WWE star and former women’s champion Natalya Neidhart recently appeared on the Sports Guys Talking Wrestling program to discuss how important it’s been for her to give back to the business, which includes working with new talent like Xia Li. Highlights from the interview are below.
Says she’s proud that she’s been able to give back to the business:
What I’m most proud of is being able to take the knowledge that I have and pass it on to others. Like what good is having knowledge if you can’t pay it forward. We all need to be aspiring to do that. Every single girl that I work with — I remember when I first worked with Charlotte [Flair] in 2014, the night that we had that match at TakeOver which people still, thankfully, talk about to this day, I said to her, I said, ‘I gave — I left it all in the ring. I gave everything I had and I want you to do the same thing. I want you to do that, the same thing for someone else.
Says she’s been helping Xia Li:
I worked with Xia Li. I’ve been working with her in my ring, I’ve been helping her. I’ve been trying to help anybody that I can help with. I just need them to pay it forward. We need them to pay it forward, the industry needs them to pay it forward and what good is sitting at the top of the mountain when you can’t enjoy it with somebody else? To me, to be able to take all of my experience, to grab somebody that’s at the bottom of the mountain and to lift them up, it means more than a championship. It means that you’re inspiring somebody else to live their dreams and that they’re gonna look back with their kids and go, ‘Nattie really helped give me a chance to prove myself.’ Lacey Evans is another one that, you know, she… she was somebody that I think even WWE wasn’t sure what she was capable of and they knew she was athletic, they knew that she was beautiful, they knew that she was great on the mic and very gifted in that sense and she’s a former Marine but then, we had this incredible, game-changing match in Saudi Arabia that opened up a door for women around the world to have more visibility. Not just in a wrestling ring but in their lives and people now look at Lacey differently and I wanna be able to do that with every single girl that I wrestle with. To go, you know — to have somebody go, ‘Wow, Nattie’s really good but that other girl’s really, really good too.’ That’s the art, that’s the magic and I think my biggest inspiration for that is Bret Hart.
(H/T and transcribed by Post Wrestling)