Chris Jericho recently confirmed he was looked at as a potential replacement for Shane McMahon at Wrestlemania 34 last month.
Jericho spoke about possibly being involved in the Daniel Bryan & Shane McMahon versus Kevin Owens & Sami Zayn match on his Talk Is Jericho podcast, where Bryan himself was a recent guest. A few weeks before the big event, Shane was hospitalized with diverticulitus, but ultimately got cleared to compete at Wrestlemania.
Jericho said there was a plan in place to get him to Louisiana when Shane’s status was up in the air, despite him playing a show with Fozzy in New Hampshire: (transcript credit to Cageside Seats / Sean Reuter)
A few weeks before WrestleMania, maybe three or four weeks, I get a call from Vince. And he’s talking about Shane and his appendix, or not his appendix, his diverticulitus, and he had an infection in his hand and he had… a staph infection and he had… a hernia. And he goes, ‘Listen, we don’t know if he can do ‘Mania.’
And he had somehow looked, or got someone to look at my schedule, and we had a Fozzy show that day… So he was like ‘I know you’re doing a Fozzy show, and you’re gonna watch WrestleMania with your fans,’ he goes, ‘what would you think about coming to New Orleans if Shane can’t do it?’
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Jericho continued, saying they went as far as planning out a route to get him to New Orleans and how close it would have been to him getting there on time:
And it’s funny because we were looking, we were googling airports, and it was in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, like the most out of the way place. We were looking up airports close to Hampton Beach and how long is the charter to get there [New Orleans], and he [Vince] was like ‘Okay, you can make it right on time and we’ll give you a police escort, and you’ll basically have to go right into the ring.’
And I said ‘Listen, I’ve got no problem with that, and I know that Bryan has no problem with it. Kevin and Sami – especially Sami – are gonna have heart attacks calling a WrestleMania match in the ring.’ I mean, obviously we would think of some stuff beforehand, but like, I can do it. I don’t have a problem, so can you. We could do it now. But like, Sami is going to die of a frickin’ aneurysm if we do that!
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