MVP got “knocked out” by boxing legend Evander Holyfield during a special match at Saturday Night’s Main Event in 2007.
Reflecting on the moment during an appearance on the “Insight With Chris Van Vliet” podcast, MVP looked back on how the match came together as part of his on-screen rivalry with Matt Hardy. He said,
“That night, I could have probably been knocked out pretty bad. Matt tells a great story about how he went to the locker room to meet Holyfield. Shelton [Benjamin] was talking about how he saw Holyfield walking in the back and that athlete-to-athlete sizing everybody up.
Matt tells the story, he went back there and they introduced them and Holyfield asked him if he ever boxed and Matt said no. Holyfield said, ‘Okay, put your hands up. Try to hit me.’ He was sizing up Matt, seeing if Matt knew what he could do. Matt said he tried to hit him and Holyfield smiled and said, ‘Okay, we’ll be alright.’ Just like that, he summed up, ‘This guy couldn’t hit me in a million years.’”
“In his dressing room, there was a sound feed coming from the headsets and JBL, who we know is quite the boisterous one was talking about how, I guess his wife had met Holyfield and said he was a charming guy and JBL, his headset is going into the dressing room and he was like, ‘Damn right he’s a charming guy, he’s got 13 kids from ten different women, stay the hell away from him.’
They hear this in the dressing room and everybody was pretty upset. Holyfield was not happy at all. JBL had to go in and apologize to him and they were able to smooth everything. I go to JBL and go, ‘What the hell are you doing? I gotta get hit by that guy. You wanna get him pissed off.’
Fortunately, he was cool and an absolute pleasure to work with. People at that level with that expertise are capable of doing things you can’t really fathom. If you watched that back, it looked like he really laid one on me, and he hit me way softer than Bobby [Lashley] ever did.”
At WrestleMania 41 (Night One), Paul Heyman shocked the WWE Universe by betraying both Roman Reigns and CM Punk to align himself with Seth Rollins.
Heyman had entered with CM Punk, his longtime friend, which didn’t sit well with Roman Reigns, his “Tribal Chief.” But by the end of the night, Heyman walked out with Rollins instead.
Appearing on “The Rich Eisen Show,” Rollins explained that the signs were there for a while. He said,
“If you followed the food crumbs, if you look back at the last two months, you could probably figure it out. You could see it. The writing was on the wall. It made perfect sense to me, and it was a partnership waiting to happen.
CM Punk is supposedly this guy’s friend, but he’s leveraging his friendship to get a favor, to get what he wants, which is the main event of WrestleMania and have him in his corner. Then, Roman Reigns, they are supposedly thick as thieves, but Roman Reigns left Paul Heyman to get destroyed by his family and never apologized for two seconds.
If Roman takes the Wise Man, then Punk is going to eat him alive. If Paul takes the Wise Man, Roman is going to go after Paul Heyman. I was really the only solution and I told Paul Heyman as such. Here we are.”
The new partnership grew even stronger on Monday Night RAW, when Bron Breakker joined Rollins and Heyman to further shift the power dynamic in WWE.
