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Former UFC and WWE Champion Ronda Rousey has been opening up lately about her time in mixed martial arts and professional wrestling.
Rousey has a new book coming out called Our Fight and she has been sharing some of the reasons why she quit fighting, including having to deal with multiple concussions and working with “sicko” Vince McMahon, as she called him.
One of the women that Ronda Rousey worked with closely during her time with the WWE was Grand Slam Champion Becky Lynch.
This week on The MMA Hour, Lynch addressed some of the issues that Ronda Rousey has brought with regard to her time in the WWE.
“She was coming off a different industry,” Lynch explained. “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, ‘Okay, 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, ‘Okay, 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 it, 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.”
Lynch, coincidentally, is also, like Rousey, out promoting a new book. Hers is titled Becky Lynch: The Man: Not Your Average Average Girl.
As for how Becky Lynch feels about Vince McMahon, she has a slightly different take than Ronda Rousey.
“Those allegations are horrible and and it’s so hard to listen to because that’s not my experience,” she said. “He was so good to me and Vince had a genius about him and he was not the easiest to work with, but he had also lived an extremely like, interesting life in terms of what he built.
“And so I liked learning from him, I liked talking to him and he is responsible for for all of the the the things in my life by building WWE. And for the most part we would, we’ve had some ups and downs, but he was always good to me as a person and always treated with me with respect and I felt like I had earned a lot of respect from him, and he gave me a lot of respect.
“And then you’re hearing this other side which is not the person that I know and that’s really hard, that’s really hard, especially when you’re a woman in this business and you’re a woman who has been trying to push things to be equal, but look that’s the other part of it, right? It’s not, there’s there’s not a third party that was making things unequal, you know what I mean?”
Becky Lynch would then add, “So it’s very hard to hear about these things because I didn’t experience them and I hate that anybody, I hate that anybody experienced that in general, but especially somebody that has been very kind to me in my life, in my career.”