The Man attempted a tactful explanation for her rival’s recent criticisms of WWE.
The rivalry between Becky Lynch and Ronda Rousey fueled the first women’s main event of a WrestleMania in history. It also may have spilled out behind-the-scenes to prevent the two stars from working together when Rousey returned to the company in 2022.
But that’s not how Ronda’s been presenting it as she started doing press ahead of the release of her new memoir, Our Fight. Instead of Lynch or anyone on the WWE roster for failing to capitalize on the heat between them, Rousey’s instead been slamming the company itself and the men who led it for most of her time at WWE.
Asked about Rousey’s recent comments while promoting her own new autobiographical book, Becky Lynch: The Man: Not Your Average Average Girl, by Ariel Helwani on The MMA Hour today (Mar. 27), Lynch says she isn’t surprised that Rousey describes her time at WWE in a negative light. She doesn’t want to comment too much on things being quoted from Our Fight until getting a chance to see them in context, but Becky did have some thought on Ronda’s professional wrestling career.
“Look, I had — I have a very different view, and a very different experience of WWE. But I always wanted to do this. This is what I always wanted to do — I love this. I love this. Is it perfect? Nothing is. I’ve worked in little delis that you’re like, ‘How does this place operate?’ The size of WWE and the amount of talent and people that go into making it go live on TV for however — five hours a week when you’re just talking about Raw and SmackDown. And then you’ve got PPVs, and then you’ve got NXT. So there’s so many people that go behind that. You’re going to be dealing with a lot of people, so you’re going to have some negative experiences. But this is my dream, this is — I’ve always wanted to be good, I’ve always looked at myself, ‘How can I be better? How can I make the division better?’ And I’ve always worked to make it better…”
Becky acknowledged that creative hasn’t always been great, especially when much of Ronda’s run took place during “a time when notoriously the shows were getting rewritten as we were going on live on TV”. But she it’s largely due to how everyone in the company is stretched thin, not that anyone is trying to make anyone look bad.
Rather than put the onus on her rival, Lynch instead says that WWE mishandled Rousey — in large part because of how well her debut tag match at WrestleMania 34 went. She still contrasts Ronda’s approach to her own, however. So while she seems to empathize with Rousey’s situation and rationalize how she handled it, Becky’s still saying she herself would have worked harder to make things better out of her love for the business:
“… if we do good, the company does good, so I don’t think anybody is trying to make anybody fail. When you love this, you look to try and make it better. ‘How can I make this better?’ But she was coming from a different industry, she was a star — and she should have been handled differently, in terms of I think she had such a great first outing that everybody thought, ‘Oh, she can wrestle’. And I mean this with respect but she couldn’t wrestle.
“Like what we do isn’t something where you can just have one good match and, ‘Okay, yeah, I’m off to the races.’ It’s a craft, and you have to learn your craft, and you you have to be diligent about learning your craft. But everybody treated Ronda like she already knew it because when she first came in she was good in that first bout, but she was also working with Kurt Angle, she was working with Triple H, Stephanie McMahon — it was a well rehearsed match, because everybody wanted her to succeed and then it was like, ‘Okay, she can do this, off to the races’. And that was mishandling her because she was a big star in her own right and she had done so much for MMA.
“So in terms of that and booking, that wasn’t done well. But my experience coming from thinking that nobody thinking that I was gonna be worth anything, and making myself very valuable to the company and very valuable to wrestling in general, it’s because I loved it. I loved it and I sought out to do it. And she came in, and I think she found a place that she enjoyed, that she liked. But she never sought to do it from a young age, and I think that changes the experience that you have when you go into a place.”
Even if there’s a touch of shade in Lynch’s comments, she has a point. It’s similar to the one Rousey made while talking to our own Rick Ucchino recently, when she compared WWE’s careful handling of Logan Paul to how Ronda was thrown into the mix in between working with Angle in 2018 and main eventing against Becky & Charlotte Flair a year later.
Watch The Man’s entire chat with Ariel Helwani — which also includes her latest contract update, another version of her answer to questions about the sex abuse allegations against Vince McMahon, and her thoughts on CM Punk’s WWE return — in this video:
Then, let us know what you think of Becky’s answer, and if you think Rousey will offer a retort, in the comments down below.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login