Magazine Archives: Return Of The Man

By Jack Goodwillie, FightfulMag.com, Issue 5.

***

Becky Lynch’svalue to women’s divisions of WWE can’t be understated. The 34-year-old will be coming up on her 20th year in wrestling in 2022, a year that figures to be the most important of her career to date.

Lynch broke out in 2018 at a time when WWE sorely needed a bankable face of the women’s division, and as unlikely as her rise may have been at the time, “The Man” became the most over women’s wrestler sinceAJ Leeand Paigeand even surpassed them as arguably the most popular women’s wrestler the company has ever known. In an era where WWE is as starved for stars as ever, the timing of Lynch’s return to the ring couldn’t have been better, even if it had to be as a heel (for now).

I’ve been a fan of Lynch’s work since she stood in as Sasha Banks’lackey on NXT. Every wrestling fan has their favorites and Becky Lynch was one of mine. However, even I have to admit I didn’t see this kind of upside for her career, that is, until NXT Takeover: Unstoppable in 2015, the night Lynch debuted her trademark orange locks and her character work took an unfathomable leap forward. A lot of people point to Banks’ matches with Bayleyin NXT as some of the formative women’s matches of this era, but I’d put the match at Unstoppable right up there with any of the Banks-Bayley bouts. On that particular night, I no longer saw Lynch as simply a good wrestler, but as a future star and potential divisional cornerstone. On that particular night, Lynch showed she could step out of the shadow of the three other “Four Horsewomen”of NXT and make something of herself based on her own talent and drive.

Fast forward to the present day, and Lynch has since headlined WrestleMania 35 in one of the most memorable main events of the last decade, held women’s championships on five separate occasions and become a bonafide draw in possibly the hardest era to do so. That does not mean Lynch has had a perfect career on the main roster, and that’s perhaps every bit as true after her star-making heel turn at SummerSlam 2018 as it was prior. She has oftentimes succumbed to the poor booking and decision-making that fans have come to expect from WWE, and there may not be a better example of this than her WrestleMania 36 match with Shayna Baszler.

I remember personally being in attendance for Baszler’s first appearance on Raw on February 10, 2020 (also my birthday). Many people lampooned her post-match attack on Lynch where she bit open the back of her neck like an apple, however, I happened to like it. I thought a segment like that would be just the character edge Baszler would require to meet her potential working with Vince McMahonon the main roster, but that one segment alone wouldn’t be enough. The two would work together at WrestleMania 36 – the one in quarantine - and the match missed the mark on several levels. The bout was a little less technical than people came to expect, got less time than people were led to believe (8:36), and Lynch would go on to retain the belt in spite of the fact she would be going away for more than a year in pursuit of motherhood. Of course, it was not until days after her match with Baszler that Lynch got the official pregnancy diagnosis, but while hindsight is 20-20, giving Baszler the belt for Lynch to chase still feels like it would have been a move the fans would have gotten behind, especially coming off the NXT Championship run she had. Instead, Lynch pinned Baszler, after which Baszler was sent to toil in mid-card purgatory while Lynch had her spot atop the card to come back to.

---

Alas, Lynch avoided physicality for the remainder of April, and on May 11, 2020, she officially relinquished the Raw Women’s Championship to Asuka, setting in motion a new era for the Raw women’s division and women’s wrestling in WWE as a whole… and this was not necessarily a good thing. In some ways, the women’s division took a step back without Lynch’s popularity around to buoy it, but that had nothing to do with a lack of talent like in previous years. The internal problems with creative that have plagued the men of WWE for the past decade had finally spread to the women, which actually speaks to the abundance of talent in that area of the company right now. Still, without a Ronda Rousey or Becky Lynch to help someone into their rarified air, creating the next women’s megastar becomes next to impossible, and the Raw brand certainly had its challenges during the pandemic.

Asuka performed admirably as the women’s champion, and always makes for a logical championship choice considering just how polished she is inside the ropes. She held the belt twice after Lynch went on sabbatical, but similar to what happened to Shinsuke Nakamura, we’ve seen Asuka turn up the dial on her main roster character work, and turn down the dial just a tad on her in-ring capabilities. For that reason, her women’s championship matches with Sasha Banks, while great, may have fallen just short of the high bar of her NXT run where she became a beloved character to so many wrestling fans. Banks, meanwhile, has been hot and cold on the main roster. While early returns were encouraging, Banks was inexplicably kept out of the limelight, forming the Boss & Hug Connection with Bayley before becoming something of a lackey to Bayley in a reversal of roles from her NXT days working with Lynch. Eventually, she found her way back to being a tried and true main event talent, but at the time of the Asuka matches, it felt like we were getting Sasha Banks-lite with her still being tied to Bayley.

After regaining the Raw Women’s Championship from Banks at Summerslam, Asuka would hold the belt until WrestleMania 37 when she did the honors for Rhea Ripley. Ripley’s match with Charlotteat WrestleMania 36 received similar criticism to Lynch-Baszler from the night prior. Many thought the wrong person went over, but for different reasons. Based on her runs in NXT UK and NXT, many people, including me, saw Ripley as a face to contend with the likes of Charlotte in the years to come.  But in order for that to manifest, Ripley needed a big win to establish herself on the main roster - not to mention shewas the one tasked with defending her NXT Championship as opposed to the other way around. Of course, Charlotte got the win just to drop the belt two months later toIo Shiraiwhile Ripley took a rotation around the sun, so to speak, before returning at WrestleMania the following year, this time with Asuka’s Raw Women’s Championship up for grabs. The ensuing match was good, however, there was something missing about Ripley on the main roster. I always saw Ripley as the female Pete Dunne: a decent babyface that works better as a heel who can definitely talk but should be kept out of long-winded exchanges. Unfortunately, long-winded exchanges are kind of Monday Night Raw’s thing. How many lines does Daltonhave in Road House? How about Neoin The Matrix? Heck, the protagonist in GTA III doesn’t speak at all. The point? Less is more when it comes to characters like Ripley, and until WWE figures that out, she’ll never reach the heights we all know she can.

Hanging around in the backdrop of the winds of change has been the Alexa Bliss-Fiend storyline. For brevity's sake, I’ll spare the recap, but I will juxtapose the Bliss-Lilly angle up against Lynch’s rise to the top. People enjoy Becky Lynch and “The Man” persona because it feels real, and if it’s real, that means people can relate to it. If people can relate to it, history says that is the strongest way to connect with fans on a grand scale. Relatability is what drew people to Steve Austin, and for a while, it’s what drew people to John Cena. Nobody can relate to someone who claims the controlling stick to their brain is in the possession of a demonic-looking doll. Granted, it makes for a good slasher film, but can it yield a bankable wrestling star? The precedent says no, even though The Undertakerbroke through to have one of the most distinguished careers in the history of the profession. However, for every Undertaker, there is a Papa Shango, Mordecaiand Boogeymanto go with it. While Bliss has yet to hold the Raw Women’s Championship in this era, her segments have superseded the title on several occasions, becoming in the eyes of decision makers the focal point of the Raw women’s division. What’s more troubling, the decision to roll with Bliss in her current role was made during a time where gauging fan reaction was as difficult as ever, and as fans had begun to populate arenas again, she had slowly begun to revert back to being a mix of her old self and new self with fewer supernatural antics.

As for the Raw Women’s Championship, Charlotte regained possession of the belt back in July, and traded reigns with Nikki A.S.H., FKA Nikki Cross. From a physical standpoint, Charlotte is a prodigious talent. However, I’ve grown to see her not as the Ric Flairof the women’s division, but as the Triple Hof the women’s division. As Jim Cornette always says, “Triple H was never the guy. He was the guy who worked with the guy to help the company draw money.” To me, this description fits Charlotte to a tee. She’s a great talent, but she’s constantly on top, and sometimes it seems like the women’s championships of WWE are surgically attached to her waist. Like Rousey and Lynch, Charlotte peaked in the main event of WrestleMania 35, but unlike her two opponents, she would have figured to have benefitted most being in the match, even if her addition to the match was met with widespread criticism. Whether bad booking or simply a lack of interest in Charlotte from the fans was to blame, she never again reached the heights of the WrestleMania 35 match and has gone back to being an underwhelming champion without a drawing woman to work with. As for Cross, people have attempted to justify her new superhero gimmick by the fact that it got her the Raw Women’s Championship, even if only for a month, but the handling of the new character only got half the equation right. Nikki Cross is extremely likable, and people are more than willing to get behind her as an underdog, but is the character relatable? Similar to her former tag team partner Alexa Bliss, the answer is no. People aren’t cheering for the mask, but rather the person behind the mask. The superhero attire only serves to get in the way of the star Cross can become with a simple flick of the pen. Needless to say, with nearly every possible candidate having a turn at being the champion, the Raw women’s division sputtered in Lynch’s absence.

---

It’s not easy to say exactly what quantifies a “draw” in today’s wrestling landscape. Pay-per-view sales used to be a pretty good indicator, but WWE is out of the PPV business. Television ratings have also, historically, been a decent but not definitive indicator, but the water has since been muddied by WWE’s own admission that ratings lack relevance in 2021 due to YouTube and social media. Even then, YouTube views can’t be looked at as a solution to this problem, as view counts are not a barometer for what is “working.” Car crash compilations rack up millions of views per week, but that doesn’t mean being involved in one is going to make you an Internet celebrity. Nowadays, the best indicator for who the “draws” are in wrestling lies in merchandise figures. At around the time of her WrestleMania match with Rousey and Charlotte, Fightful’s very own Sean Ross Sapp reported that Lynch had taken the lead on merchandise sales “since roughly November [2018].” In doing so, Lynch became the first female to lead WWE in merchandise sales, cementing the idea that in fact, draws can still exist in modern wrestling and come in different shapes and sizes. This counteracts the old-school way of thinking that physical intangibles trump everything.

As WWE began to take its foot off the gas pedal with Lynch in 2021 (programs withLacey Evans, Natalya, etc.), her merch sales also began to let up just enough for The Fiend to take over the top spot by the end of 2019. Four months later, she wrestled her last match in WWE for the foreseeable future, and five months later she had officially taken her leave. Recent history does say, however, that as long as WWE is aggressively pushing Lynch as the face of whatever brand she’s on, she can do big business for the company, and thus, big business for the women’s division, provided she is set up with the right opponents to work with.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom for women’s wrestling in WWE with Lynch out, however. Bayley and Sasha Banks carried the load for the blue brand, first as a tag team, then as renewed rivals with a fresh outlook. The in-ring chemistry between the two is tried and true, and Bayley’s transition into an organic heel gave Banks the boost she needed to once again become a credible women’s champion, which later set the table for Bianca Belair’srise to the top. Fans and pundits alike lauded the Banks-Belair match as being one of the best women’s matches of all time, and it’s tough to disagree. Bell-to-bell, it outshined Lynch/Rousey/Charlotte from two years prior and established Belair as a main event talent and someone set up to make a Lynch-like impact on WWE.

Naturally, with her return to the ring imminent, people called for Lynch to challenge Belair for the Smackdown strap at some point down the line. However, the match the fans got wasn’t necessarily the match they asked for. Lynch returned at SummerSlam as a legitimate surprise for the Las Vegas fans but beat Belair in less than 30 seconds to undo the great work Belair had done dating back to the Royal Rumble. The fashion in which the title change went down also established Lynch as a heel, making for an unfortunate double whammy for wrestling fans. It’s doubtful that many had Lynch beating Belair for the title on their SummerSlam bingo cards, and even fewer probably would have thought it would result in a heel turn. Now some stars reach a level of popularity where they become truly unturnable. CM Punkwould appear to have reached that point in AEW, and while many thought Steve Austin reached that point back in 2001, it didn’t stop WWE from making the bold move at WrestleMania XVII to turn him heel. I thought Lynch reached that level in the women’s division. How does a company turn its one-time top merch peddler heel? That was the excuse fans got for why John Cena never turned heel again after his face turn in 2003, so why couldn’t that same logic be applied to Lynch who the fans legitimately don’t want to boo? This much is anybody’s guess, but WWE can be full of surprises and there may even be a remote chance Lynch is a babyface once again by the time this piece runs.

---

One benefit of Lynch being away is that while the movement within the women’s divisions has been largely stagnant with exceptions, there are still plenty of women for her to work with. Belair would have been at the top of my list before Lynch beat her in record time at SummerSlam, but there is still a lot of potential in a feud between the two. The future matches will have to be great, but I think it’s too early to give up hope on that. Lynch has never worked with an athlete like Belair, and Lynch certainly knows how to be an effective in-match heel, I just question how quickly WWE is burning this match when in reality, this could be a credible WrestleMania main event.

Speaking of WrestleMania, Lynch figures to be the A-side to whatever match she’s in, but there’s a number of different directions her character can go. If Bayley is her WrestleMania opponent-to-be, it would be fair to expect Lynch to turn face again prior to the program considering how well the heel Bayley character would work with “The Man” as we used to understand her. Lynch appearing on “Ding-Dong, Hello!” would make for good television as well. If WWE decides to run back Becky vs. Sasha from the aforementioned NXT Takeover: Unstoppable, it would be wise for the two to play on each other’s past in the build-up, regardless of what the alignment is. If WWE decides to go the route of putting Lynch up against a new face, Rhea Ripley is always going to be on the table, and don’t count out Raquel Gonzalezas a dark horse for Lynch’s first WrestleMania match in two years, as she is always improving and cosmetically fits the bill for what WWE believes a star needs to look like. Regardless of who she is slated to work with next, and regardless of her alignment (although a face turn needs to happen sooner rather than later), it feels damn good to say Becky Lynch is back to mixing it up in WWE. As the past year and a half has shown, the shows are more interesting with her than without her, and her sheer presence on the shows could expedite the rise of a handful of up-and-coming talents in the WWE women’s division.

Jack Goodwillieis a freelance sports journalist and a regular contributor to The Wrestling Estate. The former athletic administrator got his start covering high school sports for The Philadelphia Inquirer after receiving his journalism degree from Temple University in 2015.

Twitter: @jackgoodwillie