The Learning Tree: An In-Depth Look at Chris Jericho's AEW Character and the Lineage of Pro Wrestling Skills
Chris Jericho, a name synonymous with reinvention and longevity in professional wrestling, has once again captured the wrestling world's attention with his "Learning Tree" character in All Elite Wrestling (AEW). This persona, a blend of charismatic showmanship and mentorship, provides a fascinating lens through which to examine not only Jericho's evolution but also the rich, interconnected history of professional wrestling itself.
The Genesis of the Learning Tree
Jericho himself has acknowledged the need for constant evolution in a career spanning over three decades. His "Learning Tree" character is a testament to this philosophy. When asked about how his new persona has been for him, Jericho said, “It’s amazing. When you have been in the business 33 years … You always want to evolve and revamp your character and kind of get some diversity with what you’re doing." This drive to stay fresh and relevant has been a cornerstone of Jericho's success.
The "Learning Tree" is more than just a character; it's a reflection of the mentorship that is inherent in professional wrestling. The Learning Tree faction consists of Chris Jericho, Big Bill and Bryan Keith. Chris Jericho recently revealed that Bryan Danielson suggested Big Bill and Tony Khan suggested Bryan Keith as members of The Learning Tree. Jericho said, “Now with the Learning Tree, Big Bill, what a great suggestion that was to work with him. It was Bryan Danielson’s suggestion for Big Bill and Tony’s suggestion for Bryan Keith. Didn’t even know Bryan Keith, same thing as Daniel Garcia, same thing as Sammy Guevara."
The Character's Impact
Jericho takes pride in evoking strong reactions from audiences, stating, "That’s the beauty of wrestling, you just lean into it. I take great pride in, kind of, making people angry with things because that’s what you want to do. You’re playing a character, you know what I mean? When Chris Jericho comes on screen in AEW, it’s different from the Chris Jericho that we’re talking to right now. And that’s the way it should be." This ability to separate the on-screen persona from the real person is a hallmark of a skilled performer.
Jericho also notes that the members of The Learning Tree are benefiting from the increased exposure and mentorship. He continued, “Now, it’s really cool to work with those guys because they’re coming into their own. Bryan Keith is just hilarious with just everything he says. Bill has really embraced this wise man following the guru of the Learning Tree. He’s just a killer and people chanting his name nightly, that’s something we’ve noticed as well. It’s just been really cool to work with all these people and they’re all getting more TV time and learning and working with major players."
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Mentorship in Professional Wrestling: A Historical Perspective
The "Learning Tree" concept highlights a crucial aspect of professional wrestling: the passing down of knowledge and skills from veteran performers to up-and-coming talent. This mentorship is not just about teaching moves; it's about instilling the traditions, psychology, and storytelling techniques that are essential to the craft. Stories of mentors and protégés are a central trope in pro-wrestling storytelling because the best pro-wrestling storytelling is strongly rooted in reality, and the reality of professional wrestling is that mentorship for the transmission of skills and traditions from deep in the mists of memory is fundamental to its very existence.
The Learning Tree: Chris Jericho and Sammy Guevara
One of the central threads in the tapestry of story in AEW in its first four years has been the story of Chris Jericho's factions: first the Inner Circle and then the Jericho Appreciation Society. And threading through the center of that story, very consistently over several years, is the story of a mentor and protégé between the veteran Jericho and rookie firebrand Sammy Guevara. On Wednesday nights, on the AEW Dynamite program, young Sammy Guevara plays the role of the devoted protégé to a wrestling legend in the person of AEW's first World Champion, Chris Jericho.
Tracing the Roots: Sammy Guevara's Learning Tree
To further illustrate the concept of the "Learning Tree," let's delve into the lineage of Sammy Guevara, Jericho's on-screen protégé. By tracing Guevara's training back through the years, we can gain a deeper appreciation for the interconnectedness of the wrestling world.
Booker T: From Houston Street to Wrestling Legend
Over a decade ago, back in their common hometown of Houston, Texas, teenage Sammy was protégé to a wrestling legend in his real life, specifically as a trainee of the Five-Time WCW Champion, Booker T. Sammy will admit that the famous name on the door of the school wasn't always around to do the hands-on training. But unlike them, he credits Booker T with working with him directly as often as he could and really mentoring him with good advice, and he's always given credit solely to Booker for his development into the professional he is today, so we will take him at his word.
Booker T's story is one of redemption and perseverance. Booker "Junior" Huffman was living with his big brother Lash and working at a mini-storage, when one day in 1989 Lash came home and said that he had checked out a new wrestling school that had opened up, and that he thought they should become a pro-wrestling tag team together. Junior was incredulous, but Lash made his case: they had the athleticism, they had the showmanship, so maybe this was something they could really excel at. But it would cost them three thousand dollars that they didn't have. Luckily, Junior's boss at the storage unit believed in his potential, and paid him a $3,000 bonus to give him a chance to live out a dream. So Lash and Junior attended Ivan Putski's Wrestling School, associated with his short-lived Western Wrestling Association promotion.
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Ivan Putski and Scott Casey: The Polish Hammer and the Journeyman
Putski was a power-lifting strongman nicknamed "the Polish Hammer" who had been a pretty big pro-wrestling star in the 70s and 80s, and, (as we shall find is pretty common,) his name above the door did not mean that he did any of the actual training. Rather, it was journeyman wrestler Scott Casey who would show the brother duo the ropes.
Casey would also suggest to Junior the character that he used in his early days: "GI Bro," an African-American combat veteran, suddenly timely again with the Gulf War breaking out. Since Booker developed this character as an independent wrestler before hooking up with any major promotion that would have insisted on treating any intellectual property as "work for hire," he owns "GI Bro" outright, which would lead, decades later, to Booker filing an unsuccessful lawsuit against Activision for a Call of Duty protagonist that he deemed a knock-off.
Scott Casey saw something special in Booker, and told him that people might call him all kinds of slurs behind his back, but that he and his brother had the size, the ability, and the talk, and that before long Booker would be a champion. Casey's words to his protégé would prove prophetic.
Scott Casey: A Wrestling Journeyman's Start
When Scott Casey told Booker T that he had the potential to be a world champion, Casey was winding down a reasonably successful in-ring career, but one which never saw the Cowboy hit such heights himself. He had bounced from regional promotion to regional promotion for 20 years, making money and having fun, but never being the hottest thing going. Finally, at the tail end of this run, Casey became part of the big 80s boom of the WWF. But he was only ever a very minor part.
The career I've described is the career of a barnstorming journeyman of the "territory" era of wrestling which spanned the 50s through the 70s and early 80s. In that time, likely hundreds of men plied their trade and earned their living bumping and bleeding for the roar of the crowd in much the same way. How did such a journey begin? For Scott Casey (and many other Texas wrestlers!) it started at West Texas State, just 20 miles down the road from the Funk clan stronghold of Amarillo.
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The Funk Family and West Texas State: A Cradle of Wrestling Talent
The list of West Texas State Buffalo football stars who went on to join Dory Funk's organization and then to pro wrestling glory is long and illustrious, including names like: Stan Hansen, Tito Santana, Manny Fernandez, Bobby Duncum, Dick Murdoch, Ted DiBiase, Tully Blanchard, and "the American Dream" Dusty Rhodes.
Scott Casey never made as big a name for himself as any of those guys, but he played for the Buffaloes, too. And in 1970 when he was getting ready to graduate and thinking about what might be next after college football for him, Terry Funk took him aside and asked him if he wanted to stay in Amarillo his whole life? Or travel the world? Casey immediately replied "where do I sign up?"
Bobby Duncum, Duke Myers, and the Inauspicious Training Ground
Most of the gridiron joes brought into the Funk circle were shown how to work by some combination of Dory or Terry or Junior. But when it came time to show the ropes to Scott, the Funk clan must've been busy, because they relegated it to their B-team. Maybe they wanted him trained up at the same time that the Funks were putting on a wrestling show, because neither the Funks nor an actual wrestling ring were available for the task! Instead, Bobby Duncum, who had been trained by Junior just a couple years before, brought Casey over to the house of rookie Duke Myers who had been trained by "Soldat Gorky" - a fake "Russian" wrestler out of Portland, Oregon who went by "Wolfman" John Smith when he wasn't doing the "evil Russki" grift - earlier that year, and had been bouncing from promotion to promotion since. Myers laid out blankets on the lawn and in that inauspicious training environment, the two walked him through the basics of bumping and selling.
The Great Billy Thom and the Mystery of "Barba Roja"
If that was the end of the story of Scott Casey being trained to be a wrestler, we would be nearly done finding the roots of Sammy Guevara's Learning Tree. To break it down quickly: Myers's trainer, Gorky/Smith was trained by a local Pacific Northwest regional star of the 40s, originally from Finland, named Paavo Ketonen, about whom little is remembered or recorded. Duncum was trained by Dory Junior, and Junior was trained in turn by his Dad and by two of Senior's most capable wrestlers: Ricky Romero and teen prodigy Johnny Como. Senior had been trained in his turn by legendary Indiana wrestling coach, Billy Thom, a giant of wrestling in the 30s who straddled the usually separate worlds of amateur and pro wrestling.
Sources agree that when Morales was just a teen, he moved from Puerto Rico to New York City and was trained as a professional wrestler by a man known as "Barba Roja". However, many luchadors have competed with that piratical ring name, (meaning "Red Beard,") and I struggle to find any information about which of them would have been training Morales in New York City in the late 50s and early 60s. So the Learning Tree of Sammy Guevara has a couple of mysteries at the root.
Jericho's Own Learning Tree: A Lion's Tale
Chris Jericho's journey to becoming a wrestling icon is also a testament to the importance of mentorship and learning from others. For decades, Chris Jericho was reputed to have learned the ways of grappling in the dreaded basement of fellow Calgarian wrestling stars Bret & Owen Hart. When Jericho published his memoir, A Lion's Tale, in 2007, he set those rumors to rest. While the future Lionheart did learn the ropes at a camp called the Hart Brothers School of Wrestling, where he met fellow-trainee and lifelong friend and ally Lance Storm, it was found not in a legendary "Dungeon," but in a rented-out bowling alley, and elder Hart brother Keith only dropped by to collect the checks!
The actual training at the "Hart Brothers School" was handled by a local wrestler, (who had only recently graduated from the camp himself,) named Brad Young, as well as by Ed Langley-a referee whose qualifications to train pro wrestlers are unknown, and who merely read to them out of Stu's training manual!
Later, Jericho did get an opportunity to train a bit in the infamous Dungeon, but that training was not with a Hart, but with one of their longtime kayfabe nemesis, known in the West as Mr. Hito. There are no interviews to be found asking Brad Young who exactly trained him, and the stories about Ed Langley make it sound like he had no wrestling training at all. Jericho's later trainer, Mr. Hito, is not so obscure as the others, but the most I've been able to discover about his training days was that it occurred in the late 60s at the dojo of the Japan Pro Wrestling Alliance, the promotion that had a monopoly on men's pro wrestling (or puroresu) in Japan throughout the 50s and 60s.
Lessons Beyond the Ring: "No Is a Four-Letter Word"
Jericho's insights extend beyond the wrestling ring, as evidenced by his book, "No Is a Four-Letter Word." This book distils more than two decades of showbiz wisdom and advice into twenty easy-to-carry chapters. From developing a strong work ethic thanks to WWE chairman Vince McMahon, remembering to always look like a star from Gene Simmons of KISS, adopting a sense of perpetual reinvention from the late David Bowie, making sure to sell himself like his hockey-legend father Ted Irvine taught him, or going the extra mile to meet Keith Richards (with help from Jimmy Fallon), Chris has learned countless lessons during his decades-long career. The result is a fun, entertaining, practical and inspiring book from the man with many scarves but only one drive: to be the best. After reading No Is a Four-Letter Word, you’ll discover that you might have what it takes to succeed as well … you just need to get out there and do it.
The book shares twenty of Jericho’s own life lessons and principles on both how to live the life you want and how to achieve your goals. My favourites were. For wrestling, the tale of AJ Styles WWE debut and how Jericho got the Styles clash (one of AJ’s finishing moves) unbanned by WWE owner Vince McMahon. For music, there’s a tale where Jericho is asked to be part of Lemmy’s (Motorhead) 70th birthday celebrations. Another tale that stands out is to do with Fozzy (Jericho’s band). Fozzy were touring Europe at the time of the devastating terrorist attacks perpetrated by ISIS in Paris during November 2015. While lots of other bands subsequently decided to postpone their tours, Fozzy continued with their own tour playing in Paris exactly a week after the attack on the Bataclan.
Jericho has a lot of famous friends and he frequently drops their names with a reckless abandon. Whilst reading NIAFLW you’ll need to watch your tootsies with all the name dropping that takes place! But, it never feels like the names are simply ‘there‘ added to the book just to show that Jericho knows all these famous people. Jericho is a very driven guy wanting to be the best that he can be and continually be looking to expand his horizons. Including both successes and failures that he has had along the way, NIAFLW shows how he learnt from his mistakes to obtain his goals. Whether he’s playing a heel or a face (bad guy or good guy) in wrestling Jericho has always had a charisma about him. the ability that when he speaks and cuts a promo, you listen. He has a mesmerising way with words that make you take notice and Jericho manages to channel that same charisma he uses for wrestling promos into his writing style. For readers looking for a book with a positive message and for fans of rock music and/or wrestling this truly is an outstanding read.
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