AEW president Tony Khan says there’s no reason why even competitors in the wrestling business can’t be decent to each other.
The wrestling world was quite surprised when AEW stars Bryan Danielson, Chris Jericho, and Paul Wight appeared on the June 27 episode of WWE RAW to celebrate John Cena‘s 20th anniversary; taped messages from all three men played on the show.
During an interview with the Battleground Podcast, Khan described how WWE approached him and asked about getting videos from the trio, and he explained how he thought it sounded like a good reason to cooperate.
“When people ask for a reasonable favor, I’m a good Samaritan. There’s no reason why you can’t help people out, and 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, and I ended up seeing, I’m not sure Mark Henry’s didn’t make the air, but I’m sure they had a lot of great videos and I understood why they’d want him, he’s a great star who he see every night on Rampage on Fridays and we’re gonna get him tonight on TNT ahead of the main event as we always do. But they did show Paul Wight and Bryan Danielson and Chris Jericho.
“And 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 them to our head of HR and she told them that they’d asked about this and if they wanted to do the videos, it was fine with us, but it’s up to them. And they sent them in and that’s how it happened. And you know, based on what it was, John Cena’s 20th 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 big national television companies. They had the number one show on cable and satellite on Monday, we had the number one show on cable and satellite on Wednesday. So the wrestling business is doing really well right now, and AEW is a very big part of the conversation. There’s a lot of things happening in wrestling and there’s no reason why we can’t all just be decent people at the same time.”
