As seen on WWE Saturday Night’s Main Event, Goldberg lost his retirement match to World Heavyweight Champion Gunther. This match lasted almost 15 minutes. This was Goldberg’s longest match in 22 years. The last time he wrestled longer than 15 minutes, it was at Armageddon 2003, where he lost the World Heavyweight Championship to Triple H in a triple threat match that also featured Kane. That match lasted 20 minutes.
The show didn’t go quite as planned, and it all started with an unexpected injury to Seth Rollins. Rollins was originally scheduled to defeat LA Knight during the show, but after suffering a knee injury, he made the rare call to change the match’s outcome on the fly, allowing Knight to pick up the win. That impromptu change wasn’t just a surprise for the audience, it sent shockwaves through the rest of the show’s layout, throwing off segment timings and ultimately impacting the final moments of the broadcast.
One of the biggest casualties of the reshuffle was the post-match retirement speech from WWE Hall of Famer Goldberg, who appeared in what many believe could be his final televised WWE moment. As Goldberg began speaking after the main event, the live NBC broadcast abruptly cut to black, leaving fans without a conclusion to the emotional sendoff.
According to Fightful Select, this was never meant to happen. WWE had a strict timing cutoff with NBC, and the earlier changes left producers scrambling to adjust the flow of the night. At least one top WWE executive reportedly expressed regret over the way Goldberg’s moment was cut short, even offering him a personal apology backstage.
To make things right, WWE uploaded the full version of Goldberg’s speech to its digital platforms today, ensuring fans could see the complete address uninterrupted. You can watch it below:
Gunther Shows Respect To Goldberg
On Saturday Night’s Main Event Recap with Sam Roberts and Megan Morant, Gunther was asked if it was a task handling the WCW Legend. Here’s what The Ring General said:
“Yes, I agree to that and I feel like that’s something about Goldberg in general. He’s not a Mount Rushmore wrestler of this business or anything. But him as a person, as a character, as a brand in this business… he’s a Hall of Famer already but a Mount Rushmore character, Mount Rushmore personality in this business, and that’s what made him just special is he never needed to be a good technical wrestler, he never needed to have a lot of finesse.
Everything he did, and it’s almost a little bit similar to what I do, he’s very straight to the point, he’s very straightforward. So that guy was not easy to handle for anybody he ever stepped in the ring with. So, I expected that. But, to be honest, today, it caught me by surprise.
I was out there with him for 15 minutes or maybe a little bit longer. I don’t think anybody really expected that out of the match and I expected it to be shorter, so that was a big surprise to me and so that being said, after it’s all said and done, I can pay my respects to him, to Bill Goldberg.
He came back for the right reasons. To fight for what’s near and dear to him. Obviously, it was for the World Heavyweight Championship but I would say, going into that, you could tell it was about something way more personal than a championship so, I gotta pay my respect to him.”
Also Read: Gunther Reveals Who’s Next For Him After Goldberg
