Goldberg Reveals He Had COVID When He Got Called About Match With Roman Reigns

In an interview with Car Cast (via Fightful), Goldberg revealed that he had COVID when he got called by WWE for a match with Roman Reigns at Elimination Chamber. Goldberg would go on to lose the match, which is believed to be the final match on his contract.

He said: “Roman is a great dude. It would have been nice for me to do it in my 40s, but I had to do it at 55. I think they planned it out so he had more of an opportunity to beat me. Let’s be perfectly honest, I would have squished him 15 years ago, but now, it’s a different story. I’m 55, I do two matches a year, what am I going to do? Come in, one of the bigger pay-per-views, and I’m going to beat the WWE Universal Champion and take the belt home for six months and come back? I don’t write the script, I just kind of follow it. Kind of follow it. One of the reasons I came back is to give back to the business. If I can set Roman up and make him look like a million bucks going into WrestleMania against Brock, that’s my job. I’m behind the eight ball. Not only do a plethora of people understand what the outcome will most likely be, but I obviously have an extremely short period of time to get ready for it. I hadn’t trained for three months, I have COVID when I get the phone call to go. I literally had two weeks in the gym to get ready for this. What people don’t understand, and it will come out in the documentary, is it’s tough to do that as a 20-year-old, it’s more difficult as a 30-year-old, a 40-year-old, it’s almost impossible, a 55-year-old, I’m one of the .003% humans on the planet that can pull something like that off. In doing it, it’s very tough mentally to keep yourself in a positive space because you have so many negatives going against you. Then, 90% of them understand what the storyline is going to be. I’m fighting an uphill battle the whole way, but at this point and throughout the years I’ve been able to do this on a short schedule, you go out, you do your job to the best of your ability, you can’t contribute to the creative because that’s not my job. I just go out and try to perform the best I can and hope people appreciate it in some shape or fashion.“