At RAW 25 (the 25th anniversary episode of Monday Night RAW) in January 2018, The Undertaker made his first appearance on WWE programming after his retirement tease at WrestleMania 33.
This was a big show and WWE faced a sudden problem at one of the venues. Here’s what Mustafa Ali said about it on Chris Van Vliet’s Insight podcast:
“RAW was doing the Barclays Center and the Manhattan Center at the same time. There’s a bunch of people that have paid a lot of money to attend this event. But here’s the problem that they didn’t plan — there were no actual matches there. It was just legends coming out and cutting a promo. So about almost an hour into it, the fans start realizing, ‘Hey, we got jibbed.’
There’s no matches and they start booing recklessly. So Triple H is at the Manhattan Center. He gets on the phone and he calls over Barclays and he goes, ‘I need matches and I need them now.’ So Mark Carrano goes, ‘I know, the cruiserweights!’ So he stuffs a bunch of cruiserweights into a van and just sends us blindly to Manhattan Center. Hideo Itami is driving, I don’t know.
So we’re running upstairs and everyone’s panicking, go, go, go, upstairs. Go upstairs. We’re running with our gear, because we’re all coming from Barclays. And Triple H goes, ‘Situation — there’s no matches during the commercial break. I just need you guys to go out there and do the craziest sh*t for two or three minutes.’
All right, cool. So I was wrestling Lince Dorado and we run upstairs, we have our bags, so we just open this door and we throw our bags down, we close the door, we start talking. The referee comes up and goes, ‘Hey guys, where are you changing?’ ‘Right here.’ And then we look up — private locker room for The Undertaker.
We open the door sheepishly, me and Lince, ‘Hello, sir. I’m Ali, this is Lince. Huge mistake. We’re just gonna grab our bags and leave.’ We go to reach for our bags, and he goes, ‘Hey, you guys don’t want to hang out with the motherf***ing Undertaker?’ Before I could say anything, Lince goes ‘Hell yeah!’ (laughs)
We’re changing. He’s asking us about, you know, I told him I was a former police officer. He was like, ‘Oh sh*t,’ we’re talking about this and that. Lince was a former teacher. So he’s like, ‘isn’t that crazy?’ We’re talking to The Undertaker about life, and then we kind of forgot that we had to go. We just ran out and did our match up. And then, yeah, it was just one of those wild experiences.”
Great Undertaker story from RAW 25 😂pic.twitter.com/1KjfRgN7DV
— WrestleFeed (@WrestleFeedApp) March 6, 2026
Lince Dorado tweeted the following about this story:
“I remember this like yesterday and now the dead man is my friend crazy life.”
Also Read: Undertaker Felt Bad For Cody Rhodes After WrestleMania 29
