*NSYNC singer Chris Kirkpatrick once wanted to "kill" Backstreet Boys star A.J. McLean for dating his ex-girlfriend.
The Bye Bye Bye hitmaker reveals he was livid when he found out A.J. had been badmouthing him to a woman he had recently parted ways with, and Chris was ready to beat up McLean when he took up with issue with his pop rival face-to-face.
"I wanted to punch A.J.'s lights out for a little while. I was dating a girl, I broke up with her and he started dating her," Chris tells Billboard.com. "And I guess he was talking smack to her about me, so I confronted him on it and wanted to kick his a**."
Luckily, the dispute didn't come to blows, although Kirkpatrick can't quite recall how the event actually unfolded.
"I don't know how it got resolved - I saw him out one night and said I wanted to kill him, but I said, 'Let's get a beer...,'" he remembered. "Now we're really good friends."
Pop fans have long pitted the two boy bands against one another, but the singers never really considered the chart rivalry any more than "friendly competition".
"We can't control how people are gonna take it. All we can do is control how we give it," explained *NSYNC's JC Chasez. "The doors are open - we just focus on making our shows good, making sure we sound good, and making sure the records were good."
"It created a friendly competition," added bandmate Joey Fatone, before quipping, "There's nothing wrong with friendly competition - even though we are, of course, better than any of those boy bands. Maybe not right now, (we're) a little rusty."
