Brock Lesnar left his boots in the ring. He hugged Paul Heyman. The crowd chanted “thank you.” WWE moved him to the alumni section of their website. It was over. Done. The Beast had finally walked away.
That lasted about a month.
https://x.com/SportsCenter/status/2045992797308600795
On May 18, Lesnar showed up on Raw, hit Oba Femi with multiple F5s, and Paul Heyman whipped out a pre-signed contract for a rematch at Clash In Italy. Tonight. The man who left his boots in the ring at WrestleMania 42 didn’t even make it to Memorial Day before lacing up a new pair.
And look, I get it. Lesnar says Femi embarrassed him and he can’t go out like that. Fine. That’s a perfectly acceptable wrestling storyline. But let’s stop pretending the retirement was real. Let’s stop pretending any of them are real.
WWE has turned the retirement into a booking device. The boots in the ring. The tearful embrace. The slow walk up the ramp while the crowd does the wave goodbye thing. It’s not a farewell anymore. It’s Act One. The whole point of the retirement is to set up the return pop, and brother, we buy it every single time. Shawn Michaels did it. Terry Funk did it approximately 400 times. Ric Flair cried real tears and then showed up in TNA. This is the oldest play in the book, and somehow the boots-in-the-ring visual still gets us.
Eric Bischoff said he was “surprised and confused” by the return, which is generous. A Hall of Famer watching a WWE retirement and being confused when the guy comes back is like being confused that the magician’s assistant wasn’t actually sawed in half. You’ve seen this trick before. We’ve all seen this trick before.
https://x.com/Fightful/status/2046233347580477849
Triple H described Lesnar as a “walk back through the curtain, very angry, and go to his bus” type of guy. In other words, nobody backstage even had a conversation with him about what happened. The emotional farewell just… happened, and then everybody acted shocked when the contractual reality of the situation kicked in. Bischoff theorized it was reactive rather than planned. Sure. And the pre-signed contract Heyman produced out of thin air was spontaneous too.
The best part is Cody Rhodes openly admitting he wants “90s-style retirements” where you say you’re retired and then you’re not. At least somebody in the locker room is being honest about the grift. The Undisputed WWE Champion just told you the retirement-industrial complex is alive and well, and he thinks it rules.
Here’s the thing that makes this one especially funny. Lesnar is 48. He got squashed by Oba Femi in four minutes at WrestleMania. The SummerSlam retirement in Minneapolis is already being talked about as the real goodbye, in his hometown, with a proper send-off. Which means this retirement was the fake one so that retirement can be the real one. Unless that one is also a setup for the next return, which it probably is, because that’s how this works now.
We don’t do endings in WWE. We do pauses. And the pauses keep getting shorter. See you at SummerSlam, Brock. And then again at the Royal Rumble. And then again at next year’s Mania. The boots will be waiting.
