Former WWE SmackDown Live Women’s Champion Becky Lynch was the subject of a “Chronicles” documentary over the weekend. The special documented Lynch’s journey to this past weekend’s first-ever Women’s Tables Ladders and Chairs (TLC) match.
Lynch discussed her initial expectations when she began her professional wrestling training with Finn Balor at 16, why she left professional wrestling for several years during her early days, and losing herself. Check out the highlights here:
Beginning her professional wrestling training with Finn Balor at 16: “So I decided I was gonna get fit,” Lynch said. “And I was an unconventional kid, I didn’t want to go to a gym. So I was gonna take up kickboxing, but low and behold my brother found out that they were opening a school in Bray [County Wicklow], which was about an hour and half from where I lived. [It was] opened by Fergal Devitt/Finn Balor.
“I was the only girl in the place. And I expected to go in and see like a warehouse, and a bunch of big tough guys, and a wrestling ring, and a big sign on the door. I walk in to this little school gym. There were 6 blue, padded mats on the ground, and there’s a bunch of skinny teenage lads with their hair trying to grow it, trying to look like the Hardy Boyz.
“And I was like, alright, this is it, here I am. And you have to believe me when I say I was awful. I was God awful. Most uncoordinated, couldn’t pick up a damn thing, but my God did I love it. And I was just – I couldn’t believe that I was getting to do it.”
Leaving professional wrestling for several years during her early days: “I left for seven years,” Lynch said. “Seven years. It was a lot of self sabotage, like, people talk about the fear of failure, right? But they also don’t talk enough, I think, about the fear of success. Because at the time, I was 19 and I was doing well.
“And I was making a name for myself. I also didn’t really have any support, or any backing, or any guidance. Like, my mom didn’t want me wrestling. And if you weren’t in WWE you were off fending for yourself and I wasn’t making a lot of money. I’d make like, what? $50 dollars a weekend, if even. So it was just a lot of, I got so in my head,” Lynch continued. “I got to succeed, I got to succeed, I got to succeed, I got to succeed.
“But then it was like, oh, but what if I do? And what if I’m not good enough? Ya know? And all these things. So I kinda got depressed, I got confused, I got lost, I got hurt in a match, and I kinda used that as an excuse to kinda step away. And I couldn’t even face up to the fact that I couldn’t face up to it. I had to hide behind the excuse of, oh, I’m hurt. Which is why I think I take extra exception to when I’m genuinely hurt and people are calling me out like I’m hiding behind something.”
Losing herself: “I completely lost myself,” Lynch said. “And what we see here, we see me being built up, and me changing and me taking over. That’s all from below zero that I’ve had to come up, and it’s a little step at a time, at a time, but it’s even coming from that low point when I was 19 to where I am now. I’ve been through all this and now I am so grateful, and I know what I’m meant to do because I lost it all.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M4qKQKZxPM&feature=youtu.be
H/T Wrestling Inc. for the transcriptions
