Former AEW Women’s Champion Britt Baker D.M.D. recently spoke with Mel Magazine to discuss being both a dentist and professional wrestler, if anything would make her choose one of her careers over the other, and more.
You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On the concern of an in-ring injury hurting her ability to function as a dentist: “That’s my biggest fear. In fact, I think I feared it so intensely that I manifested it when I broke my right wrist this past year, and I’m right-handed. That was tricky. I had just become AEW Women’s Champion so I didn’t want to take any time off. I didn’t want to let the fans down, my boss down, the women’s division down or the roster down, so I fought through it. I didn’t take time off. I didn’t get surgery. I just had a brace on my arm that I took off way more than I should have so that I could work in a dental office.
“For that reason, it definitely delayed the healing, and I had to delay a lot of appointments with extractions and heavy-duty dental office stuff. I was still able to do fillings and smaller stuff because you don’t use your wrist as much as you think you do; it’s a lot of fine movements. Because of how my wrist was fractured, I was able to still work in the dental office. I just had to be choosy about what I could do or not do. That was hard. It was an eye-opening experience that in the blink of an eye something you love can be taken from you, so we need to be thankful and we need to be careful.”
On if anything would make her choose one of her careers over the other: “I think that could happen if I fell out of love with one of my careers. I have to be true to myself and be true to what I like doing. I don’t ever want to do something that I don’t have my heart in 100 percent because I wouldn’t be giving it my all, and I wouldn’t be 100-percent Dr. Britt Baker, D.M.D. If I’m not doing that, I won’t want to do it. I hope that never happens, but if for whatever reason my wrestling schedule really picked up and I had to take some time off, it would break my heart, but I’d do it. I know that I can always come back to dentistry. That’s my forever career; I can do that until I pretty much can’t walk anymore. Wrestling I can’t do forever.”
On her goals in both wrestling and dentistry: “One day I want to have my own dental practice that I own and manage, and hopefully someday I can hire another dentist that I can teach, show the ropes to and pass on everything I’ve learned from dental school and being in practice. In the professional wrestling world, I just want to have a lasting legacy — and not just women’s wrestling, but in all of wrestling. If I can, I’d also love to cross over into mainstream media, because I really love professional wrestling, but I also love playing a character. I love acting and everything that goes along with it. I’d love to be a major female name who gets to cross over into Hollywood or mainstream media. But at the same time, I want to be somebody’s favorite wrestler even 15 or 20 years from now. When I’m not wrestling anymore, I still want to be on someone’s list of favorite wrestlers. I don’t want to be someone who was only relevant when they were an in-ring competitor. I want to have those matches, promos and moments that people study years from now.”
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