WWE Saturday Night’s Main Event XL brought the retirement of Bill Goldberg. The 2018 Hall of Famer failed to dethrone Gunther of the World Heavyweight Championship, and then stood up for his son in a major way. However, a post-match mishap was seen as a big deal backstage, and sources are now opening up on what really went down.
The Ring General battled Da Man for almost 14 minutes at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta on Saturday night at WWE SNME XL. The main event came right after Seth Rollins called an injury-forced audible in his loss to LA Knight, but sources deny any rumors on a Money In the Bank briefcase cash-in being planned for the main event. After taking out Gunther for bullying his son in a post-match segment, Goldberg was joined in the ring by friends and family for a retirement speech. The moment was cut for NBC viewers in an unfortunate mishap that brought fan backlash on social media.
The Goldberg vs. Gunther main event suffered from time cuts forced by the Rollins injury situation, according to Fightful Select. Goldberg’s post-match speech was also impacted, and that did not go over well with many backstage.
Sources report that at least one un-named WWE higher-up official apologized to Goldberg for what happened with his retirement speech. WWE had a hard-out with NBC for the ending of SNME, and the show was running long. While the NBC feed cut away mid-speech, leaving many fans unable to see what the WCW Legend had to say, sources acknowledge that this clearly was not intentional, adding that a number of people within WWE felt bad about what happened.
WWE Releases Full Goldberg Retirement Speech
Seth Rollins suffered a knee injury during his WWE SNME XL match against LA Knight, and after calling an audible, the heel Superstar was defeated at around the 12-minute mark. Rollins was originally scheduled to win, and Fightful Select reports that the injury situation forced major shifts that had an impact on the timing of the show.
Rollins vs. Knight took place just before the main event, which saw World Heavyweight Champion Gunther retain over Bill Goldberg. The WWE Hall of Famer was defeated in his retirement match, but he took Gunther out after the match for bullying his son. The latest update from backstage notes that as SNME ended, there was a quick plan in place for Goldberg’s full speech to be released online to make up for the issue on broadcast TV.
The 10-minute video of Goldberg’s post-SNME speech, seen above, was released today on YouTube at 2:29pm ET. As of exactly six hours later, there are 373,076 views and 18,201 likes.