Top Indie star Matt Cardona took to his YouTube channel to discuss various topics, including how top AEW star and ROH World Champion Chris Jericho helped him during his career by allowing his character to evolve.
Cardona said, “Chris, whether he knows it or not, he helped me out so many times in my career. A couple of examples, I was doing the one-legged tights for the ‘Woo Woo Woo’ Zack Ryder, because at the time, I wanted to be different from [Curt] Hawkins, different from Edge. I wanted to stand out and it worked. It really did. But one day, Chris pulled me aside, and I’m paraphrasing, [but he] basically said, like, ‘You’re too good to be doing this. It worked. But you gotta wear trunks to be taken more seriously.’ The next week, trunks. All because of what Chris said. Fast forward, a couple years later, I get fired from WWE. I had my AEW debut. I knew, ‘Okay, Zack Ryder is dead. He’s dead. It’s gonna be Matt Cardona,’ right? But I thought, ‘Okay, I can still, throw up the LI [Long Island hand gesture] right? I did that. I helped Cody [Rhodes]. I throw up the LI. Chris pulls me aside, he’s not mad at me, but he says, ‘You gotta get rid of that shit. Everything about Zack Ryder has to die.’ I’m like, ‘Well, Chris, I just put out a t-shirt that says ‘Strong Island, doing the LI.’ He’s like, ‘I don’t care.’ He was right. Like, it all had to die. Chris, he’s the master of evolution, everything he does, the reinvention, time and time again. He’s an inspiration. Now, I feel like I am, too.”
You can check out Cardona’s comments in the video below.
(H/T to Fightful for transcribing the above quotes)
