Back in early January, Chris Jericho made a surprise appearance at PWG Battle of Los Angeles.
Jericho Appreciation Society member Daniel Garcia had been due to compete at the event but cut a promo before his match claiming that he only teamed with sports entertainers. This brought the entire Jericho Sports Entertainment Society to the ring and set up a ten-man tag team match between Jericho, Garcia, Sammy Guevara, Matt Menard, and Angelo Parker against Gresham, Blackwood, Evil Uno, SB Kento, and Oku. Anna Jay, Tay Melo, Jake Hager, and his hat were also at ringside.
Jericho scored the win for his team after hitting Blackwood with the Judas Effect.
Speaking on a recent episode of his Talk Is Jericho podcast, the former World Champion detailed how the appearance came about, including how AEW boss Tony Khan reacted to the idea.
“For anybody that wants to know how that happened, Excalibur and I had spoken about it months ago. After a show, we were having some drinks and I was like ‘Yeah sure, I’d like to do PWG. Let’s try and figure it out sometime.’ Then, about a month or so ago, Danny [Garcia] mentioned that he’s in BOLA and that there’s always this tournament.
He said ‘Why don’t you and Sammy come and we’ll do the six man.’ I was like ‘Why don’t we make it the whole gang, all eight of us and do like a ten man, but still have Anna and Tay and Jake on the outside with us as well.’ I think that was kinda the cool part was that the entire group showed up. Once I suggested it to Tony Khan, he was super excited about it.
When we first started AEW, I think the Bucks did a few of these [types of shows] and I think Kenny and I showed up at a small indie in Georgia. Not to have a match, but I think I did a run in. We were kinda like the new company that was just showing up wherever we wanted to and we kinda had this street credit because of it.
I felt like this kinda took us back to that. No one’s gonna expect this and everyone’s gonna be talking about it. So no matter what we do in this match, it doesn’t matter because they’re going to be going nuts because it’s such a cool surprise.”
When Did Chris Jericho Last Wrestle For An Independent?
Prior to walking out at PWG Battle of Los Angeles, Chris Jericho hadn’t appeared at an independent wrestling event since wrestling with Ohio Valley Wrestling in the summer of 2003. Even this match comes with the caveat that Jericho was a WWE-contracted performer at the time and OVW was a main developmental territory. Before that, aside from three memorial shows, including one for Brian Pillman in 1998, Jericho hadn’t wrestled for a true independent since 1996.
Chris Jericho was most recently in action on the January 25th episode of Dynamite when he teamed with Sammy Guevara to defeat Ricky Starks and Action Andretti.
H/t to Fightful