At SummerSlam, Becky Lynch challenged Bianca Belair for the Raw Women’s Championship. A match that received great praise showed a complete one-year booking between these two women from last year’s SummerSlam to this year. After the match was over, the two women shook hands and despite the injury sustained by Lynch at the beginning of the match she toughed it out and stood by the side of Belair to stare down the returning faction now known as Damage CTRL.
Lynch being booked to stand with Belair showed the change back to a babyface character and the return of “The Man.” While speaking to Ryan Satin on Out of Character, Lynch said the following about being both a heel and a baby face.
“I talked to Hunter a little bit before and he was like, ‘How do you feel about being a heel?’ I was like, ‘Honestly, it’s fun, I like it. I feel I’m maybe more naturally inclined to be a babyface, people like me better as a babyface. Clearly, I’m doing my job if they don’t like me.’ I’m just great, lads. I’m just great. He goes, ‘I feel we’re swimming upstream keeping you as heel.’ ‘Yeah, I agree.’ Then the creative was laid out and I was like, ‘That sounds awesome, hell yeah, pop, pop, pop,'” said Lynch. (Fightful)
She continues to talk about working with Triple H – “It’s great. Obviously, he has a great mind for it. His track record with what he’s done with women in NXT, I’m a product of that, I got to be in that system and become who I am today. He’s really championed women’s wrestling in general and not looking at it as women’s wrestling. This is a story, these are two people in a story, how do we make this story good? That’s what I love. How do we make this story good, no matter the gender.”
Lynch also commented about getting injured early on in the SummerSlam match –
“Yeah, yeah, I think like the first two minutes or the first three minutes or something [was when my shoulder injury happened at SummerSlam]. Yeah, yeah and then I was like, maybe I dislocated it, maybe it’ll click back in its place and then by the end of the match, I was like, ah, I’m out, I’m out. I’m gonna be out for a little while.”
During this interview, Lynch also talked about how the first half of 2022 shaped up for her. Knowing that she would eventually face Belair again, she wanted to have a few different competitors before their WrestleMania 38 match. She mentions how she faced Liv Morgan, Doudrop, and Lita instead of rushing to continue the storyline with Belair.
“Yes! [I’m glad I got to go full circle with Bianca Belair] Because that was a fight because we’re gonna take it off her, 26 seconds, that’s the only way people are gonna boo Becky, right? If we squash her, make it feel like she’s really, really got the bad end of the stick but then, of course, it being WWE and the creative always changing, they’re wanting to run it back all the time, all the time so it was like, ‘No, no! Let’s not do it at Day 1. How about we do Liv at Day 1? That would be awesome. She’s got a lot of momentum, she’s very good. We got something here. Let’s run with that’ but then, ‘Okay, let’s do it at Royal Rumble.’ ‘Well, maybe, how about we do Dou because she’s also awesome? We gotta get her running, she’s awesome’ and then, ‘Oh, let’s do it at Crown Jewel.’ ‘Well, you know who I’ve always wanted to work?’ And so that we could get back to it at WrestleMania and do it in the best way possible.”
She continues, “We were hoping that that would be the big blow off and that’s the end of the story but circumstances happened and we had to keep it going which I’m really happy we did because I do think it was a beautiful end to the story, you know? We began with a handshake at SummerSlam, we ended with a handshake at SummerSlam. It was a year of me being an asshole and coming back around to being the man and so, I feel like it was — we don’t often do long-term storytelling like that and often when we do, it’s by accident [Lynch laughed] and so, but we had it in our minds that we wanted to push forward, especially for that WrestleMania moment and then everything that happened afterwards wasn’t ideal but actually ended up being ideal and so, I’m real proud of that year. I’m real freaking proud of that year.”
For the full interview, you can view that below –
