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Bobby Lashley rolled off Kevin Owens after the referee’s hand hit the mat a third time — eyes open wide, popping from his skull in joy and almost disbelief. The encounter he has heard about for 20 years, pushed hard for — and almost given up on — was his at last.
Bobby Lashley vs. Brock Lesnar is happening. Finally.
“I think everybody else wanted it to happen, but until it’s actually official it was kind of one of those things like: ‘Are they going to take this away? Is this going to be taken away?” Lashley said in a Zoom interview. “And then when it happened, it was like ‘Wait a minute, it’s real now.’”
The emotions continued to flow — the traditional selling that’s a hallmark of any good professional wrestling angle with hints of real-life feelings shining through — after Lashley’s victory in the fatal four-way match on “Monday Night Raw” that earned him a WWE championship match with Lesnar at the Royal Rumble on Saturday (8 p.m., Peacock). The 45-year old Lashley’s face lit up with destructive glee as he let out a yell and soaked it in — though he admitted it’s not truly real until they are face to face at The Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis.
“It was one of those things that I’d be like, ‘Oh, that would be awesome,’” Lashley said. “Then that thought kind of withered over the years and I was like, ‘Well you know what, if it happens it happens.’”
He and Lesnar, 44, both are well-accomplished combat sports athletes. As an amateur wrestler, Lesnar was a two-time All-American and NCAA heavyweight champion. Lashley, the son of a U.S. Army drill sergeant, was a three-time NAIA national champion at 177 pounds. He was also an International Military Sports Council gold medalist who had his dreams of reaching the Olympics cut short after being injured while ducking for cover during a bank robbery in 2003. Lesnar won the UFC heavyweight championship and posted a 5-3-0 (1 NC) record in the promotion. Lashley, who fought most notably for StrikeForce and Bellator, went 15-2 in MMA.
However, their paths never truly crossed. Lesnar left WWE for the UFC around the time Lashley came in for his first run in Vince McMahon’s company. The Beast returned to WWE while The All Mighty was still doing MMA and wrestling in Total Nonstop Action. It wasn’t until Lashley came back to WWE in 2018 that a match felt likely, but he still needed to rise to the main event level to be worthy of a clash with Lesnar.
Lashley’s strong second act in WWE peaked in 2021 as he won his first WWE championship in March and held it for 196 days, finally losing when Big E cashed in his Money in the Bank contract. It put Lashley in position to be the guy WWE turned to after plans changed ahead of the Day 1 pay-per-view on New Year’s Day when Universal champion Roman Reigns tested positive for COVID-19. Lesnar, his scheduled opponent, was instead inserted in the WWE championship match and won. It opened the door for a meeting with Lashley that “makes sense.”
“When Brock’s coming back he’s only coming back for the top, the [top] spot and I wasn’t in that,” Lashley said. “And he said it. He said it on Raw, he was like, ‘We weren’t in the place to have that match.’ I wasn’t. But winning the title and having the run I’ve had the past few years, I think all those things enabled it and put me at that top level, so now he focuses on that match and looks at the match a little different now.”
Had it not been a pro wrestling match that brought him and Lesnar together, Lashley would have liked to have seen it happen in MMA as their amateur wrestling careers happened well before they became fighters the fans grew to know. He said he believes Lesnar would feel the same way and “would have wanted a fight” because once you get to the level of being a fighter, it’s in your blood. It is part of what he believes makes that match they will have so intriguing to fans.
“This has got to be one of those matches where everything has to get thrown out there in order to beat two people that refuse to lose and two people that are really unbeatable,” Lashley said.
He brought the fight to Lesnar when he speared him through the barricade at Day 1 for their first physical contact and they came face to face on “Monday Night Raw” two weeks ago. The Kansas native took the time to size up Lesnar and get a feel for what he was thinking like he would for any fight in his career. Lashley has said his opponent has no soul.
“He had blank. It was like one of those people that don’t have remorse,” Lashley said. “You can always tell some kind of emotion out of everybody. When you look at somebody’s eyes and you see no emotion, none, none at all. I think that’s what fears a lot of people because they can’t understand who he is and when they do look at him, it’s just like a shocking overwhelming feeling….
“That’s why he’s been like that and people don’t understand it, who he is and what he’s able to do, what he’s capable of doing. He’s accomplished things. Look at some of his matches in the UFC, like when he tried to open Frank Mir’s whole entire head open and then got up and wasn’t like are you OK, but ‘Yeah! If he dies he dies.’ ”
All of it adds a different level of believability than your ordinary pro wrestling matches. Lashley hopes it answers all the “what ifs” for the fans and said everybody knows “that things happen in these matches.”
“There’s some cheap shots that get thrown and, ‘Oh, let’s see how he reacts,’” Lashley said.
He will face a much different Lesnar than we’ve seen at any time in WWE. Lesnar is sporting long hair, a beard and doing a lot of his own promos despite reuniting with advocate Paul Heyman. Lashley has experienced a lot of success in his second WWE run working alongside a manager such as Lio Rush and now an excellent partnership with MVP. When asked if he would like a run without a mouthpiece at some point, Lashley isn’t ready to mess with a good thing.
“I don’t think it really matters either way,” he said. “I think what we’re doing right now works, so we always try to change things that work. I don’t think we need to change anything. We should just let it work.”
On screen, Lashley has shown no interest in working with former Hurt Business members Shelton Benjamin and Cedric Alexander. He said his character just doesn’t want to win the WWE championship with anyone’s help, just as he did the first time. What he’s most proud of from his run with the belt was that he got to defeat significant opponents after winning it, most notably Randy Orton, Drew McIntyre and Goldberg.
“That kind of really locked it in,” he said. “Everybody thought, ‘Drew’s gonna beat him at Mania and then we’re all going to jump up and down and cheer.’ Nope. I win.”
His reign has also been part of a recent run for black world champions in WWE. Prior to Kofi Kingston winning at WrestleMania in 2019, WWE had just two black male world champs in its history. They’ve had three since then with Kingston, Lashley and Big E. The sports entertainment company also had Sasha Banks and Bianca Belair hold world titles on the women’s side.
“It shouldn’t be a point where you have to say, ‘there’s a black champion, there’s a Mexican champion, there’s an Asian champion,’” he said. “It’s not, it’s not that way anymore. We want to make it the norm. Like I beat Brock, nobody’s going to be saying, ‘Oh, I wonder if there is going to be a black champion.’ No, it’s going to be a frickin WWE champion. That’s who it’s gonna be and I think all of us wanted to get to that point of being the norm because we wanted little kids growing up to look up to us and say, ‘I want to be a champion just like him. He can do it, I can do it.’”
Lashley said he always believed this opportunity against Lesnar was bound to happen
“They [WWE] would have heard the reaction to any kind of interaction we had with each other and then they would of said, ‘Oh, boy, damn. I guess we heard it a lot, but now we really understand it,’” Lashley said.
Now we get to live and see it.
So after more than two decades of waiting, what would it mean for Lashley to beat Lesnar — something he says he’s allowed himself to visualize while going to sleep at night?
“I could tell you all kinds of words, I could think of all kinds of analogies but I don’t think anything is going to be able to express how I feel or I don’t know how I’m gonna feel,” Lashley said. “I think I’ll probably black out right after I put him out. He’ll probably fall out. Make him tap, I’ll probably fall out too. You wouldn’t know who the champion was. Just throw the title down, somebody won it.”
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