Chris Benoit vs Chris Jericho (WWF, 1-21-2001)

WWF Royal Rumble, New Orleans, LA

IM GOIN DOWN TO NEW HAWLIN
SEE ABOUT A FREND O MINE
IM GOIN DOWN TO NEW HAWLIN
WHERE DA STARS ON DA SIYWAWK SHINE

But seriously, folks! This was a request. Ol’ Chris Benny is a real hot topic these days, the folks just can’t enough of this guy, trending all over social media.

This is an Intercontinental title ladder match. These two had been feuding off and on at least for the better part of a year at this point. Personally, I felt their year 2000 matches were pretty much all overrated, and I’m not saying that now to be the attention-seeking dude on the internet who’s proclaiming that actually Benoit was never even good at wrestling. I thought it then and think it now. They were really good matches that somehow let me down by not being better. I wasn’t the biggest Jericho guy, really.

The striking thing immediately when watching Benoit, as always anymore, is not simply the flying headbutts or the crazy headshots he would take. It’s how violently he bumps on everything. Simple stuff, he whiplashes himself to the mat. It’s the sort of thing we admired about his work when active, it’s the sort of thing that is really jarring when you watch it now and realize how few guys worked with that level of ferocity as constantly as he did. Even great wrestling peers of his, guys of the time, didn’t bump as nasty hard as routinely as Benoit did.

You know, with the benefit of hindsight, it may not have been good for Benoit to do a suicide dive into a chair being swung by Chris Jericho, taking that unprotected, and then bouncing his skull off the floor. That’s the big, memorable spot from the match, or at least the most big and most memorable. It’s the one we thought of for years after, and then years after for sure.

In the great canon of ladder matches, this is maybe the stiffest and hardest-hitting in terms of the wrestling between the ladder spots, and the ladder spots are ladder spots, there’s no avoiding the brutality there.

The modified Walls of Jericho on/through the ladder is pretty cool. Jericho taps out in the crossface, but there’s nothing to be done there, which Jericho would surely know, but it’s for the visual and I guess you can half-ass explain it as the instinct of being in the hold so many times before. Most explanations like that you’re just trying to convince yourself that it was fine and logical.

Benoit takes crazy bumps missing a flying headbutt from the top of the ladder, then seems to his best to throw his skull at the floor when he’s knocked over the ropes to the outside. That gives Jericho the big opening, he milks it for all he’s worth, and that leaves Benoit kinda lookin’ like a jackass ringside as he struggles to, uh, not sure, really. I mean, he’s up. Find your way to logicalize that one, I guess. I’m sure there’s something. And Jericho wins the IC title for the (number) time of (larger number) in his illustrious career.

Again, I didn’t find this to be truly great, so time hasn’t made the Benoit-Jericho matches better to me. I think this is really good, mind you, but it’s another in their series that falls short of what it feels like it should have been. And for what it’s worth, that’s nothing to do with how I see Benoit matches now; I’ve made pretty clear, I think, that I can still enjoy a Chris Benoit match if only the match itself. It’s more, still, that I wasn’t and am still not extremely high on Jericho in this period. He was always the “great worker” who was more sizzle than steak for me in this era, not that he didn’t have some great matches, but he wasn’t truly elite to me. He was always good, and he kept getting better, past this time, probably peaking in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

Rating: 3.5/5