Renee Young and Alex Riley led the Night of Champions pre-show panel with Big Show and Booker T. Tom Phillips was doing the backstage segments, reading tweets from the WWE Universe using various hashtags.
The majority of the pre-show was spent hyping up Brock Lesnar vs. John Cena. They showed footage early on of all Brock’s matches and beat downs in 2014, emphasizing WrestleMania and SummerSlam for obvious reasons.
AJ replaced Booker T on the panel briefly, cutting a promo about her Divas Championship match. She told Stephanie McMahon to grow some stones and get in the ring herself, since she’s adding people like Nikki Bella to her match. Booker also interviewed his former tag team partner Goldust backstage. Goldust said the “old him” was dead, and Stardust cut a weird promo about the “cosmic key.”
It was noted several times that Christian’s career was “put on hold” due to medical complications. Both Michael Cole and Renee Young said they hope he will return to action at some point, but nothing definitive was offered.
There were no matches during the pre-show. Christian came out with 10 minutes left and got a good reaction from Nashville for his return. He brought out Chris Jericho. Y2J said they were former tag team champions, and it was his idea to call them “The Sexy Beast”. Christian says he was the captain – Captain Charisma – and he named them “Vitamin C”. They roll footage of Randy Orton attacking Y2J backstage a few weeks ago. Christian goes on a rant on Orton, calling him all sorts of names, and RKO shows up on the TitanTron. Orton calls them the Canadian version of Brad and Angelina, and tells Chris the only show he’ll be able to get on is Total Divas when he’s done tonight. Jericho goes on a rant and does his “eeeever again” bit to hype tonight’s PPV.
