WWE Hall of Famer Goldberg stepped back inside the squared circle in July for a match with The Undertaker at the Super ShowDown event in Saudi Arabia. But while many fans walked in hoping to see a dream match between two legends, most of them walked out with overwhelming disappointment.
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Goldberg accidentally knocked himself out early in the match, leading to multiple botches that nearly seriously injured both men. Undertaker won the match but looked visibly disappointed afterwards, while Goldberg went out of his way to apologize for his performance on Twitter afterwards.
The former WCW World Heavyweight Champion appeared on Booker T’s The Hall of Fame podcast this week, where he explained why he took the match and where things went wrong.
“I’m not going to make excuses, that’s for sure. I’m just going to answer questions and give facts,” Goldberg said. “Facts are the reason why I had that match and took that opportunity, was because it was an opportunity of a lifetime whether I was 22, 52 or 102, ya know? Not that it was in Saudi Arabia but because it was against The Undertaker.”
Goldberg said he expected to be dealing with scorching heat, and went into detail about how he trained to have better cardio in the match rather than try to bulk up again like his 2016-17 run.
He then addressed the spot where he accidentally knocked himself out by running at full speed into one of the ring posts.
“But the ring post thing, hey man, that’s a spot that a couple of the bookers came up to me and said, ‘Well, we called it,’” he said. “We knew you were going to do that because 50% of the time I have done that spot I have not had good results. Because here’s the deal, I don’t profess to be an entertainer on the level of Ric Flair that can go out and make people laugh. I mean, I can, but it’s not my way of doing things. My way of making people’s jaws drop is blurring the line of reality and fiction so everything I do has to be — it’s like the kick I took from Dolph [Ziggler].”
The former world champion said in the end what brought the match down was a combination of the heat and bad timing between the two.
“I can’t bounce back from it like I used to, and then the perfect storm of the heat, and the perfect storm of Taker not having the timing and not going at the same time at one point or something. Hey, at the end of the day, there’s never been a dude in the freaking ring that I couldn’t pick up, period…. It was an unfortunate deal that I shouldn’t have gone as hard as I went. And then there were a couple of people saying that he referee should have called it. Well guess what? The referee asked me 15 times how I felt and you know what I told him? Fifteen different answers. I felt different every single time that he asked me.”
When asked if he was done with performing in the ring, Goldberg said no. His most recent match took place on Sunday at SummerSlam, where he beat Dolph Ziggler in just shy of two minutes.
