Chris Jericho Responds To Vince McMahon’s AEW Comments
Last week, Vince McMahon’s comments that he doesn’t “consider AEW competition in the way he considered WCW as competition” set the internet alight, and now AEW’s Chris Jericho has hit back at the remarks.
Speaking with Kenny McIntosh of Inside The Ropes, former AEW World Champion Chris Jericho opened up his former boss’ comments – saying McMahon was smart to say so and he feels the same.
“Well, what else is he going to say? You know, and to respond to that, we don’t see WWE as competition. And he was smart to say that.”
Jericho went on to recall the ‘Wednesday Night Wars’ being a “total abysmal failure” for NXT, and noted that was in part due to AEW not paying attention to NXT.
“We’re not worried about what WWE is and we haven’t been since day one. We weren’t worried about what NXT did. The whole time with the NXT vs. AEW war, which ended in a total abysmal failure for NXT, we never once had a TV screen watching what they were doing when we were doing it. We didn’t know what segments they were in. We didn’t know any of that. Now, the WWE way is you’re watching what the competition is doing when they were on, we didn’t do that. And it was no disrespect. We just didn’t care. We were too busy worrying about our own company and about our own stories, and about our own show to care what anybody else is doing. And that’s one of the reasons why we did so well is that we were concentrating on AEW, not anything else.”
Chris Jericho revealed that he thinks Vince McMahon’s denial of competition actually means he does see AEW as a threat – but that it doesn’t matter.
“So WWE is not competition for us. We’re competition for ourselves. So for Vince to say that – to me, it’s probably reverse psychology and that he does see us as competition. But deep down inside, what does it really matter?”
Jericho’s parting shot was that, if Vince McMahon doesn’t see AEW as competition yet, he soon will.
“The WWE is the WWE and they have billions of dollars locked in TV deals and we are working towards that. Now when our demo ends up beating theirs and TV deals start coming in for us at the billions, then I truly think there will be a lot of competition because now you’re fighting for money, you’re not just fighting for bragging rights – and bragging rights don’t mean anything. It’s the money that you make from it that counts. So we’ll see what happens.”
h/t Inside The Ropes. You can read the full interview here.