WWE star Shayna Baszler recently appeared on WWE Die Woche on Facebook for an interview covering all things pro wrestling. During the discussion, Baszler addressed “you can’t wrestle” chants that have been directed at her and Ronda Rousey…
“It’s funny because you’ll hear, ‘you can’t wrestle’ or people tell us ‘we can’t wrestle’ or ‘learn how to wrestle,’ ‘all we do is MMA.’ We’re probably the only two girls in the locker room, maybe on the roster, there are maybe this many [holds up five fingers] that know how to do a double leg takedown. A real double leg. That’s wrestling. It’s funny the way people think about us because we’re too good. I like when I’m doing stuff and I look in the audience and people have to watch my matches between their fingers and they’re like, ‘oh no.’ I like that.”
“I dabble in comic books and there is a Batman comic where someone says, ‘Why do you call yourself a bat? You don’t fly.’ He says, ‘I don’t fly because I don’t need to fly.’ Me and Ronda don’t fly around because we don’t need to. Other people have to do that because they don’t know how to grab your arm and twist it in any direction, we do. It’s different if you look at it that way and open your mind. It’s specifically the United States. Europe especially, Japan, they’re a little more open to this style of wrestling. I spent a lot of time in Japan wrestling and that’s where I really got comfortable. Like anyone, when I first started in pro wrestling, ‘Josh (Barnett) I want to have a top rope move, I want to do cool stuff.’ ‘No one can do what you do, you need to embrace what you do.’ When I went to Japan and lived there and wrestled for a while, I really got comfortable and went, ‘Ah yes, I don’t need to do that, this is cool. This is the cool stuff.’ It’s been fun.”
You can watch Blaszler’s appearance below:
(h/t to Jeremy Lambert for the transcription)
