Chris Jericho Talks About Taking The Claudio Swing At Blood & Guts

Before his second AEW match was over, Claudio Castagnoli had already made one hell of a mark, with his death defying swing on top of the Blood & Guts cage one of the craziest spots of the year.

At a recent Inside the Ropes live event, the recipient of the swing Chris Jericho revealed how the spot was his idea, and how Claudio was unsure about it at first:

“Well, sounds like a broken record but that was my idea. The reason for it is Claudio [Castagnoli] came in and I actually went and stood in the arena at Forbidden Door just to hear the reaction because I knew people would go nuts for him but they went f****** nuts for him, and I was like, they really, really like this guy and once again, we have a chance to build another main event star very quickly. What’s the best way to do that? Focus on his strengths and one of his strengths is his strength. He is so strong. It’s unbelievable how strong he is. I said, ‘We’ll have him start. Have him start with Sammy because Sammy’s very dynamic, he can make him look good and then lets continue through’ and I had the idea of going on top of the cage. Now I wouldn’t have thought of that again, except for last year’s Blood & Guts, we still only had 1,000 people in the crowd and if you remember, because the way we shot at Daily’s Place, what you saw was the cage and then basically just the wall behind it, the big tron, the stage. You couldn’t really get a sense of the massiveness of this cage and it looked cool, but it’s almost, like to me it was like, ‘oh, good job guys, aw, is that your Hell in a Cell? Oh, good job, good job.’ So when I got there, I said, dude, we need to do something on top of the cage because I’m just envisioning this shot from the hard camera of the cage with 6,000 people on this side with Eddie Kingston standing on top of the cage just standing there, people just going, ‘Ahhh!!!’

“And that was my vision, and people were like, ‘Well we shouldn’t go on top again.’ Next year, no. This year, we have to because it’s essentially the debut of Blood & Guts. It’s the first time people have seen how big this is with this giant crowd in Detroit, one of our biggest that we’ve had. This puts us on a different level. This makes AEW look every bit as big as any other wrestling company in the world today. Let’s go onto the top. Sammy [Guevara] texts me ‘Hey, I wanna take a bump off the top.’ I’m like, ‘Of course you do.’ He wanted to take a bump off the top last year. I’m like, ‘I’m already taking it so you –’ ‘So what can we do?’ ‘Maybe Eddie throws him off,’ ‘great’ and then maybe I put Eddie into the Walls [of Jericho] and then maybe Claudio comes up and saves the day. Then Tony [Khan] had the idea of two submissions and Claudio gets the tap out first which robs Eddie Kingston of his submissions which causes a little bit of animosity between those two. Story, story, story,” said Jericho.

Claudio was initially hesitant about performing the spot, and Jericho admitted several rotations in that he himself started to panic:

“I just said f*** it man. When he comes up there, ‘You gotta give me the swing’ because people love — he gave Cool Hand Ang 20 spins at Forbidden Door. People were going bananas for it so I was like, ‘Dude, you gotta give me the spin on top of the cage’ and when he got there, he said, ‘I can’t do it.’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Because everywhere that I spin, the chain that lifts the cage is in the way’ and I was like, ‘Well we could do it on the edge.’ He goes, ‘You can’t do it on the edge, that’s insane.’ I said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘You’re the strongest guy’.

“I would not have done that with anybody else, anybody else on the planet but with him, I took that spin many, many times and I was like, ‘Dude, you’re in total control. We can do it. We’re not that close to the edge’ [Jericho laughed]. So, we talk about the area we’re gonna do it in and then here it comes and dude, I’ll tell you what, I was scared about falling off the cage. When I got into the position for this spot, I was like, ‘Oh, my f****** gosh’ and then he starts spinning. There was seven rotations, which seemed like 1,000 hours to do those seven - it was ten seconds. The first three, I was cool. Then I started to lose my mind, because all I could see was little people sitting in the crowd, little people, little people [Jericho does a spinning motion] I’m like oh my gosh. How high up are we!? This is terrible! And I remember looking at him in the eyes because that’s the secret, you gotta look ‘em in the eyes and I was like, ‘Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!’ And he put me down.

“Here’s the thing, watching it back on TV, he was so in control and he didn’t move out of this one little semi circle and we were probably, I would say this far from the edge so there’s really no way I can fall unless he loses his balance and, ‘Whoa.’ He wouldn’t lose his balance. Watching it back, I could have taken it 15 times because I was completely safe,” continued Jericho.

H/T: POST Wrestling