Triple H Explains Why Brock Lesnar Walked Out Of WWE SmackDown

Sep 2, 2022

Ahead of the July 22 episode of Friday Night SmackDown, Vince McMahon announced his retirement just a few hours before the show aired. It was reported shortly after that Brock Lesnar had walked out of SmackDown and his status for the show was in question. Eventually cooler heads prevailed and Brock did indeed make a brief appearance during the episode when he hit Theory with the F5.

Triple H recently spoke to Ariel Helwani about what motivated Brock Lesnar to walk out and he confirmed that The Beast was reacting to Vince McMahon’s retirement announcement.

“There’s some truth to it. Yeah. Look, you have to understand Brock’s relationship with Vince and Brock’s relationship with combat sports period. He has a relationship with Dana [White] that’s a certain way, he has a relationship with Vince that’s a certain way. But Vince is the devil he knows and Brock is inherently not a trusting person, it’s just how he is. He doesn’t like people. [laughs]

But he’s not a trusting person and I think in that moment, where you just hear Vince is out, [he thinks] ‘Well now what’s going to happen? I’m out of here.’ You know what I mean? I think there was just a moment of that, nothing more, nothing less. It’s not like he looked at it like ‘I don’t like anybody else here, I don’t trust anybody else here.’ There was a moment of ‘I’m going to walk on this’ and then we have conversations, he comes back.”

The Game went on to say that he has a great relationship with Brock, and after they talked about where things would go next for him Lesnar liked what he heard.

“I have a great relationship with Brock. Have we had issues over the years because of at a certain point, he was a talent [and] I was a talent? Talent all get along to some degree, but there’s also a very real rivalry between all of them. They all want to be the best, everybody wants to be the best and be in that spot. So yeah, I’m sure there’s some level of mistrust or those things. He’s always had a relationship — Brock’s not a ‘let me just deal with these people over here to take that off your plate, Vince’ [guy]. He wants something, he calls Vince directly. When he has wanted to do a deal, he calls Vince directly.

“There’s a period of time when he first came back where he was dealing with me directly and then, because he and Vince weren’t getting long when he first came back just from past stuff, but over time he rekindled his relationship and now everything goes through Vince. It’s just a different time now and I think now that he has had a moment to digest it. He digested it a little bit, came back to the building, we did business that night and had long conversations about where we would go next. He liked what he heard and how he’s been dealt with, so it’s all good.”

Brock Lesnar last competed in WWE when he challenged Roman Reigns for the Undisputed WWE Universal Championship, but unfortunately for Brock it was Roman who walked out with the gold that night. There’s currently no word on when Brock might return to WWE. Stay tuned for more updates as they become available.