Jennifer Grey says she really didn't believe she was going to be able to perform her final two dances during Tuesday night's Dancing with the Stars finale which ended with Derek Hough and her being crowned the show's eleventh-season champions.

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"I did not think I was going to be able to [dance]," Grey said during a Wednesday morning appearance with Hough on Good Morning America.

Grey's dance status became uncertain after she ruptured a spinal disc while performing during Monday's performance show and the actress told GMA it had remained that way right up until the beginning of Tuesday's broadcast -- prompting Dancing with the Stars host Tom Bergeron's warning that she may not be able to complete her final two dances.

"Even though I was going to try, they had to tell everyone that in case it hit again, because when it's going, there's no dancing," she said. 

"It took 24 hours for the nerve block to work." 

During the interview, Grey also explained how she and Hough had decided to incorporate a tribute to her iconic Dirty Dancing film role into their freestyle dance.

"The thing that was so fun about it was that we were trying to find some way to do something that was related to Dirty Dancing because I knew everyone wanted us to do 'Time of Your Life,' and there was a lot of pressure for that, but I knew that that was a dance for Patrick and me," Grey said.

"I knew that I wanted to leave it as such and that I wanted to do something fresh, and then he decided to do that song and I said, oh what a great song! What a great idea!"

"Because I was actually the one that was holding the watermelon in that scene, so that's where -- actually Derek is so smart that way because he just -- he said, why don't you just be holding a watermelon? And then -- it was just genius!" 

"And those people that don't know would just be like, why is she holding a watermelon?" Hough joked.

"And then, he wanted to rip off the clothes and I was going to have on a white tied-up shirt and a skirt, but then I said no, when the skirt comes off it's no more baby. It's all Jennifer," Grey added.

In addition, Grey also said the dance skills she acquired while filming Dirty Dancing were vastly different than the tedious training and rehearsals for Dancing with the Stars.

"This dance experience was so much more difficult. I learned basically one dance over the course of really pretty long month and a half shoot, and it was very very little," Grey said.
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"This was like a different dance every four days or two dances or in this case, this week, four dances in four days... It was just a completely different level of dancing -- much more complicated, much much more challenging."

Hough also commented on the couple's victory, which gave him three Dancing with the Stars titles and sole possession of the show's all-time victory record, which he had previously shared with his sister Julianne Hough, good friend Mark Ballas and fellow pro dancer Cheryl Burke.

"I've been very fortunate, I mean I've been getting fantastic partners and everything, and they're just wonderful. So, I'm very fortunate and it's been awesome. It's been a great season," Hough said.

"And he's insanely talented. Can we just talk about that?" Grey suggested.

"It was never done before. Never."
About The Author: Elizabeth Kwiatkowski
Elizabeth Kwiatkowski is Associate Editor of Reality TV World and has been covering the reality TV genre for more than a decade.