Chris Jericho: “Jon Moxley now is so much better and bigger than he ever was as Dean Ambrose”

During his podcast, Chris Jericho talked about the rise of the AEW brand…

“When the idea came for AEW, and you’ve heard it a million times. ‘Oh, there’s a new wrestling company. This guy’s got some money.’ Whatever. Same thing over and over again. It took me a while to really believe what Tony was talking about because what you need to start a company is you need money and a lot of it, which the Khan family has. You need a great television deal, which we didn’t have at the time, but we finally got it with TNT and TBS. You need a collection of guys who aren’t retreads or haven’t lived up to their full potential, and we had that with The Elite right out of the gate, and then bringing in Moxley right out of the bat for the first show that we had. That’s a guy who was not even close to living up to his full potential. You can see that now. Moxley now is so much better and bigger than he ever was as Dean Ambrose. So we had all three of those things, and also a passion and a desire, and there was a point to prove.”

Jericho also commented on AEW getting a television deal…

“At the time [launch of AEW], there was no television deal. I remember at some point we were talking about maybe going on Showtime. At some point, we were thinking maybe streaming it on, I don’t know, Amazon Prime or something along those lines, and that’s not good enough. You can’t put it on Showtime or whatever. Then [TNT] got interested I think because Chris Jericho was involved and Jim Ross. I think those two names were the two names that got us the TV deal along with Tony’s passion and his commitment and all the other factors I told you.” (quotes courtesy of WrestlingNews.co)