The Undertaker, real name Mark Calaway, has talked about his WrestleMania XXX match with Brock Lesnar numerous times in interviews over the past couple of months. He’s gone over details like how Vince McMahon didn’t come up with the decision to have Lesnar win until the day of the show and how he doesn’t remember anything from the match due to a concussion he suffered early on. But in a new interview on CBS Sports’ State of Combat Podcast, Calaway finally opened up about how he felt regarding the decision to have “The Beast” be the one to end his undefeated streak.
“My biggest concern was I just wanted to make sure that [McMahon] was sure and that’s what he wanted to do. I didn’t feel like Brock needed it,” Calaway said. “Brock was already a huge star, and it wasn’t going to help him one way or another. My only concern was there might have been someone down the line that could have benefitted from it more and that probably would’ve been Roman later on.
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“That’s with hindsight being 20/20,” he added. “But if I was going to get beat by someone, Brock was a guy who had the credentials, I think, to do it and people would be like, ‘Um, OK, s—, that’s Brock Lesnar.’ That was my biggest deal. I just wanted to make sure that’s really what [McMahon] had wanted to do.”
Given his credentials, many fans didn’t think Lesnar “needed” the win, given he was already a multi-time WWE Champion, a former UFC Champion and a WrestleMania headliner by then. But since then his accolades have just kept piling up with eight reigns as world champion for a combined 1,447 days and three additional WrestleMania main event matches.
During a recent interview with Ariel Helwani, Calaway revealed that he was working on setting up a match with Lesnar back at WrestleMania XXVII when he had his encounter with him back at UFC 121.
“I was there to pick a fight. I was sent there personally to pick a fight, and I was unaware that Dana [White] had no clue what was going to happen, which I felt horrible about after the fact,” he said. “I thought there had been some kind of discussion between him and Vince [McMahon]. At that time Brock was so hot in the MMA world, so obviously … I was like, ‘You know what? Why not try it?’ There was no personal animosity really. But it was basically me saying, ‘All right, you left our world, I’m going to come into your world and I’m going to call you out.’ That was it, obviously it was a huge media storm.”
