Anyone who ever watched Bill Goldberg during his WCW days knows that “Goldberg” has a pre-match routine: he barricades himself in his locker room, where he gets angry and headbutts a locker or a door, then walks out of his dressing room sporting the wound from said headbutt, gets escorted by security to the entrance ramp, and then proceeds to snort fire and smash fools.
On Monday night’s episode of Raw, he did the headbutt part … but then went to the ring to do a promo while dripping blood from his head, and although this edited video from WWE only shows a small part of it, Goldberg seemed to barely know where he was at first.
He lost his place and train of thought several times and stumbled over his words. He could have just been nervous or amped up or just generally stumbling over his lines, as literally everyone does at one time or another, but the sweaty, bloody visage painted a much more frightening picture.
On Tuesday, everyone got to breathe a gigantic sigh of relief, as Goldberg took to Instagram to announce that he was going to retire his pre-match headbutt “for now” (hopefully “for good”), on the grounds that it made him “loopy” during Raw. Yeah, Bill. We uh … We kind of picked up on that.
I understand why Goldberg was doing the thing, even at 50 years old. He’d been away from wrestling for 12 years, and for so long, the headbutt was synonymous with the character for him, and of course for a lot of the fans. Goldberg appearing from his dressing room with a fresh wound on his head is an iconic part of the Goldberg character, and I defy anyone to say it wasn’t a huge part of the mythos, especially in WCW.
But buddy … not for a promo. Be careful, man. You just had to come out and get stared at. It’s like William H. Macy’s character getting braces in Magnolia. No need for headbutts, Donnie.
