Ronda Rousey took several shots at WWE in her new book, Our Fight, and did so again in her interviews to promote the launch of her book.
In a recent appearance on “The MMA Hour” podcast, Becky Lynch reacted to Rousey’s scathing remarks, noting that Rousey might have been mishandled by WWE creative, which is “not always great.”
Rousey also discussed how Seth Rollins reacted to CM Punk’s return at WWE Survivor Series: WarGames 2023.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On Rousey’s comments about WWE: “I have a very different view and a very different experience of WWE. I always wanted to do this. This is what I always wanted to do. I love this. I love this, and is it perfect? No, nothing is.”
On WWE creative: “Stuff like the creative, no, it’s not always great. There’s been a history of it not making sense to me, but nobody’s personally going, ‘How do we make Becky Lynch look awful?’ But they have so much going on, there is so much going on and the fact that we pull everything off the way that we do, and even at a time when notoriously the shows were getting rewritten as we were going live on TV, and we still go them done and we still went out there, we still hit our times and we still made the show work — and no, it was not always great, but a lot of it was all doing the best we can. Nobody wants to go out there and do bad work or make anybody look bad.”
On Rousey’s WWE run: “She was coming off 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.’ I mean this with respect, but she couldn’t wrestle.
What we do isn’t something that you can just have one good match and then, ‘OK, yeah, I’m off to the races.’ It’s a craft, and you have to learn your craft, and 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, ‘OK, she can do this, off to the races,’ and that was mishandling her because she was a star in her own right and she’d done so much for MMA.
So in terms of that and booking, that wasn’t done well, but my experience coming from nobody thinking that I was going to be worth anything and making myself very valuable to the company and very valuable to wrestling in general, it’s because I loved it. Because I loved it and I sought out to do it. She came in and I think she found a place that she enjoyed, she liked, but she never sought to do it from a young age, and I think that changes the experience you have when you go into a place.”
On where she was when CM Punk made his surprise return: “I was in Gorilla. There was a fist pound. Then my husband was going crazy by the ring. Then the producers on the headset are going, ‘Seth is freaking out.’ I’m like, ‘Oh no, this going to be a rough night.’”
On not feeling disrespected on being kept out of the loop about Punk and Rollins’ reaction: “No. I believe the deal happened very late. As far as I know, I believe the deal happened very late and sometimes the tiredness hits. The deal happened late and then he had a match. He was working on his match all day. He felt disrespected. We think of ourselves. We are the universe. Everybody. Nobody is going, ‘I want to disrespect you.’ We may feel disrespected, but nobody is intentionally going, ‘Let me disrespect this person.’ Consideration should be taken into account. You should have told your top stars, of course, but nobody is going out there going, ‘How do I disrespect my top stars? My World Champion. How do I disrespect him?’ Nobody is thinking that.”