how insane the Ring of Honor fans were, it just made for a very awesome experience. We got so much out of one little thing. It could’ve just been a one-off, could’ve not even happened, could’ve just been a one-and-done thing, but it went from there, and was good business for Ring of Honor – dare I say the best business for Ring of Honor. Ring of Honor was dead in Philadelphia and they were gonna stop running Philadelphia I’m
pretty sure...

MC:  They were over-saturated...

CH: Ya, and it’s just...you know what, we’re gonna give it one more shot. CZW was located in Philadelphia, I was the CZW – I wasn’t the World Champion at that point, but I was the Tag Champion – but I was one of the CZW guys, so we thought ‘Well, lets try and draw in some of those CZW fans,’ we got – you know Ring of Honor – let’s see if we can pop the house. They had Kobashi a couple shows before that, and it just didn’t go very well, so they were like ‘F@#$, if we can’t draw with Kobashi...’

MC:  They didn’t draw with Kobashi?

CH: Uh, not what they had hoped.

MC: Considering what they paid him, I heard from Mike Modest actually (in an interview with Mike Johnson in the Elite Section, ahem people)...it was 5 digits...

CH: Ya, but when you think about it though, you’re not just re-cooping money on a weekend basis. It’s DVD’s, and prestige. Like, f***ing “Stone Cold” Steve Austin wrote a Twitter post about Kobashi vs Joe. Somebody asked him about Ring of Honor and he’s like “Kobashi vs Joe is a damn good match.”So okay, whatever they paid NOAH, whatever they paid Kobashi for that match, for that weekend, they’re still reaping the benefits of that.
 
In Parts two and three, Chris talks about Adam Pearce as a booker, Kenta Kobashi's workout habits, the ever-spotlighted concussion in wrestling issue, and everything in between.

If you enjoy PWInsider.com you can check out the AD-FREE PWInsider Elite section, which features exclusive audio updates, news, our critically acclaimed podcasts, interviews and more by clicking here!

• Tweet