The wrestling world was shocked this past August by the tragic news that Windham Rotunda, better known as WWE’s Bray Wyatt, had passed away at just 36 years old. The news was announced by WWE Chief Content Officer Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque and it was later reported that the former WWE Champion contracted COVID-19 earlier this year which led to him suffering a heart attack due to the disease worsening an already-present heart condition.
Prior to his passing, Wyatt appeared several times on WWE programming throughout early 2023. He competed in his final on-screen match at the 2023 Royal Rumble where he defeated LA Knight in a Pitch Black Mountain Dew match before going on to tease a WrestleMania 39 match with Bobby Lashley. Wyatt made his final TV appearance on the February 27th edition of Raw, where he taunted Lashley, before disappearing from TV unexpectedly until his sudden passing in August.
However, it has now come to light that Lashley wasn’t the company’s first choice for Wyatt’s opponent on the Grandest Stage Of Them All. Karrion Kross recently revealed that he was originally slated to face Wyatt at WrestleMania in Los Angeles and detailed the two’s multi-hour conversations about how the feud and match would pan out whilst speaking on Insight With Chris Van Vilet.
“We were supposed to work last WrestleMania and nobody knew that except for a collection of writers and some people in the office,” Kross revealed. “We were slated to do something. We would talk for hours about how we wanted to get into it, what we wanted to deliver creatively for people, where we thought we both needed to be. We had ideas with Alexa [Bliss] and Bo [Dallas] and Scarlett and then everything happened the way it did.
But he left a mark on anybody and everybody that he ever met. It’s just very strange, the way everything kind of just played out, beautiful and tragic. He was always an inspiration to me. He always showed me warmth. He showed everybody warmth, you know what I mean? But I have more stories than we have time to share. We were cool and I’ll never forget them.”
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If you use any quotes from this article, please give a h/t to Haus of Wrestling and credit Insight With Chris Van Vilet.