Drew McIntyre Was The Undertaker’s Original Opponent At WrestleMania 26, Why He Wasn’t Ready For The Opportunity
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Drew McIntyre was the latest guest on Broken Skull Sessions with Steve Austin, and the current WWE Champion spoke about the early years of his WWE career. Austin asked McIntyre about the rumors that he was the original opponent in mind for The Undertaker at WrestleMania 26 instead of Shawn Michaels, a match that is still remembered as one of the greatest matches of all time. McIntyre says he only learned of those plans from Michaels after the fact, and says he probably wouldn’t have had the match he should have at the time.
“[I was supposed to face him], that’s what I heard, after the fact. I wasn’t told directly. It was supposed to build to a match with ‘Taker, I was always told. But I heard you know basically from Shawn, afterwards, I got to spend some time with Shawn, work with Shawn but that was the plan and then obviously Mania had the great Shawn and Taker match, the retirement match. But if I had that match at the time, it wouldn’t have been what it could have been, should have been.”
McIntyre started off with a huge push but he started falling down the card after some time, and he opened up to Austin about some of the turmoil going on in his personal life coming around the same time with professional life was on the downturn.
“I certainly wasn’t ready for that opportunity at that time. But it was probably right after Mania that things started to go kind of downhill. It started personally and to be honest, this is about the time my mother got sick for the first time back home in Scotland and got the cancer diagnosis, and that rocked my world. The most important person in the world to me and I started acting out, like drinking basically every night at that point. Things weren’t going exactly to plan at work and professionally started falling apart. Things weren’t going exactly to plan the way I felt they should have been. And I was acting out,” McIntyre explained, “things started doing downhill professionally as well as personally, and it was just the vicious spiral and just kept going and going and going and basically every night I was out and about and taking my mind off things and it was directly affecting my work. And like I say, my personal life was not good at the time.”
McIntyre also told Austin that no one knew about his drinking except for his close circle of friends, and hypothesized that he probably would have been fired if the company knew about it.
Check out the full episode of Broken Skull Sessions with Drew McIntyre at this link.
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