Bray Wyatt once offered to put off his return to WWE to help out a friend.
After being released from his contract in 2021, Bray Wyatt made a stunning return to the company at Extreme Rules 2022. His return had been hyped for months with mysterious QR codes on television, and he cut an emotional promo on the following edition of SmackDown.
Speaking in a recent interview with Metro, Wyatt’s close friend Jason Baker opened up about the Extreme Rules return, revealing that Wyatt nearly delayed the return after finding out the news that Baker’s grandmother had passed away.
“I literally just took him to the airport and dropped him off – he was gonna go home for a few days and come back and then we were gonna finalize everything for the Extreme Rules return. An hour later after I dropped him off at the airport, I got the call from my mom saying that she’d passed away. Shot him a text saying, ‘Hey man, I got the call’.
“Without even skipping a beat, Windham goes, ‘Do you wanna push this back? It was like, ‘What?’ He was like, ‘Yeah man. look, I know how important your grandma was to you, and I can’t do this without you. If you can’t do it, I won’t hold that against you, and we can push it back.”
“He Was A Wonderful Person” – Jason Baker On Bray Wyatt
Continuing, Baker explained that he couldn’t ask his friend to delay his return, so he would honor his grandmother by going to work instead.
“It’s like dude, look – I know I don’t come from the wrestling world but I know how much of a unicorn second chances are in that industry, and I can’t ask you to do that. But that’s just how he was, he was a wonderful person. Past all the work and all the amazing things he did as a wrestler, he was just an amazing human, an amazing friend.”
Baker also opened up about portraying The Fiend during Bray Wyatt’s return at Extreme Rules return.
“They were like, ‘We’re gonna have The Fiend as well, on top of all the puppets.’ We were gonna pick some random, whoever, and Windham goes, ‘No, Jason, you have to play The Fiend. You’re the only person I trust with it.’ I know what that means, to have a wrestler be like, ‘I trust you enough with this gimmick that I’ve created to go portray it for 30 seconds.’ That magnitude was definitely not lost on me.”
After his return to WWE, Wyatt competed in just one televised match, facing LA Knight in a Mountain Dew Pitch Black match at Royal Rumble 2023. He appeared to be building a feud with Bobby Lashley before suddenly disappearing from television. In late August, the wrestling world was shocked to learn that Bray Wyatt had passed away at the young age of 36. It was later reported that he suffered a heart attack.