Jericho on the theft of the AEW World Title and telling Tony Khan that it was gone
Chris Jericho On Having to Tell Tony Khan the AEW Title Got Stolen, Being Told How Much The Title Cost and How They Dealt With It
On his most recent Talk is Jericho, Chris Jericho discussed how the theft of the AEW World Title and how he had to tell Tony Khan that it was gone.
Highlights and the full podcast are below:
On having to call Tony Khan to tell him the title got stolen:
“So I wake up the next morning, and now I’m like, ‘[Sigh] I gotta call.’ I call Tony Khan, I’m like, ‘Hey, man. The title got stolen.’ He’s like, ‘What??’ I go, ‘The title got stolen.’ [Tony’s] like, ‘What do you mean, it got stolen?’ And now I feel like the biggest loser ever, because I’m trying to explain to my boss that I lost the title — that the title got stolen. And it’s like, what a terrible embarrassing thing to have to say to your boss. ‘I’m sorry, the title got stolen.’ Like, terrible!
“And then I have to tell Cody, and Nick and Matt, the Jacksons. And Kenny’s gotta know, and I just feel like, these guys are probably texting each other like, ‘Was Jericho drunk, or was he high? Or is he just stupid?’ None of those things! The thing that I did stupid was not put the title back into my big suitcase and leaving it out. But even so, it’s in the back of a giant limo SUV. You put it in there, the driver’s with it the whole time. If he leaves — which he never should have in the first place — but you lock the door. But we’ve been through that. It was gone.”
On trying to figure out what to do and finding out how much the belt cost:
“So I call Tony, and we’re like, ‘Okay, well what do we do with this? Let’s just not say a word about it.’ Because this is really embarrassing for this fledgling company. You know, I could just see all the wrestling fans and WWE just howling at the fact that these hot young upstarts went and got a new World Champion and new World Title, and it gets stolen not even 24 hours after the first guy wins it. And on top of that, I asked Tony, ‘How much does the belt cost?’ He says, ‘About 30 grand.’ And I’m like, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me. $30,000. That’s how much this title is. This is like now grand larceny, something along those lines.”
“So we’re trying to figure out what to do the next day. Do we keep it quiet, do we keep it, you know, close to the vest and what do we want to do with it. And not even 20 minutes later, I get a phone call from somebody. Some random reporter that I’ve worked with before. And he’s like, ‘Hey uh, is it true that the title got stolen?’ I’m like, ‘How did you find that out?’ ‘Oh, the Tallahassee Police Department put it up on their Twitter page.’ And I’m like, ‘What??’ ‘Yeah, they’re putting it on social media that the title belt got stolen, and Chris Jericho got his title stolen.’ I’m like, well that’s just great! Now not only did it get stolen. Now they’ve announced it! Now it’s really looking bad.”
On making the video to address the situation:
So now we’re trying to figure out what to do. Do we put out a press release, or do we just ignore it. And I’m like, ‘You know, we have to attack this head on. We don’t need a press release. Just let me think about it a second. I’ll do a video, and I’ll send it over to you. And that’s what I did. That’s the one where I was sitting in the hot tub with the bubbly and saying I vowed to scour the Earth to find the thief that stole the AEW Championship. And we were able to kind of deflect a little bit of the embarrassment because we took the bull by the horns. Instead of just ignoring it, we said, ‘Okay, we have to try and figure out a way to take advantage of this in a good way.’ And we used that publicity to kind of divert the intelligentsia from the real story, which was this belt was stolen.”
