Goldberg recalled why he was so angry at a comedy segment involving Chris Jericho.
The animosity between Chris Jericho and Goldberg is well-documented, and the two even had a backstage altercation during their time in WWE.
However, tension between the two began years before their backstage fight, as Goldberg was angry with Jericho over a comedy segment during their time in WCW. While the two were involved in an angle, Jericho was instructed to beat a Goldberg lookalike on pay-per-view. During Goldberg’s appearance on Talk is Jericho, Chris Jericho recalled the segment and finding out that Goldberg was angry at him.
“I remember the one week I showed up for whatever PPV it was, and they had me wrestle… it wasn’t even Gillberg, it was another guy that was doing a Goldberg kind of gimmick. It was Terry Taylor who told me, ‘Beat this guy and pretend he’s Goldberg,’ and I was like, ‘Alright.’ And so we did it, and then the next couple days you found out about it, and you were really angry at me. You were like, ‘Oh, I heard about this Jericho.'”
Goldberg responded, admitting that he took things very personally because he didn’t come from the world of wrestling and didn’t understand the storytelling nature of the business.
“I took it so personally, man, and it’s a business, it’s a fabricated business. You know, I was a football player, man, that’s me. I’m a meathead, I’m a very simplistic person. And I take things way too, personally, I really do, I have my entire life. You know, that’s a lot of who I am and it creates situations such as the situation that you and I had.
“And it was, it was purely a misunderstanding in my outlook, I didn’t know the wrestling business, I didn’t grow up, I didn’t grow up really being a huge fan of it. I remember watching Texas Championship Wrestling with my grandmother all the time. But I never really aspired to because my entire life was predicated around becoming a professional football player.
“And so I really didn’t understand the business. I didn’t understand the soap opera really that it is, and I didn’t understand like I do now that that character was you have to have range, you have to be able to go from one end of the spectrum to the other and back, you know, the snap of the fingers. And I didn’t realize that and everything I did, and everything I wanted to be a part of was based on violence, right. And, you know, going from zero to 100 is pretty cool.
“But being able to, to show some dimension and diversity throughout that is also quite important. And maybe it was something that I tried to leave for later on, because they say sometimes when you do something in the ring, you can’t go back on it. Right? It’s tough to keep a character protected when there’s so many people trying to do certain things to it.”
Elsewhere on the podcast, Goldberg said that he’s “done apologizing” to Bret Hart.
If you use any quotes from this transcription, please credit Talk is Jericho and link back to this article with a h/t to Inside the Ropes.