Marina Shafir recently appeared as a guest on the Swerve City podcast with Shane “Swerve” Strickland for an in-depth interview covering all things pro wrestling.
During the discussion, the women’s wrestling star spoke about how she wants to help push the women’s division to the forefront in All Elite Wrestling.
Featured below are some of the highlights from the interview where she touches on these topics with her thoughts.
On how she feels she can push the promotion’s women’s division in a better direction: “I’m still formulating that destination for myself. It’s becoming a little more clear. I just never thought…I was so open minded of where I thought this was going to go, and I never thought I would be in this position of being a force to be reckoned with and not something else. This is a real opportunity for me to double down on myself and over dedicate on some things. I know what I’m up against. I turn 35 this year, but I’m in my prime. I’ve had to really double down because I do believe I can help the women’s division and push it in a better direction. In order to do so, I just have to pony the fuck up.”
On how she didn’t break her body when she was younger just to sit around and let an opportunity in wrestling pass her by: “My pedigree, everything I’ve done up to this point, should matter. I didn’t break my body over and over again to be in this position and be like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s so long ago.’ No. I accomplished some shit as a young person. I believe I’m in that special percentage of taking certain risks. I was lucky enough to be beside people who took risks on themselves and also understood that it was much bigger than them. Very early on, they weren’t up their own assholes and they were reminded of what important consistently. My shit matters and I feel what I can offer to the rest of the women’s division is individuality and the chances to you took to learn new things can matter if you don’t understand how to utilize them correctly.”
On how the women are not actually competing against each other in AEW, they’re competing against the men: “It should bring the competitiveness back. Why not? Fuck all this contrieved bullshit. Fuck ‘anybody can wrestle.’ Let’s just do it a little bit. If you’re good at something, say it. Go with that. Really bring the strengths up. You don’t want to go into a fight, ‘Ay, ankle hurts, little fucked up.’ You’re not going to go into a fight saying, ‘I’m not going to be throwing this jab.’ I try to tell the girls, ‘Listen, I’m going to fuck you up, but it’s us against the men.’ Maybe that’s a concept I don’t understand yet, but I know the real competition isn’t each other, it’s [the men].”
Check out the complete interview via the YouTube player embedded below. H/T to Fightful.com for transcribing the above quotes.
