Chris Jericho never plans to take a potentially dangerous bump again.
The former AEW world champion’s group, The Inner Circle lost to the MJF-led group, The Pinnacle in the highly-anticipated Blood And Guts match on last week’s AEW Dynamite. Jericho would go in-depth on his Talk Is Jericho podcast on how the controversial finish to the match came together and how he felt about the ending being criticized by fans as looking ‘too safe’.
“I tell Max, ‘Give me a shove’ because I needed to feel something so I could take a pushback. I step back and I thought the bump would go by fast, but I just kept looking at him as I fell. Then, I landed, and of course, it takes the breath out of you. I’ve seen a few people bagging on it being a crashpad. It was no crashpad, it was a cardboard box. I don’t give a shit if it was a crash pad, you just go for it. It felt great, obviously, it hurt, but I could move my arms and legs and I wasn’t dead. The crowd went completely silent and I just laid there until they took me away on a stretcher and the people started clapping. It was later on that I started hearing ‘the fall didn’t look great.’ For me, when I watched it back, I thought it looked amazing. When you watch it back, I barely missed hitting my head on the lights on the stage. I almost overshot everything. Everyone in the business knows how dangerous this can be and how terrifying it is and the margin for error is slim. You have the right to bag on it. Out of the 1.3 million who watched, if 3,000 people didn’t like it, that’s a very small percentage. Most people thought it was crazy and I got great feedback.”
Jericho would go on to tell fans: “I hope you enjoyed it because you’ll never see me do it again. I’m glad it turned out the way it did. I wouldn’t change anything.”
(h/t to Fightful for the quotes)
Related: Chris Jericho On Blood And Guts: We’ve Seen Blood Before, It’s More About The Story