Roman Reigns has been away from WWE since just prior to WrestleMania 36. It was revealed just over one week before the show that he would not be competing against Goldberg for the Universal Championship at the show due to the coronavirus pandemic as placing himself in possible harms way would be a risky proposition due to his history with leukemia. WWE finally announced that Braun Strowman would replace him in the match just 24 hours before WrestleMania kicked off. Of course, Strowman went on to defeat Goldberg for the Universal Championship.
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Reigns’ return to WWE still remains up in the air, and the fact that it was recently revealed that someone within WWE tested positive for COVID-19 probably doesn’t help matters. This week’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter noted that Reigns’ return is entirely in his court, with Dave Meltzer noting “…it is said to be up to Reigns when he returns and that nobody knows.”
During an interview this week, Bill Goldberg alluded to the fact that his match with Reigns could have been taped even after Strowman had replaced Reigns in the match.
“I go to Orlando, I tape, I come back here and quarantine. It’s just been like ‘Groundhog Day’. Obviously, I had a change of opponents at the very last moment. Roman Reigns, everybody knows he has leukemia, he’s in remission and obviously his immune system is down,” Goldberg said. “I don’t know why it was even considered in the beginning besides he’d invested the time and WWE invested the money in the angle, the match. So literally until the 23rd hour, it was still a possibility that he and I were going to wrestle. Plans changed at the very last minute. I did my match with [Braun Strowman] and it was possible that I could do a match with Roman again before the fifth [of April], that obviously fell through.”
He continued, “It was still a possibility on [Roman’s] end that he could go through with the match. We went to the [WWE Performance Center] and our temperatures were taken when we walked in, the place was scrubbed up and down, there were a limited amount of people allowed in and out of the building, it was very controlled. I think what happened was somebody was sick and Roman had heard about it. They just had the flu, but just the fact that someone was sick under those circumstances, at the end of the day, he just couldn’t do it. More power to him to continually want to get it done, whether that’s realistic or unrealistic from a person in his shoes [is] concerned but you’ve got to love the guy because up to the 11th hour, he was still willing to do it.”
The “someone who was sick” was The Miz, which reportedly spooked Reigns and upset his cousins, The Usos. Eventually, the WWE SmackDown Tag Team Championship match was also changed due to the Miz’s illness, with the scheduled triple threat tag title match turning into a singles triple threat match.
