Former WWE Champion Bobby Lashley never put pen to paper with the UFC and he’s explained why.
Lashley is gearing up for a match that wrestling fans have been waiting quite a while for. He will challenge Brock Lesnar for the WWE Title at the Royal Rumble PPV on Jan. 29.
Lashley has been making the media rounds ahead of the big event, which kickstarts the road to WrestleMania. One of Lashley’s pitstops was The MMA Hour with Ariel Helwani.
UFC Wasn’t Meant To Be
On the show, Bobby Lashley was asked if he was ever close to signing with the UFC when he was competing in MMA. The WWE superstar had the following response.
“I’m not 100 percent sure but I know that Dan [Lambert] had talked with Dana [White] at one time and Dana, he was fair with it. He said, ‘You know, we can’t offer him a huge contract but we will give him something that he can get his foot in the door and kind of prove himself.’
“That’s all I knew and then when I talked with Dan about it, Dan’s a huge wrestling fan and Dan was like, ‘But they want you to sign everything. There’s no more pro wrestling. Are you ready to shut the doors on pro wrestling?’
“I was like, ‘Golly.’ You can’t offer me a contract and say, ‘Yeah we can bring him in but he needs to shut all that down with small money,’ cause wrestling is something that I knew I could make good money on long-term.
“So, I couldn’t take a small contract to prove myself when I had pro wrestling where I already proved myself and that was always my money bag that I could always go back to. So, I really couldn’t do it.”
Bellator President Scott Coker had no issue allowing Lashley to compete in MMA and wrestle for Impact Wrestling. Lashley’s last MMA bout took place back in Oct. 2016. He submitted Josh Appelt via rear-naked choke in the second round.
Following his successful return to Impact, Lashley made his way back to WWE in 2018.
Lashley’s pro MMA record sits at 15-2. Time will tell if he ever wants to get back inside the cage but with how well he’s doing in WWE, it may be far-fetched.
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