Shayna Baszler joined Renee Paquette’s Oral Sessions podcast to discuss a wide range of topics.
During it, the WWE Women’s Tag Team Champion opened up about her interactions with Vince McMahon and her adjustment to the style of wrestling that is presented on the main roster as opposed to NXT.
“You come with this image that he’s [Vince McMahon] this unhinged, crazy guy but he’s always so nice and critiques me really well. I don’t know. He’s never been the way you imagine that you built up this monster in your mind so much.
When I first started wrestling on Raw, he gave a talk that was like, ‘Look, you have something different to offer, you have a unique look. The thing you have to start learning now that you’re on Raw is that your work rate is shown on pay-per-views and at NXT, so don’t get so hellbent on weekly Raw TV, because that’s where we build the story for the work rate that you can do on a pay-per-view.’ So he’s like, ‘You’ve got this thing. I don’t want you to do any pro wrestling. Got it?’ Okay, got it. So I have this match and it looks like I’m just going off the map and beating someone up, he loves it, the next week I do it again, he loves it. The next week I have a match with Nattie and I’m like, ‘Listen, Nattie,’ who’s way more experienced at this than me obviously. Nattie’s trained with me in an MMA gym, so I was like, ‘Listen, let’s just shoot around a little bit and then we’ll get to what we need to get to.’ We do it, he hates it. We go in the back and he’s like, ‘Well [it] looked like you guys were just fighting each other.’ So he makes us do it again. This is when we were doing the stuff at the PC and we were recording some episodes and doing some live. So he goes and makes us do it right away again and I’m just flabbergasted. I’m still new up there so I don’t know how stuff is, and Nattie’s like, ‘I got you, we’ll do this.’ So we go and we do a match that she basically calls to me and it’s a normal match, you know? And we go in the back and he loves it and I’m so confused at this point. I’m like, ‘Man, we did like headlock takeover, drop down leapfrog. I don’t understand,’ and so I go and I sit outside Vince’s office for a long time because I’m like — it’s scary and you’re asking the guys outside the office like, ‘Is he in a good mood today?’
So I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna — I don’t know. It’s nerve racking, he’s the boss and anytime you go to the principal’s office, it’s scary, right? So I go in there and I don’t even know — I don’t even know what I wanted out of it. I think it was just to get it off of my chest. But I was like, ‘Man listen, I know I have something that no one else has. I know I can bring a certain legitimacy to this that no other female has. I don’t know how to figure it out week-to-week yet. Just give me a chance’ and I was like, ‘You’ll never have to worry about me being in shape. If you want me to go out there and wrestle the same match 100 times, I’ll do it, I’ll figure it out. Just give me time. I’m just letting you know I’m aware I don’t have it. Just give me time. I’ll make you money’ and he was like, ‘Can’t wait.’ I think it was finally when I started working with Sasha [Banks] and Bayley where I think in the ring I stopped trying so hard to impress Vince and just started feeling comfortable in my stuff and it was finally where it started being like, ‘That’s it’ and going in the back and being like, ‘Is that more?’ And he’s like, ‘You’re getting it.’ So it has been this big learning curve, but I think feeling that comfort in what I am and not necessarily — and this is leaving out a whole bunch of like — like Randy Orton being like, ‘Don’t worry about the fans saying it’s boring.’ Just giving advice and AJ Styles giving advice, like all these guys but, it has been a hard balance and it’s something I’m constantly struggling — I have this old school style, but also I can’t necessarily do it the way they did it back then because it’s wrestling today so it’s been this — it’s still a juggling process, you know?”
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