During a recent edition of Chris Jericho’s “Talk is Jericho” podcast, Christopher Daniels commented on almost retiring in Ring of Honor (ROH) last year before All Elite Wrestling (AEW) came around. You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On if he was involved in creative in Ring of Honor: “Yes, I was there when they were putting it all together and like, I had an opinion. I wasn’t the final say on stuff but I would pitch ideas for TV and I would pitch ideas for the live events. Like for example, the storyline that ended 2018 for myself and Frankie and Scorpio, the idea that we had one year left, like that was an idea that Frankie and I had discussed in the car and I pitched it to Ring of Honor and they allowed us to go forward with it.”
On his final ROH storyline: “So like at the beginning of 2018, Joe Koff had said, ‘At the end of 2018 your contracts expire, you guys are done.’ And so we had the storyline throughout the year of us trying to get titles, so that we’d have some sort of leverage to try and re-get contracts. At the end of the year, these gentlemen had contracts because they had been world tag team champions but I didn’t get a contract because I lost at Final Battle. Like, all of that was stuff that I had pitched. I gave the idea with Hunter [Johnston] and all the other creative guys that were with, we sort of kicked ideas around like ‘who should I wrestle? how close do we get to titles, how close do we get to actually winning a contract before the end of the year?’ and that sort of thing.”
On really planning to retire: “When we started, this was before any idea of AEW was going around so I mean, for like ten and a half months of that, there was no possibility that we’d go anywhere else. So like, when we pitched this idea, honestly the original idea when I pitched it was that it might be my transition out of the ring. The idea was going to be…in my head, January 2018, my idea was going to be, Frankie and Sky were still going to be there and I was going to leave because I didn’t win a contract or I didn’t get my contract renewed, and then I would return as the matchmaker or GM or whatever the authority figure was going to be. Because I thought, ‘oh well, by that time I’ll be 49. 49’s a good number to transition out of the ring.’ Except now, I’m a month away from being 49 and I don’t want to get out of the ring yet.”
