The latest episode of Undertaker: The Last Ride covered the fallout from The Undertaker’s somewhat disappointing match with Roman Reigns at WrestleMania 33 up through his triumphant return at WrestleMania 34 against John Cena. For those who don’t remember, the build for that match was vastly different compared to how most matches on pay-per-view are built up. Cena appeared on Raw for weeks calling out “The Deadman,” demanding that the two finally have a match on WWE‘s biggest pay-per-view. Except no matter how personal Cena got in his insults, Taker never responded — the lights in the arena never went out, the “gong” from his music never played, nothing. Cena finally relented by saying he would attend WrestleMania as a fan, and after a fake-out by Elias he finally got his wish when Undertaker marched down to the ring… only to squash Cena in less than three minutes.
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Cena popped up during the episode to explain the thought process behind the story.
“I think knowing what you want to achieve, in any sort of storytelling is the most important thing. And with this story, we needed to bring back The Undertaker,” Cena said. “I get chills thinking about it, because really the energy was there, the anticipation was there. They just want to see the guy.”
While on television it looked like The Undertaker hadn’t decided to wrestle until that moment, in actually Mark Calaway had been considering the match ever since he watched the Reigns match in January 2018. The latter half of the episode shows off his training regiment for the match, and afterwards he admitted that he thought the match would go significantly longer than it did.
“It felt good,” Calaway said. “Selfishly, I would have liked to have been out there a little longer. But it is what it is. It’s bittersweet… not what I trained for. But we don’t sell time I guess, we sell entertainment. So hopefully that’s what they got.”
Undertaker’s match with Cena did not wind up being his last match. Since then he’s competed in eight matches, taking on the likes of Rusev, Triple H, D-Generation X, Goldberg, Shane McMahon and AJ Styles. His most recent match, the cinematic Boneyard Match with Styles, took place at the end of Night 1 of WrestleMania 36.
