Chris Jericho has claimed both AEW President Tony Khan and WWE Chairman Vince McMahon stepped in to ask him to pull out of a huge match that was planned.
When AEW was announced as a company on New Year’s Day 2019, the wrestling world changed forever. Former WWE Champion Chris Jericho was the biggest name to attach himself to the upstart company from the off and eventually became the inaugural AEW World Champion.
However, the wrestling world was abuzz with something else in early 2019, and that was the upcoming G1 Supercard show held by both Ring Of Honor and New Japan Pro Wrestling that took place in Madison Square Garden.
Amidst rumours that WWE had tried to stop the show from taking place in what was long seen as the company’s spiritual home, the show went on in front of a sell-out crowd. Most of those fans in attendance, however, probably thought when they bought their tickets that they’d be seeing arguably the hottest force in wrestling at the time, The Elite. But the advent of AEW changed everything.
Chris Jericho was discussing the G1 Supercard show with a new AEW star and one of the men who competed in the Garden that night on his Talk Is Jericho podcast. Intriguingly, Jericho revealed he was originally pencilled in for a match at the event but his new boss, Tony Khan, and his old boss, Vince McMahon, both asked him not to appear:
“I was actually going to go against [Hiroshi] Tanahashi and then both Tony Khan and Vince McMahon asked me not to do it. That’s a whole other story, we could do a whole podcast just on that. But I didn’t do the show.”
Le Champion eventually got his match with The Ace of New Japan Pro Wrestling several months later as Chris Jericho, who was AEW World Champion at the time, defeated Tanahashi at Wrestle Kingdom 14 in January 2020.