Chris Jericho Talks Past ROH Champions Considered To Challenge Him
Chris Jericho has revealed some of the names that were considered as challengers for his Ring of Honor World Title.
After Chris Jericho beat Claudio Castagnoli to become the ROH World Champion on September 21st, Jericho started to refer to himself as The Ocho in reference to the eighth World Championship win of his career. Jericho won five World Titles in WWE, won the WCW World Title while he was in WWE and he was the first AEW World Champion in 2019.
When Jericho beat Claudio, he did not do it in an honorable way meaning it was not clean. Many of Jericho’s title defenses since then have seen him win in cheap fashion because he’s a heel that is trying to ruin what fans like about AEW.
The storyline has seen Jericho and Jericho Appreciation Society group get heat from the crowd because they like to brag about being “sports entertainers” while others in the company refer to themselves as “professional wrestlers.” The fans also boo the “sports entertainment” phrase that WWE has been spouting for the majority of the last 25 years.
During a recent episode of his Talk Is Jericho podcast, Chris Jericho spoke about how his 2022 has gone including his reign as the ROH World Champion. Jericho spoke about bringing back Colt Cabana to face him on Dynamite.
“We wanted to bring Colt back on the show, reintroduce him, he had a pretty rough year as well. Former Ring of Honor champion, and I always enjoyed his work. A very solid worker and it was fun to have him back. That’s the reason why he came back, solely, we just wanted to have him on the show and reintroduce him. He hadn’t been on TV for a while.”
The funny thing was, he told the story where he almost died. He bought the wrong kind of socks, he bought compression socks instead of normal socks and I guess it was limiting his blood flow to where, when he came back from the ring, he was about ready to pass out.”
“Colt was a guy we had talked about doing something with. Colt, Dalton Castle, and PCO, but PCO wasn’t going to work out so we used Bandido, I think that’s what it was.”
As he continued, Chris Jericho spoke about wanting to do another match with an outside guy and brought up Chris Hero, but AEW would go with Tomohiro Ishii instead.
“I wanted to do another match with an outside guy. We had a couple of ideas, one was PCO, once again, but he wasn’t available. The other idea we had was Chris Hero, but he wasn’t available either, couldn’t do the gig. Same thing with Dragon Lee, another idea that Tony had, but he couldn’t make it.”
“I was like, ‘Does anybody want to wrestle me?’ We were thinking that maybe we could use Chris Daniels, I suggested Samoa Joe or Jay Lethal, but they’re in different programs. Finally, Tony says, “What about Ishii?’ ‘That is great.'”
Is Chris Jericho revealing all of this because he’s going to lose the ROH World Title soon? Find out this Saturday, December 10th at Final Battle when Jericho defends the ROH World Title against Claudio Castagnoli. If Claudio loses, he’ll have to join Jericho’s group known as the Jericho Appreciation Society.