As seen on 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. 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.”
After this, Gunther addressed CM Punk, who recently shoved him down to the mat on the June 30th episode of RAW.
The longest Intercontinental Champion ever then teased feuding with Punk next:
“You touched on CM Punk, but I know that moment (when he shoved me down to the mat) and that will be addressed in the future. But for now and for today, I achieved something far greater than Bill Goldberg ever achieved (laughs). So I gave him the honor of being retired by one of the greatest to ever do this. I’ll leave you guys with that.”
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