Chris Jericho jumped ship to AEW with Jon Moxley, known as Dean Ambrose in the WWE following his footsteps. The duo were involved in a full-fledged feud back in 2016 which included moments such as “Mitch the Plant” and the only ever Asylum match at Extreme Rules that year.
On the recent edition of Inside The Ropes, Jericho went on to reveal the backstage story behind the potted plant which was first introduced during his Highlight Reel segment. Here is what Jericho had to say about it:
“The idea was to have a Highlight Reel with Ambrose and hit him with the potted plant,” Jericho said. “So, we do the angle and I hit him with the plant. He misses SmackDown the next week. He’s got a contusion. He’s got a concussion, he’s got all these injuries. But all anybody was talking about was the potted plant being broken. Some genius at WWE.com gave it the name of ‘Mitch The Potted Plant’. I was like, ‘No, stop it, this is an assault with a deadly weapon.’ It’s a potted plant. You hit someone in the head with a potted plant, it’s going to f*** you up. But all they cared about was Mitch the Potted Plant R.I.P.
“So we moved on, the idea after that was for the revenge for me killing Mitch the Potted Plant, was Ambrose would destroy my jacket… he proceeds to destroy my jacket. Now this f***ing jacket, just when Brodus Clay put it on, killed the whole side. Now, Ambrose is hitting it with a hammer, tearing it apart piece by piece, he’s ripping it to shreds and the f***ing thing is still blinking.”
“Ambrose was like, ‘I really want to ask Vince to use thumbtacks.’Â A few weeks before the match, I get a text from Ambrose, ‘Vince is going to let us use thumbtacks.’ Vince decided that I was going to lose. That means I have to take the bump in the thumbtacks…”
“[After the match], I go backstage and say, ‘I want you all to film this and I want a bucket and you guys are going to count how many tacks are in my body right now.’ They go all the way up to sixty-eight. It’s no fun being hardcore, save that s**t for the indies. I go to sit down and I feel something stab me right in my ass… There’s one more tack sticking out of my right buttock. I pull it out and there were your sixty-nine tacks. It’s a real f***ing number. Sixty-nine tacks pulled out of my body, there you go.”
