WWE United States Champion Bobby Lashley has explained why Vince McMahon told him to take time off and miss WrestleMania 38.
In April 2022, WrestleMania 38 took over the AT&T Stadium in Texas for a stupendous two-night extravaganza of sports entertainment. The nights were headlined by Stone Cold Steve Austin returning to the ring for the first time in 19 years to defeat Kevin Owens and Roman Reigns unifying the WWE and Universal Titles against Brock Lesnar.
Further down the card, Bobby Lashley had his hands full as he took on the giant Omos. Lashley inflicted defeat on the giant star but now he has revealed that former WWE Chairman Vince McMahon gave him the green light to miss the show due to injury.
Speaking on The Masked Man Show Bobby Lashley revealed that a shoulder injury almost kept him off of The Grandest Stage of Them All:
“I tore my shoulder two months before WrestleMania, I couldn’t even raise my hand. I kept that quiet. I took like three weeks off and said, ‘I have to make it to WrestleMania.’ I called Vince (McMahon), Vince was like, ‘Ah, let’s take off, get surgery,’ spend four months off. I was like, ‘I can’t do that. There is no way I’m going to do that.’”
“I sat at home for a couple of weeks and started going crazy. I was like, ‘I can’t stay at home, I have to go to work.’ I started training, getting ready, rehabbing, and I got back in and made it for WrestleMania. There is no downtime. Every other sport has an offseason, we don’t have an offseason.”
According to Lashley, he wasn’t happy that stories about his injury began to spread given how few people knew about it:
“It [the report] circulated. I get p*ssed off about that a little bit. Stuff that is supposed to be inside here gets leaked out. I don’t know how it got leaked out. I didn’t tell anybody. It was between me and the trainers. The trainers were like, ‘Go get an MRI,’ I got my MRI and the MRI said I had a 75% tear in my rotator cuff, my labrum was torn. I was like, ‘Does that mean I get a day off?’”