Brock Lesnar left Friday’s WWE SmackDown event a few hours before the show started after hearing that Vince McMahon was retiring. Lesnar reportedly said something to the effect of, “If he’s gone, I’m gone.”
Lesnar was removed from the SmackDown preview on WWE.com at one point while the company WWE was working on convincing Lesnar to return. Lesnar returned and appeared in the show’s final segment, where he laid out Theory.
Fightful Select reported one source described the situation as being “overblown.” It was noted that things “blew over,” and Lesnar eventually returned. WWE creative did rewrite the script for the show, and the new script didn’t feature Lesnar. WWE left the last segment open in a way where Lesnar could be included if he returned.
PWinsider.com reported that Lesnar was originally scheduled to immediately leave the arena to return home after appearing in the opening segment. It’s still unclear where Lesnar went after leaving the arena or how close he was to flying back home.
On today’s Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer noted that this wasn’t a situation where Lesnar left the arena only to return right before his segment. WWE also didn’t hide Lesnar from everyone backstage once he did return.
“I know he was back in the building by 8:30 [pm local time] as far as a timeline goes. It wasn’t that he was hidden away, or they wanted to do this big…like the MJF thing where you’re doing the work, and you show up at the last second, and nobody knows you’re back. It wasn’t this big guarded secret. I shouldn’t say a guarded secret because it probably was supposed to be a secret. It wasn’t as if he didn’t come back…he didn’t show up at 9:45 and go out there at 9:50, put it that way.”
Lesnar is scheduled to challenge Undisputed WWE Universal Champion Roman Reigns at SummerSlam on July 30.
