Maria Kanellis made an appearance on Oral Sessions with Renee Paquette to discuss a wide range of topics.
During it, she discussed her working relationship with Paul Heyman while she was in WWE
“It’s funny because I still work with him and I ask him stuff. I want his feedback. I want to know what he thinks. When I started in wrestling, I worked originally down in Ohio Valley Wrestling and Paul was writing the show. He invited me to come early, read the script, and see what he had planned out for other people.
I was dating Punk at the time, so it was both of them that I was literally getting an education on wrestling, the history of wrestling, every part of wrestling I was learning from both of them. I’ve always had a fantastic relationship with him. Do we butt heads? Of course we do, but I think that’s what I like is that he is a person that will challenge me on something. He also thinks like I can conquer mountains, and so I do.”
Kanellis also shared her vision for the ROH women’s division.
“I would really just like for it to not be like a special event every time women have matches. I would just like it to be part of the show. I would really like whole characters. We get very into these boxes of ‘women can only be strong, or women can only be weak, or this or that’, and I want to get out of that habit. I’ve really tried to tell my girls to tell me more of their story. Let’s get it out there.
Let’s get more of the person you are because the person you are is amazing. It’s just a matter of letting everybody know who you are. That’s another piece of it for me. Right now, we just have the Women’s World Championship. I would like to get a Tag Championship out there. I would also like to have a Pure division because Pure wrestling is becoming such a huge thing as far as the men are concerned, and so now I would like to bring more of that to our women’s division. We have a lot of good women for that. I would like to have an all women’s show at some point that’s like a PPV. We do have an all women’s show right now. I think we’re on week 24 of doing it. Every Wednesday is Women’s division Wednesday, so I want to keep that going. I would like to have 2 or 3 matches a week rather than just one match a week. There’s a lot of different things out there, but the biggest thing to me is to make the women’s characters more whole, and to make them more well rounded.”
