William Regal revealed exactly what happened during his infamous match with Goldberg in WCW.
On February 9th 1998, William Regal battled Goldberg in a match on WCW Monday Nitro. The bout took place during the infancy of Goldberg’s incredible undefeated streak, and he was still a rookie wrestler.
He had mainly competed in squash matches against jobbers. His wrestling skills were an unknown quantity, with nobody knowing if he could wrestle outside of his short, dominant matches.
However, it soon went badly. Different retelling of the story paint a vastly different picture of the match. Some people claim that Regal began to “shoot” on Goldberg, forcing him to wrestle in a way he couldn’t and intentionally hurting the future WCW Champion.
However, Regal completely denies any wrongdoing. He spoke with Inside The Ropes about the William Regal vs Goldberg match from 1998, where he gave his side of the tale.
Regal revealed that he was told to wrestle a “competitive match” with Goldberg, and not to have his usual squash match.
“You’ll never see me change my side of the story of that.” William Regal said. “I’ve done interview after interview about it. There’s a key part to this that I’ve left out, always. And that is the agent, the producer who was part of that match. If you listen to my side of it, I was told exactly what to do. Somehow Bill [Goldberg]—and Bill was there—and Bill has somehow forgotten that I was told to go out and have the match that I had.”
“I did exactly as I was told. Unfortunately, Bill froze up in the match. There’s only so much I could do. The one mistake that I made was not going home early because he had never had more than a 90-second match, and I was told to have a competitive match. I think it was supposed to be six minutes. I don’t know if we quite made it to six minutes, but I was told to have a competitive match.”
William Regal Told Eric Bischoff ‘I Can’t Hit Myself’
William Regal continued. He spoke about going backstage after the match, and being confronted by Eric Bischoff about the match with Goldberg.
Regal, trying to explain that Goldberg froze up in the ring, told Bischoff that he couldn’t hit himself – explaining that he couldn’t make Goldberg do anything, so had to take it upon himself and put start wrestling him his own way.
The agent told me that. I know that because I spoke to that agent recently and said, ‘Look, are you ever gonna tell this story? Because I’m the one who has to keep answering this question, and I’ve answered it for 20 years and I’ve left your name out anyway.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, you did exactly as I told you.’
Eric Bischoff was screaming at me, and I just take everything on the chin. No matter what’s ever happened in my career, except for the time when I wasn’t in my right mind because of it, well this night I was. And I said to Eric, ‘I’m sorry, Eric, but I can’t hit myself.’ That’s my line. Then I said, ‘I can’t hit myself. What do you want me to do?'”
