GUNTHER gets candid about the match with Goldberg.
On July 12th, WWE is presenting Saturday Night's Main Event from Atlanta, Georgia, and it will feature Goldberg's final match. He'll be challenging GUNTHER for the World Heavyweight Championship.
Both competitors have made the media rounds in the lead-up to the match, and GUNTHER stopped by The Masked Man Show. He dove into the variables surrounding being part of Goldberg's final match, such as the WWE Hall of Famer's age and whether he can still go in the ring.
GUNTHER stated that he's looking forward to all of it and thinks the ingredients are available for it to be special. GUNTHER, while he feels they are distinctly different situations, compared it to the bout with Pat McAfee from Backlash and said he enjoyed that as well.
“Yeah, I thrive in that (being the villain). I think it’s a great scenario because that’s the other way now. We just talked about how I saw Goldberg when I grew up. One, I’m not a fan anymore. I’m a professional and it’s my duty to… I have to think about what’s best to do to the entertainment of everyone, and it’s gonna be my job to, yeah, take that special moment away from everyone and I feel like that struggle leading there is gonna be interesting. I think it’s an interesting situation all-around because the big question is obviously to a degree… Goldberg is 58 at that point. Does he still got it? How’s that match gonna look like? What kind of performance are we gonna see from him? … With this being his last match, being for the World Heavyweight Championship, I think it’s all the ingredients for a very special scenario that is a little bit out of the norm that we usually see, and I love being involved in those situations. Similar -- obviously, very different -- but similar to the Pat McAfee stuff. I enjoyed doing that because it was just a different setup, a different scenario. I can have a good match with a good opponent. That’s what I get paid to do. Nothing less is expected. But there’s like, different scenarios and that’s what makes it really interesting for me. So I’m looking forward to that.”
The World Heavyweight Champion went on to add that being Goldberg's last match came out of the blue. He stated that he feels he benefits from sharing the ring with Goldberg.
“I feel like it’s a little bit out of the blue, because that’s nothing I would have expected, and that was also obviously -- I don’t know -- how I got up in wrestling or I got brought up, I feel like Goldberg is the complete opposite of how I would have imagined a wrestler that I really look up to. But, also, I’m able to understand that business is done differently as well. There’s different styles and just over here, the showmanship, the looks of a person are maybe sometimes more important than how technically finesse we are in the ring. I don’t wanna touch the style and it’s very successful. So in that aspect, being in WWE in the position that I am now, being able to -- and that’s the thing with Goldberg is… like I said before, you can say whatever you want about him but, he’s one of the most outstanding guys in the history of this business and seeing a lot of the guys that he had before, it’s a great opportunity for me to step into the position now to be his last opponent because with all due respect, that’s what it is. I gain from that, being in the ring with Bill Goldberg because when he shows up, there’s a lot of interest in that and yeah, happy I got that opportunity.”
GUNTHER regained possession of the World Heavyweight Championship on the June 9th WWE Raw when he choked out Jey Uso. The bout against Goldberg, as of this writing, will be his first defense of his current reign.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit The Masked Man Show with an H/T to Fightful for the transcriptions.
