Chris Jericho Reveals Fascinating Detail About Throwing Fireballs in AEW
One of Chris Jericho's many gimmicks since joining AEW has been crowning himself "The Wizard" as he throws fireballs in the faces of his opponents. He opened up about implementing it into his character on the latest AEW Unrestricted, revealing he needed to get a magician's license in order to use it when AEW was in Las Vegas. The reigning ROH World Champion now has that license, but they had to work around some hurdles for one of the TV spots.
"Memphis, someone threw a fireball. Okay, I'll throw a fireball in your face. It worked. Then we were at commentary and I was thinking, 'Who throws a fireball? A wizard, maybe. I'm a wizard!' Read the room. Back in the day, everyone brings signs. There are no signs anymore. You go on Twitter and everyone is like, 'Wizard, wizard, memes, GIFs.' 'That's a thing. All I need to do is throw a fireball one more time.' We went to Vegas, there was a problem. I had my magician's license. You need that to throw a fireball in the vicinity of Vegas. The problem was it didn't come in time, so we had to go outside the boundaries of Vegas to throw the fireball at the stagehand. 'Guys, don't tell me why it's not going to work,'" Jericho said.
"My internal, '(Wayne) Gretzky stay ahead' is we needed to throw another fireball today. It's at the peak. Next week would be too late. We figured it out, made it happen, the kid took the fireball, and now it's a thing. I did it one more time with Shota Umino. That's it. I never have to throw it again. I can fake it, I can tease it, or maybe I do. It's now part of Chris Jericho canon," he added.
Jericho won the eighth world championship of his career (aka "The Ocho") at AEW Grand Slam last week, defeating Claudio Castagnoli. He then cheated to beat Bandido on this week's Dynamite and closed out the episode by proclaiming he was going to destroy Ring of Honor by defeating all of its former world champions. That will start with another match against Bryan Danielson next month.