The Undertaker has revealed the story behind the moment he thanked Triple H for during his 2022 WWE Hall of Fame speech, explaining how a few words immediately before his WrestleMania 31 match with Bray Wyatt helped him overcome serious doubts about whether he could still perform.
Speaking on Insight with Chris Van Vliet, Mark Calaway traced those doubts back to WrestleMania 30, where Brock Lesnar ended The Undertaker’s undefeated WrestleMania streak.
During the match, Undertaker suffered a severe concussion and was taken to hospital before the show had finished. “So, so on the night that you know, I really say, I’m sure everybody at this point knows, but when the streak got broke by Lesnar, I got a really bad concussion, and didn’t remember the match.”
Undertaker said his memory did not begin returning until several hours later. “Yeah, I went right to the hospital before Mania was over, and my memory didn’t even start coming back till I don’t know, it was four or five in the morning.”
Doctors repeatedly asked him basic questions as they monitored his condition, but Undertaker could not answer them. “Crazy, the two people that I knew. This is what’s crazy: I knew who Michelle was, and I knew who Vince was. I didn’t. I couldn’t have told you my name. I couldn’t have told you where I was. It was really, really bizarre.”
To this day, Undertaker has no memory of actually wrestling the match against Lesnar. “I don’t know. Just I did it on instinct, I guess, because I don’t, I don’t remember it.”
His last memory from WrestleMania 30 was from hours before he entered the ring. “My last memory of the day was, I don’t, maybe 2 o’clock. That’s the last thing that I remember.”
Even the extensive preparation he traditionally underwent before wrestling — including stretching, warming up and receiving injections in his knees and hips — remains completely absent from his memory. “I don’t remember any of it and never did and I still haven’t. I just don’t remember it at all.”
Undertaker eventually recovered and received medical clearance to wrestle again, but as WrestleMania 31 approached, the psychological effects of what had happened began weighing on him. “Once I recover from the concussion and I start training again and I’m wondering if I’m gonna come back the next year, self-doubt kind of starts to set in.”
Part of the problem was that Undertaker could not identify exactly what had caused the concussion. At his age and with decades of punishment behind him, he began wondering whether it was simply a sign that his body could no longer withstand wrestling. “There’s just so many bumps that you can take, and those are the self-doubt thoughts that were creeping into my mind. It’s like, what if it happens again?”
Doctors had given him a clean bill of health and told him there was no medical reason to prevent him from returning. “They were like, no, no, man. They were like, we can’t tell you not to do this.”
Despite that reassurance, the doubts returned immediately before his match against Bray Wyatt at WrestleMania 31 on March 29, 2015.
With Wyatt already in the ring and Undertaker waiting in the Gorilla position for his entrance, Triple H noticed something was wrong. “I think he could sense it, that I was struggling.”
Undertaker recalled being crouched in the corner when Triple H quietly approached him. “He just comes up and he goes, ‘Hey,’ he says, ‘Don’t forget who the f*** you are. You’re the f***ing Undertaker.’”
For Undertaker, that was all he needed. “It was like it was just enough to like, you know what, you’re right, you know, I’ve done this a million times, everything’s gonna be fine.”
He went through the curtain, defeated Wyatt and proved to himself that the previous year’s concussion had not marked the end of his career. “And I went out and had the match, but man, I wouldn’t say panicked, but there was just so much self-doubt in my head, like that I hadn’t experienced in a long, long time.”
Seven years later, when Undertaker was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, he publicly thanked Triple H for reminding him who he was when he needed to hear it most.
