Raw Women’s champion Ronda Rousey has a disqualification win over Charlotte Flair from Survivor Series and added a pinfall victory over Sasha Banks to her record last night (Jan. 27) at Royal Rumble. She’ll likely get involved with Banks and her tag partner Bayley in the run-up to Elimination and the Women’s Tag title match, and is probably headed to a WrestleMania 35 showdown with Becky Lynch.
In case you’re new to WWE and the wrestling internet, Sasha, Charlotte, Becky & Bayley are known as the Four Horsewomen of NXT. As training partners & friends in MMA, Rousey and NXT’s Shayna Baszler, Jessamyn Duke & Marina Shafir started calling themselves the Four Horsewomen. Fans have been looking for signs of a faction war over the name ever since.
So this quote from her fallout interview with Charly Caruso from Chase Field about the NXT Horsewomen seems relevant:
“As a competitor, I have all the respect in the world for her. I think it’s just the Four Horsewomen is the only real point of contention for me, you know? Me and my friends, we were the Four Horsewomen before we came to WWE. It wasn’t a gimmick or a marketing ploy, or you know, something to make us all more popular cause we’re aligned. It was like, this is real and it’s personal. This is our lives. And they’re taking something that’s near and dear to our hearts and just trying to package it and sell it to the masses - I mean they don’t even like each other, you know? I just don’t - I don’t know - it’s something so personal and near & dear to me & my friends. It just seems like - if they held the ‘4s’ up with the same regard that we do, I would have respect for that. But to them, this is nothing but marketing, they don’t have that bond that we have. It’s just for show. And this isn’t for show, this is for life for us.”
I’ve knocked Ronda’s mic skills before, but this works for a reason her supporters say she’s a good promo... I kind of think she actually believes this. Even after Sasha explained to her that the pro wrestling-born Horsewomen aren’t a gimmick and their bond doesn’t require they be best friends at all times, I can see Rousey thinking it’s disrespectful to have to share the name. Or she knows this is all storyline, but is selling it with real emotion.
Either way, it makes me more interested in seeing her fight members of the other group, so it works.
Don’t you think?