Seth Rollins opens up on Brock Lesnar reportedly changing their WrestleMania match
One of the most well-known WWE backstage stories of 2019 came at WrestleMania 35 when the Universal Championship encounter between Brock Lesnar and Seth Rollins was moved from the penultimate match on the card to the start of the main pay-per-view.
It was reported by the Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer after WrestleMania that Lesnar and Paul Heyman had pushed for WWE’s decision-makers to move the position of the match, so a late call was made for it to open the show.
Speaking on his ‘WWE 365’ documentary on the WWE Network, Rollins confirmed that his match against Lesnar was supposed to go on second-to-last before Ronda Rousey vs. Becky Lynch vs. Charlotte Flair, but he was informed during the first match on the kickoff show – roughly 90 minutes before ‘Mania officially started – that there had been a change of plan.
“In a weird way it was cool because it allowed me to just centre my focus. I didn’t have to deal with any of the distractions that you normally do with WrestleMania, and I didn’t have to get inside my own head, overthink the match, overthink the performance, all that stuff. It was just… I had to go out there and do me, which I’m pretty good at.”
Brock Lesnar vs. Seth Rollins - what happened next?
The longest WrestleMania of all time featured one of the shortest World Championship matches of all time, as Seth Rollins hit Brock Lesnar with a low-blow and followed up with three stomps to defeat “The Beast” in a match lasting just 2 minutes and 30 seconds.