Chris Jericho revealed on his recent Saturday Night Special Q&A session that the original plan for him at AEW All Out this year was supposed to be a match with boxing legend and WWE Hall of Famer Mike Tyson.
Jericho began his feud with Tyson on the dynamite after AEW Double or Nothing 2020. Initially, Jericho mentioned that the two have issues coming back from when they were partners in WWE, and Tyson double-crossed in order to reunite with Shawn Michaels and Triple H of D-Generation X. That episode of Dynamite went off the air with a pull-apart brawl with Jericho and Tyson trying to get at one another.
In his Q&A session, Jericho reveals that the Mimosa Mayhem Match with Orange Cassidy was originally supposed to be their second match but upon learning that the plan with Mike Tyson was no longer on the table, they extended the feud between Jericho and Cassidy to the September pay-per-view.
"Originally, I was supposed to work with [Mike] Tyson at the September pay-per-view, All Out 2, and we just couldn't get it done in time. So, the second match I had with Orange was originally going to be the Mimosa Mayhem but we moved it to the rubber match position.”
In an interview earlier this year with WrestleZone, Jericho said he wanted to be the one to have the first official match with Mike Tyson.
“Probably one of the worst things you could do is put him in an actual boxing match," said Jericho. "Maybe if it’s somebody in his own era and doing kind of an exhibition and that sort of thing, but we want to keep Mike Tyson’s aura at a maximum which is why AEW is perfect for him. We can do whatever storyline we choose and wrestling is all shapes and sizes, we can do whatever we need to do and plug him into any situation that we want to make it. I think there’s no better person for that than Chris Jericho after all these years of doing this who is kind of a ‘Mike Tyson’ of wrestling. I’ve never lost my aura or my mystique but you can see that I’m doing some of the best work in my career after doing this for 30 years. So it’s a perfect match-up."
He continued, “Mike and I know each other. We’ve known each other for ten years. We have a built-in storyline, a built-in angle. It’s not just a random thing and the character of Chris Jericho that makes perfect sense that I would be obsessing with this for ten years and not scared of Mike Tyson. I know a lot of people are like, ‘Are you crazy? You were standing face to face with Mike Tyson!’ With Mike, there’s no script, there’s no rehearsal, he’s going to do whatever the fuck he wants and that’s fine. I don’t mind cause I can control that and I expect it, so I think there’s a lot of excitement there and I know we’re working on that, both sides, to make something like that happen.”
Chris Jericho will celebrate 30 years in wrestling this Wednesday on AEW Dynamite on TNT.
Should you use the above quote from Jericho's Q&A session, please credit Fightful for the transcription by linking back to this article.
