Becky Lynch addressed her issues with Charlotte Flair in an interview on the MMA Hour with Ariel Helwani.
For Lynch, she thinks their friendship was negatively impacted when she started to make her rise in late 2019 as a top star for the company.
I’m sure she would give you a different side, and I’ll give you my side,” Lynch said. “My star was rising, we were the best of friends and it all worked when she was on top and I was below. And we could all see the way things were going in 2019. Like, people were really behind me, really rallying behind me, and this turn would turn me into a different league, and I don’t think, she couldn’t take that, and has never been able to take it since.”
Lynch thinks it’s affected Flair’s work and Flair is lost in her head.
“I think she’s potentially one of the greatest, but I think I’m so in her head that she’s lost it a bit. I think she’s lost a step because she’s got that jealousy and she’s got that little devil on her shoulder, and that devil is me always being one step ahead of her, and she doesn’t like it.”
“I think she thought her birthright is she’s the star,” Lynch continued. “Doesn’t matter that I started wrestling when I was 15 and left home and traveled the world to chase this dream, doesn’t matter that I was never one of the chosen ones. She was born into this and she deserves it. WrestleMania main events should be hers by birthright. I think that’s her thinking. I think we know where she gets that thinking from.”
Lynch recalled how when the crowd chanted for her during a segment where Flair was doing a promo over the summer, it revealed Flair’s true feelings.
“She gave the crowd the finger, and she said it was because they were disrespecting Rhea [Ripley]. She doesn’t care about Rhea, she cares about herself. That was her own ego,” Lynch said.
Lynch then addressed the backstage confrontation she had with Flair last month at a SmackDown event after their championship exchange segment.
“There was a plan in place that was supposed to go one way, and if it went one way, then everyone would have had a moment and it would have been great. I, in the back, said ‘This isn’t going to happen. She’s going to do something else,’ and she did exactly what I said she was gonna do,” said Lynch.
“I told people beforehand she was going to make it really hard to do this angle, and it happened. There was no need for it. Because at the end of the day, it wasn’t about me. It was about Sasha [Banks] and her getting into something.”
“Sometimes things can happen out there and people can get carried away in the moment, and you don’t have time to process what happens,” said Lynch. “But when I knew that she was going to purposely disrespect me, I processed it a lot quicker. And so, I was able to hold it together until I got backstage. I did what I was supposed to do. And then when I got backstage, I lost it a little bit. I lost it. I just lost it.”
“I had to go out and do the dark match right after. So I verbally lost it. I still had a match to do, so I didn’t have time to be scrapping in the back… people were talked to. But at the end of the day, I was right. I was right,” Lynch said.
Lynch discussed the importance of trust in wrestling because it can be dangerous if something goes wrong.
“What we do is extremely dangerous. And we’re trusting somebody with our lives. And obviously this segment wasn’t trusting somebody with our lives, but it’s the meaning behind it. And it’s happened with other things. And when it happens to other people, maybe they can’t say something. But I can say something. I’m not scared,” said Lynch.
We need to go out there and be able to trust each other, because that’s what this is. We need to be able to trust that one person is able to do what they say they’re going to do.
“It’s professional wrestling, and it’s a beautiful art that I love, and I love it more than anything. And I love it for what it is. It’s telling stories through violence, essentially. And when somebody goes out and you can’t trust them to do what we’ve agreed on doing, then what are we doing?” Lynch said.
“Nobody just cares about themselves. They care about the segment, they care about how everybody else looks, and they work together. Nobody else does this. There’s no other guy on the roster, there’s no girl on the roster [that does this]. Everybody else, when you work with them, you know it’s going to be easy.”
The SmackDown Women’s Champion was asked about the possibility of things not going as planned when they meet in a champion vs. champion bout at Survivor Series.
“Yeah, of course there is. We kinda saw that a little bit of that with Charlotte and Nia [Jax] at one stage. When people don’t work together, it can go badly, and it’s not good. You’re watching for the wrong reasons,” said Lynch.
“I also like money. And so, this is money. People are interested and I love that people are interested,” Lynch said.
“And I love that people don’t know how this is going to go. I don’t know how this is going to go. I don’t know if this is going to be just an all-out brawl, I don’t know if this is going to be just venom behind every move, I don’t know if we’re going to be able to even get to the match, I don’t know if there’s going to be a fight backstage, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know, I don’t know. And I think that’s exciting for me and for the audience,” said Lynch.
She added it’s “probably nerve-wracking for the office.”
H/T to F4Wonline.com for the transcript