By: Neal Flanagan
Tony Khan has said that WWE reached out to him personally to request video messages from four current AEW wrestlers to mark John Cena’s 20-year main roster celebration on Raw.
Three of the messages, from Chris Jericho, Paul Wight, and Bryan Danielson, were shown on Monday’s broadcast.
Interviewed on the Battleground Podcast, Khan was asked about the request (transcription courtesy of Fightful):
“When people ask for a reasonable favor, I’m a good Samaritan. There is no reason why you can’t help people out. In this case, that’s just trying to be a good Samaritan and do the right thing to help out if you think it’s a good cause.
In this case, John Cena’s 20th-anniversary show, I think that’s great. Sounded like a classy show and WWE reached out to me personally and asked me if we would send in videos from some of the top stars.
They asked me for videos from Chris Jericho, Paul Wight, Bryan Danielson, and Mark Henry. I’m not sure Mark Henry’s made the air, but I’m sure they had a lot of great videos and I understood why they want him. They did show Paul Wight, Bryan Danielson, and Chris Jericho. I thought those were great wrestlers to ask for and I had no problem with it.
I also left it up to those wrestlers if they wanted to do it. I sent it to our head of HR and she told them that they had asked about this and if they wanted to do videos, it’s fine with us, but it’s up to them. They sent them in. That’s how it happened.
Based on what it was, John Cena’s anniversary, even though WWE and AEW are competitive, it’s a good time to be in the wrestling business and be one of these two national television companies. There are a lot of big things happening in wrestling and there is no reason why we can’t all just be decent people at the same time.”
