Without a few professional wrestlers from Winnipeg, Chris Jericho isn’t sure if All Elite Wrestling would exist today.
All Elite Wrestling’s Chris Jericho recently sat down with Taylor Allen of the Winnipeg Free Press to discuss a wide variety of subjects. While talking about the importance of Winnipeg to All Elite Wrestling, Jericho believes his match with Kenny Omega at Wrestle Kingdom in the Tokyo Dome was the catalyst for Tony Khan to start the company years later.
“I don’t want to speak for Tony, but from what I understand, when Jericho-Omega headlined the Tokyo Dome in a match that was basically brokered by Don Callis, it did such great business in not just Japan, but North America. Streams and pay-per-view buys went up by something like 300 percent,” Chris Jericho said. “So, people were interested in this match and I think Tony kind of read the tea leaves and figured out there was a market for an alternative (to WWE) in pro wrestling in North America and that was kind of the genesis of how AEW got kicked into gear and by proxy, that would basically suggest that AEW, in a lot of ways, started in Winnipeg.”
Jericho also reflected on his first match in Winnipeg in 1991 not being what he envisioned as he ended up wrestling at a bar called Georgie’s next to the Kirkfield Motor Hotel.
“I was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ I was so embarrassed,” Chris Jericho said. “Like I go all the way to Calgary to find my fame and fortune to come back and work in the exact same bar where we used to go for 35 cent draught night three months earlier. I even jumped off the top rope and hit my head on the roof because it was so low, and I put a little hole in it. So, that was my first experience wrestling in Winnipeg.”
Jericho is very excited about wrestling in Winnipeg tonight on AEW Dynamite and believes the three-way trios match with The Elite and The House of Black is going to be awesome.
“It’s gonna be an awesome show with an awesome match featuring two hometown heroes at odds, or together, who knows what’s going to happen,” Chris Jericho said. “But I do know it’s going to be a classic match and a classic night for us at AEW with the amazing Winnipeg fans.”
READ MORE: Ricky Starks: Chris Jericho Is Vital To The AEW Roster
What do you make of Chris Jericho’s comments? Do you think his match with Kenny Omega at Wrestle Kingdom was the catalyst for All Elite Wrestling? Let us know your thoughts by sounding off in the comments section below.
