The Undertaker risked tarnishing his legacy towards the end of his career.
The Deadman hung up his boots after his match with AJ Styles at WrestleMania 36. It ended a 30-year run with the WWE, and he has gone down as one of the greatest of all time in the WWE.
However, his career was not all highlight material. The Undertaker and Goldberg clashed at Super ShowDown in Saudi Arabia in 2019. It was a never-before-seen dream match, pitting WCW legend vs WWE legend for the first time.
The match was bad, and The Undertaker explained to Chris Van Vliet how age, concussions and injuries spoiled the bout. He says it helped him realize that he should retire.
“I never wanted to be a parody of myself, and I really risked that at the end. I had some matches that I think, maybe at one point in my career, they were bad. But there was one point in my career I felt like I could take anything and turn it around. I didn’t have it left in me. Like the match I had with Goldberg in Saudi Arabia. I should have picked up on the fact that he had his bell rung, and then rung it again when he hit the post.”
“I should have been sharp enough to adapt at that point and not try to get to where I was getting. It was a scary match to be in. It was Father Time. And the worst thing as you get older are the breaks. When you have long periods of time where you don’t work. Man, you lose that sharpness, the mental quickness to figure out things. That was something that I always really prided myself on: if something happened, knowing what to do.”
“Yeah, and I was so in that match, I was so just like, ‘I’m going to make this good, I’m going to make it good, I’m going to make it good.’ I didn’t have enough mental acuity and the physical attributes to turn that around, and it just continued to go, you know, in a bad direction. It was nobody’s fault, just what happened, happened.”
