AEW star Chris Jericho recently spoke on his podcast, “Talk is Jericho,” about a variety of professional wrestling topics including praising Orange Cassidy after initially not getting what he was all about during his early days with the company. Jericho on his match with Cassidy:
“My favorite Dynamite match with Orange was July 2nd in Jacksonville, Florida. It was Fyter Fest. It was the first match we had and I remember we just had really good chemistry. The one thing you guys realize about Orange Cassidy now, but at the time people weren’t really noticing, was how good of a wrestler he is. He is a really, really, really, good wrestler and lots of innovation and very hard hitting and just really, really cool to work with because when I first saw Orange Cassidy, I thought, ‘This guy’s stupid. He’s mocking the business. He’s lazy’ and then once again, the same thing with Darby. ‘Take your head out your ass Jericho and figure out why this guy is so popular. Why is he so over?’ I realized like he’s not lazy, he’s actually a genius for doing all this stuff and being completely different. It’s one of the reasons why he’s so popular and got over so huge so I was really excited to do the program with him.”
Wrestling Nick Gage:
“I remember we had just done a Dark Side of the Ring about him and I thought, wow, this guy’s very interesting. He’s got something. He is such a legit outlaw and Max suggested it. MJF suggested that we bring in Nick Gage to be this hardcore killer, so I decided to come out as The Painmaker, and man did we ever have a deathmatch for all deathmatches.”
“I’ve never been hit before with a fluorescent light tube. When that got me, I don’t know what it was. It just smashed over my head but something dislodged in my head. I was really not feeling good afterwards. I remember I didn’t want to hang out with anybody. I didn’t want to do anything. I just wanted to kind of just go in my room and chill, but I didn’t want to go to sleep because I was scared I had a concussion. It’s probably my favorite deathmatch that I’ve ever had. I’ll probably never take a fluorescent light tube to the head again, and by the way, we made it safe. We took out the phosphorus and put baking powder in there.”
Wrestling Jon Moxley:
“Another thing is that it was the return of CM Punk and The Jericho Appreciation Society kind of fed for him. A spot I called on the fly, I wish I never had called it, was I told him to duck my clothesline or whatever it was. I said, ‘Clothesline me over the top rope.’ When he clotheslined me over the top rope, because he didn’t have a lot of time as far as the positioning wasn’t right, the timing wasn’t right, and he clotheslined me over the top to the floor, no fault of his own, just an accident, not as timed as well as it could have been because I just called it on the fly. Anyways, I ended up bruising my larynx, which to this day still affects my singing. I’ve got about 95% back, but I really have to warm up at practice to get that range.”
“For the longest time, you know, months, I didn’t have a range. I remember they were saying it could take six months to a year. It’s not like if you break your arm and you’re out for, you know, six to eight weeks, there is no way to really fix it.”
“I was doing The Masked Singer at the time, so I was trying hyperbaric chamber treatments and I did a lot of rehab for it. I did a lot of voice lessons with my vocal coach, Jaime Vandera. I went and saw a laryngologist. I went and saw a voice speech therapist, so I was really messed up because when you bruise your larynx, your larynx doesn’t vibrate and that prevents you from singing high. So if you saw that Masked Singer that I did where I did Run Run Rudolph for the Christmas special, that was singing basically two weeks after my injury, and thankfully was just a lower range song that I could do it, but took a long time to get that range back. It happens. It’s wrestling. But man, what a great match I had with Mox.”
You can check out the complete podcast below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
