WWE icon The Undertaker is giving people a peek behind the curtain more than ever these days, and he finally provided an answer to a decade-old mystery.
During an interview with MMA reporter Ariel Helwani at UFC 121 in 2010, Undertaker stared down Brock Lesnar as Lesnar walked by following a loss to Cain Velasquez and uttered four words that sent the MMA and wrestling worlds into a frenzy.
“You wanna do it?”
Speculation ran rampant. Was there a legitimate beef between the two? According to The Undertaker, it was all about getting Lesnar back to the WWE, where he performed from 2002-04 before quitting and becoming a huge drawcard in the UFC.
“I was there to pick a fight,” The Undertaker, real name Mark Calaway, told Helwani in an interview this week. “Yeah, I was sent there personally to pick a fight.
“I was unaware that (UFC president) Dana (White) had no clue what was gonna happen, which I felt horrible about after the fact. I thought there had been some kind of discussion between him and Vince (McMahon, WWE president).
“At that time, Brock was so hot in the MMA world, so obviously, it’s 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 gonna come into your world and I’m gonna call you out’, and that was it.”
“Obviously it was a huge media storm, and it’s all your fault,” Calaway deadpanned to Helwani.
Lesnar, a college heavyweight wrestling champion, became a star in WWE. He left in 2004 for a failed run at making the NFL. He then wrestled in Japan before transitioning to MMA and eventually won the UFC heavyweight title.
“Obviously there was such a history there because of his run with WWE, and then his success with UFC — this is huge if we could make it (a fight) happen. That’s what it was all about,” Calaway said.
Lesnar knew Calaway was going to be at UFC 121 in 2010, but likely didn’t know what he planned to do. Helwani said he heard Calaway was planning on crashing the post-fight press conference, but the man himself said he wasn’t credentialed.
“I was hoping I was in the right place at the right time, and everything lined up, man,” he said.
Calaway, who is now revealing all in The Last Ride documentary series on the WWE Network, eventually had his famed 21-0 WrestleMania streak snapped by Lesnar at WrestleMania 30.
It shocked fans so much that reactions quickly became memes. Many wondered if it was the right call, but Calaway says he always put business first and did what McMahon wanted him to do.
“I knew some day it probably would (end),” he said of the winning streak. “In our industry, you don’t walk away like Floyd (Mayweather, boxer) retiring undefeated or Rocky Marciano. It just doesn’t happen that way in wrestling.
“Most of my peers and people that I worked with thought it was a horrible decision. I just asked Vince, I said, ‘Are you sure? Is this what you want?’ He was like, ‘If it’s not Brock, who can beat you?’”
This story first appeared on the New York Post and was reproduced with permission