After winning the ROH World Championship at AEW Dynamite Grand Slam, Chris Jericho declared his intention to destroy everything that Ring of Honor ever stood for.
This led the veteran to put the title on the line against a string of former champions from the promotion such as Dalton Castle, Bryan Danielson and Bandido. Jericho’s bout with the Mexican star on the September 28th edition of Dynamite earned praise from fans across the board, and crucially took place while Bandido wasn’t signed to the company.
However, after impressing against Jericho, and carving out an impressive CV elsewhere, Bandido eventually put pen to paper on a deal with AEW in November.
Chris Jericho Went To Bat For Bandido
On a recent episode of his Talk Is Jericho podcast, Chris Jericho revealed that implored Tony Khan to sign the high-flying star after their match.
“Going out there with this guy and not knowing anything about him, he’s such a great flier and he has such power. He held me up for the standing Suplex, I think for like 60 seconds, and the blood was rushing to my head and I could barely hold on. He was so strong and when he finally brought me down, the people started going nuts.
That’s when we had them. We did a whole bunch of crazy stuff. I took the Hurricanrana off the apron, I took the jumping backwards Moonsault powerslam, and I took his German Suplex off the ropes. It’s one of those matches where everything was going too well.
I spun his mask around and had him tap out to the walls, and as soon as we got back through the curtain, I said to Tony (Khan), ‘We need to sign this guy.’ That’s what we did. It took a while to actually get him to commit, but man, we signed him and I see big things in the future for Bandido,”
Chris Jericho was most recently in action at ROH Final Battle where he lost his ROH World Championship to Claudio Castagnoli.
H/t to Fightful