Jason Baker: Bray Wyatt Offered To Delay Return At WWE Extreme Rules After My Grandma Passed Away

Bray Wyatt’s return at WWE Extreme Rules was nearly delayed.

Bray Wyatt’s return at WWE Extreme Rules was nearly delayed.

WWE released Bray Wyatt (Windham Rotunda) in 2021, and he made his highly-anticipated return following weeks of QR codes and other teases at WWE Extreme Rules 2022. However, he almost pushed it back when a close friend lost their grandmother.

Speaking with Alistair McGeorge of Metro, Jason Baker, Wyatt’s friend and collaborator, noted that he was working with Wyatt ahead of his comeback and revealed that the former Universal Champion was ready to delay his return at WWE Extreme Rules after Baker’s grandmother 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,” Baker said.

Baker noted that he couldn’t ask Wyatt to essentially call in sick on his first day back, and he also stated that he felt like he would be able to pay tribtute to his grandma’s love for wrestling by working as planned. 

“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 said.

Baker also described how he was the man under the Fiend mask during Wyatt’s return at WWE Extreme Rules. He emphasized how having Wyatt trust him with the role meant a lot to him, and the experience was one that he will never forget.

“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,” Baker said.

Throughout the later stages of Wyatt’s WWE career, he worked with Baker, who helped create the Firefly Fun House Puppets and Wyatt’s masks.

Windham Rotunda passed away at the age of 36 on August 24, 2023. Mika Rotunda, Windham’s sister, recently refected on her brother. Check out her comments here.

Chris Jericho recently praised Bray Wyatt’s creativity. Click here to see what he had to say.