The Undertaker does not think the bump that concussed him at WrestleMania 30 was unusually bad. He thinks the problem was that by then he was only wrestling twice a year.
The Undertaker suffered the concussion during the match in which Brock Lesnar ended his undefeated WrestleMania streak in April 2014, and was taken to the hospital before the show finished. He has spoken about it before, including the fact that he has never recovered any memory of the match itself.
On his own podcast, Six Feet Under, with Paul Heyman as the guest, he explained why it happened.
“I think that’s somewhere where it happened. But when I watch it, it’s like, I’ve taken far worse bumps and popped up.”
“I think what happened is, it’s getting late in my career, and at that point I’m only working a couple of times a year, and it’s Father Time catching up with me. When your body’s not used to that trauma, you just don’t take it as well.”
Heyman said it is rarely one impact.
“It’s also the number of dings that you’ve taken over the years.”
He then described something Ronda Rousey told him on a plane, about her loss to Holly Holm at UFC 193 in 2015.
“Out of nowhere, she just turned to me and said, I have to tell you what really happened between Holly Holm and me. ‘ And I had never brought that subject up.”
“She started talking about how, when she was a kid, an accident happened, and it knocked her out cold. And because of that, she was always vulnerable to getting clipped just on the right side. And she took the clip in the first round. She was out, but on her feet, because that was her training. Just fight it through, fight it through. Ignore it. Let’s just go. And everything was on muscle memory.”
“There comes a time that when you’ve taken so many hits, it’s not that nuclear hit that wipes you out.”
The Undertaker’s account of the aftermath, given elsewhere, is that his memory did not begin returning until four or five in the morning, that he was asked his name and age every ten or fifteen minutes, and that the only two people he recognized were his wife and Vince McMahon.
He has also said he finished the match on instinct alone and has never watched it back with any recollection of having been in it. The last thing he remembers of that day is around two in the afternoon.
The Undertaker has described the self-doubt that set in while he was training to return the following year, and that a match with Bray Wyatt at WrestleMania 31 was his first since. He has said Triple H caught him crouched in a corner of Gorilla position before that entrance and told him not to forget who he was, which is the line he later thanked him for in his Hall of Fame speech.
His doctors cleared him without reservation and told him that if it happened again, they would need a different conversation.
The Undertaker was 49 at the time of the WrestleMania 30 match and retired in 2020, six years later. He worked eight more matches after it, roughly one a year, which is the schedule he says left him unprepared for the trauma in the first place. He now runs creative for AAA.
The protocols have changed since 2014. WWE has medical staff at ringside with the authority to stop a match regardless of a wrestler’s wishes, and referees are instructed to escalate any incident involving a head impact. Je’Von Evans described what happened to him on Raw in January, when he told a referee he was seeing stars, asked her not to call for medical, and had the match stopped anyway.
Lesnar confirmed his own retirement this month after losing to Oba Femi at SummerSlam, twelve years on from the match that ended the streak.
