The Festival of Friendship was nothing short of excellent but it's now been revealed that it could have played out in a very different manner. During a recent interview, Chris Jericho said that he had to battle with WWE Creative in order for the segment to go down the way it ultimately did with Kevin Owens presenting him with a list that had Y2J's name on it (much to his horror).
"The day that we had the show, Vince wasn’t there and they tried to change it to where Kevin would just attack me. And my thing was the whole drama of revealing the list of KO and “hey how come my name’s on this” and the looking up and the feeling of oh (expletive) don’t do it, don’t do it and then he attacks me.
"I had to fight for that all day long and there was some real heated debates going on between me and Triple H and a couple of other people. I said this is the way we’re doing it. It’s the way I explained it to Vince and Paul was like “I’ll call Vince right now, he’s in a plane, I don’t care I’ll find him. I’ll send a carrier pigeon to get him”. And finally I think it was just exasperation, just do whatever you want."
It sounds like Jericho had to fight not only WWE Creative but Triple H too, a surprise considering the fact he's come up with so many unique and original ideas for NXT! These comments aren't the clearest, though, as it also appears like The Game was on Y2J's side - reading between the lines - and it was the creative team who gave up trying to change things in the way they saw fit.
Either way, it's fair to say that the right decision was made in regards to how the Festival of Friendship played out as Jericho's reaction to The List of KO was undeniably priceless!
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