Before they squared off at WrestleMania, The Undertaker went to UFC to try and pick a fight with Brock Lesnar.
Speaking with Ariel Helwani on his ESPN MMA Show, Undertaker revealed he went to UFC 121 to specifically try and goad Brock Lesnar into a fight and it all ended up on camera. Helwani initially teased the interview by saying he waited ten years to ask this question and recalled how he and Undertaker watched the fight next to each other and followed up with an interview. As you may remember, Undertaker and Brock had an infamous moment where The Phenom stared down Lesnar and said “you wanna do it?” to the then UFC Champion. Helwani asked what really happened and if there was any animosity, and Undertaker explained that he was “sent there” to egg on Lesnar into coming back to pro wrestling and wanted to use his star power to do so.
“I was there to pick a fight. I was sent there personally to pick a fight. And I was unaware that Dana [White] had no clue what was going to happen, which I felt terrible about after. I thought there had been some kind of discussion between him and Vince [McMahon], but at that time Brock was so hot in the MMA world. I [thought] ‘why not try it?’
“There was no personal animosity really, it was basically me saying ‘you left our world, I’m going to come into yours and call you out.’ That was it and obviously it was a huge media storm and it’s all your fault.” [laughs]
Undertaker clarified that he was there for a wrestling fight, noting that he’s gutsy but he was well past getting into the octagon. He said Lesnar knew he would be there but no one knew exactly how it would all go down.
“He knew I was going to be there, I don’t know how much he knew about what I was going to do. And it worked out, where I was at, he could have went another way. I got really lucky that he came by us because. If you watch it back, my wife was with me, Michelle [McCool] she nudged me like ‘here he comes’ and I don’t know if I would have even done the interview hadn’t I been in the right spot. It worked out perfectly for you, perfectly for me. He came right by me, I said ‘you wanna do this’ and there it was. It blew up. You were in the right place at the right time!”
