TNA star Steph De Lander recently spoke with Women’s Wrestling Talk on a number of topics, including WWE’s working relationship with TNA and others.
De Lander said, “I think it’s a cool time in wrestling because we’ve never seen this before, we’ve never seen WWE so openly cross promoting with other promotions in this way. We’ve had Jordynne Grace and Joe Hendry and The Rascalz on NXT, we had Tatum Paxley on TNA, we had AJ Styles and IYO just wrestle in Japan this past week. There’s so many moving parts for everyone. I don’t see a drawback, I don’t think it would be ignorant to say that there’s probably a part of TNA’s extreme success of selling out Slammiversary and how well they’re doing right now, I’m sure part of that could be this new buzz with the WWE crossovers. I think WWE is benefiting too by being able to take the biggest stars from TNA and use them on their show. I feel like it’s one of those things where it’s kind of like they scratch our back and we scratch theirs.”
On potentially appearing on NXT TV:
“As far as whether or not I’d be interested in doing that too, it would all come down to circumstance. I feel like there are some interesting story beats that could be explored at some point and that’s really what I care about more than anything else at this point. I’m not really interested in having a cool match with whoever, I don’t really care about that. For me, it’s more like, who there do I have unfinished business with and there actually is a couple people that I do have unfinished business with in reality and in storyline. Whatever happens, if I were to show up in WWE, it would definitely be something worth keeping your eyes on for sure.”
On possible storylines with her in NXT:
“I think if you watched me in WWE, I was literally in the middle of a love storyline when I was released. I was dating Duke Hudson. One week I was on TV, the next week I wasn’t. I was in a situation where I have a boyfriend in NXT and I have a boyfriend in TNA. That in itself is interesting, you know? Also, I was tagging with my best friend Indi Hartwell. We were in the middle of a tag team. She’s still in WWE, I’m in TNA, I think there’s something interesting there. We’ll see what happens.”
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(H/T to Fightful for transcribing the above quotes)
