Chris Jericho revealed an intriguing story about plans for him and CM Punk to promote their WrestleMania 28 encounter in 2013 on the most recent episode of his Talk Is Jericho podcast.
Jericho said, “We had worked quite a bit over the years. We got along really well. We always had great matches, and I was ‘The best in the world’. I left for a year or so and he was ‘The best in the world.’ So I said ‘Well, this is great. We can do ‘Best in the world’ versus ‘Best in the world match’. That’s kind of what the idea was.”
“The original plan for the opening angle to get that rolling was I was going to tattoo CM Punk. I was going to do an angle where I would knock him out and handcuff him to the ring ropes, take out a tattoo needle, and tattoo my initials onto his body. I would get a tattoo artist to show me how to do it and do like a CJ.”
Jericho continued, “I remember pitching that to Vince and he was like, ‘Well, who cares? He’s got so many tattoos. What difference does it make?’ I said, ‘The difference is I’m tattooing him.’ He’s like, ‘Well, so what?’ I said, ‘It’s for a tattoo guy to get tattooed unwantedly. It doesn’t matter if you have one tattoo or 1000. It’s something that you’ll always have to look at and always think of it. It’s very embarrassing and very violating.’ Finally, Vince went for it. We had it all planned and we were going to do it. I think that we even had a tattoo artist there and he was going to show me earlier in the day.”
“Vince then came to us and said, ‘We’re not doing the tattoo thing.’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Because tattoos bleed too much.’ Now, you guys have tattoos. They don’t really bleed that much, especially a smaller one. It might bleed a little bit where the blood wells up, but it’s not like you’re gigging and there’s buckets of blood flowing out of this tattoo. So once again, I think somebody got in Vince’s head that didn’t like the tattoo idea, and just decided that, you know, it’s too much blood and we’re going to get thrown off the air.”
The podcast features numerous tales from Chris Jericho’s many WrestleMania performances, including details on the three-way bout he participated in alongside Kurt Angle and Chris Benoit. He also discusses his match with William Regal at WrestleMania 17, the inspiration behind his Money In The Bank concept for WrestleMania 21, his experiences working with Mickey Rourke and Adam Sandler, Kevin Owens’ appearance at the Festival of Friendship, and other topics. He also discussed how WrestleMania 33 made him realize it was time to leave WWE.
You can listen to the complete podcast below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
