Triple H Addresses Brock Lesnar Leaving Smackdown Before Returning

It has been confirmed by Triple H that Brock Lesnar left a live edition of Smackdown on July 22nd before Lesnar eventually returned to appear at the end of the show.

The date of July 22nd was memorable because that’s when the wrestling world was stunned to find out Vince McMahon was retiring from WWE as the Chairman and CEO. It was announced at at 4:05pm ET, so it was less than four hours before Smackdown.

Prior to that July 22nd edition of Smackdown, there were reports that former WWE and Universal Champion Brock Lesnar was so upset about McMahon’s departure that Lesnar left the building in Boston.

Lesnar was very close with McMahon after returning to WWE in 2012 following a successful run as an MMA fighter in the UFC. Even though Lesnar left the building on the day that McMahon retired from WWE, he did eventually come back and hit an F5 on Theory to end the show.

The man that replaced McMahon as the Head of WWE Creative is Paul “Triple H” Levesque, who spoke about Lesnar’s walkout in a new interview with Ariel Helwani of BT Sport. During the discussion, Triple H confirmed that Lesnar did walk out of Smackdown:

“There’s some truth to it. Yeah. Look, you have to understand Brock’s relationship with Vince and Brock’s relationship with combat sports period. He has a relationship with Dana [White] that’s a certain way, he has a relationship with Vince that’s a certain way. But Vince is the devil he knows and Brock is inherently not a trusting person, it’s just how he is. He doesn’t like people.” [laughs]

“But he’s not a trusting person and I think in that moment, where you just hear Vince is out, [he thinks] ‘Well now what’s going to happen? I’m out of here.’ You know what I mean? I think there was just a moment of that, nothing more, nothing less. It’s not like he looked at it like ‘I don’t like anybody else here, I don’t trust anybody else here.’ There was a moment of ‘I’m going to walk on this’ and then we have conversations, he comes back.”

Triple H went on to say that even though there might have been past issues between them, they have resolved that. Hunter made a point to say “it’s all good” with Lesnar and WWE now:

“I have a great relationship with Brock. Have we had issues over the years because of at a certain point, he was a talent [and] I was a talent? Talent all get along to some degree, but there’s also a very real rivalry between all of them. They all want to be the best, everybody wants to be the best and be in that spot. So yeah, I’m sure there’s some level of mistrust or those things. He’s always had a relationship — Brock’s not a ‘let me just deal with these people over here to take that off your plate, Vince’ [guy]. He wants something, he calls Vince directly. When he has wanted to do a deal, he calls Vince directly.”

“There’s a period of time when he first came back where he was dealing with me directly and then, because he and Vince weren’t getting long when he first came back just from past stuff, but over time he rekindled his relationship and now everything goes through Vince.”

“It’s just a different time now and I think now that he has had a moment to digest it. He digested it a little bit, came back to the building, we did business that night and had long conversations about where we would go next. He liked what he heard and how he’s been dealt with, so it’s all good.”

Lesnar’s last appearance on WWE television was at SummerSlam in Nashville on July 30. Lesnar failed to defeat the Undisputed WWE Universal Champion Roman Reigns in a Last Man Standing Match thanks to Reigns getting some help from his cousins, The Usos. It is not known when Lesnar may return to WWE television.