Former WWE Champion Jinder Mahal addressed a rumor that Brock Lesnar “refused” to work with him in 2017 during an interview with Chris Van Vliet. Mahal lost the WWE title to AJ Styles, who faced Lesnar instead of Mahal at the 2017 Survivor Series PLE.
Mahal said, “This is just my opinion, and obviously there’s a lot of misinformation on the internet. The headline came out, ‘Brock Lesnar refused to work with Jinder.’ I don’t think he refused. I just think it was he probably pitched for a match with AJ because stylistically, it is a much better match. Me and Brock are both heels. Who’s gonna put heat on who? It was gonna be a flat match. It would have just been him suplexing me a bunch of times, maybe Singh Bros get involved. But the match he had with AJ was phenomenal, no pun intended.
“So yeah, I don’t think it was that he refused to work with me. I just think Brock has some pull and him and Paul Heyman probably said, Hey, we should talk to Vince and said book the match with AJ Styles. Which is okay, I have to lose a championship at some point anyway, I had it for six months and I didn’t know that I was losing the championship until the day of.”
“We were in Manchester and we had the title match. We get to the building. Michael Hayes tells me and AJ go talk to Vince, and send us to Vince’s office. Vince tells us you’re dropping the championship, now you’re going to chase it. AJ, you’re winning it tonight, you’ll work with Brock at Survivor Series, then me and AJ at Night of Champions, one more championship match. And that was it. Yeah, I found out on the same day I’m winning it, lost it the same way found out the same day.”
You can check out the interview below:
(quote courtesy of ITRWrestling.com)
