During a recent appearance on the “After the Bell with Corey Graves” podcast, Nikki A.S.H commented on her singles push and becoming RAW Women’s Champion, her new character being a “Hail Mary” moment for her in WWE, and more. You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On her opportunity as RAW Women’s Champion: “Just a lot of pride. For me, when I think about my time with Sanity, that was some of the most fun I have had in my career because I was actually working with my best friend and my husband and I learned a lot. It was so much fun playing that chaotic, unpredictable character and then I loved working with Alexa. When I went to RAW, I was the outsider and I didn’t fit in and we kind of had to evolve and change from the NXT Nikki to make it for the Monday Night RAW audiences. That was a change of pace and then working in a tag team, I had always been a singles competitor on the indies and then I was a valet and then part of a stable, and then I had never been in a tag team before so I got to really explore that. Being on my own as Nikki A.S.H, as the RAW Women’s Champion, it’s an incredible feeling and that’s not to say I didn’t have some of the best times of my career with SANITY and with Alexa, but there’s this awesome feeling of I did this. I get an incredible amount of validation and this feeling of this is my time. It’s such an awesome feeling and that’s not to discount anything I did before because all of those experiences made this what it is. I needed to go through all of those experiences. It’s like pieces of a puzzle. To be here on my own is like [bleep] yeah.”
On the reaction to her title win: “It’s kind of weird because one part is like, it’s a little overwhelming because you’re like, ‘Is this all for me?’ There’s another part where I kind of feel like I did something right. I’m not perfect by any means, but I’ve always tried to treat people well and obviously, you make mistakes and you grow up in this industry. There are times that you mess up and your ego gets the better of you and you’re humbled, but I always tried to treat people well because I know what it’s like to treat people badly. Getting all these messages, it was like every person I worked with and every person I had shared a locker room with reached out and I was like man, I guess I did something right with my life that people wanted to reach out. It’s kind of like, ‘Alright I did good’. Coming back and seeing all the women in the locker room, I don’t know what I expected, I expected a couple of people there, but I didn’t expect the full locker room to be there. It was incredible.”
On how she felt like the Nikki A.S.H. character was her final shot in WWE: “Yeah, it really felt like alright this is it, this is the Hail Mary. I think it was and it was that Hail Mary moment where there needed to be a change and that was really apparent to me. That was really apparent to me right around the Royal Rumble, and we told this fun story on social media and on digital about me qualifying for the match and we made a story out of that. Right around the Royal Rumble, it was so clear and so apparent that there needed to be a change and that was it. I spent hours and hours researching this idea and getting this pitch right and I commissioned this artist to draw up what Nikki A.S.H would be as a cartoon character. You take it to the boss and it’s like you’re nervous but you’re also confident and I believed in this idea so much that you’re just like alright, let’s do it. You have to put your nerves aside and push down the butterflies. At the end of the day, I believed in the pitch on a personal level, I believed in it from a business sense. I was like, this is good business, this is a good idea. I also believed that in the heart of it it’s very pure and wholesome and something that I really wanted to portray. I wanted to portray something fun and joyful. It makes me happy and I want to try and make others happy. Also, for business, I knew it was a great idea. It was just about swallowing the nerves and just going in and doing it. It did feel like a hail mary, that’s a good way of describing it.”
(h/t – 411 Wrestling)
