Shayna Baszler is looking forward to adding “Women’s World Champion” to her byline.
The Queen of Spades spoke with WrestleZone Managing Editor Bill Pritchard ahead of WWE Crown Jewel. Baszler is one of four challengers for Rhea Ripley’s Women’s World Championship.
This match has plenty of layers to it, including Baszler’s history with Ripley in NXT. There’s also her past alliance with Nia Jax. Baszler says this is not a throwaway match by any means. She agreed that it could be Ripley’s toughest title defense to date.
“Well, I think firstly, any time you have a match like this with this many capable people, it’s going to be exciting and action-packed. There’s not a lot of places with four other people in there to sit and take a breather. So that’s going to be the first thing for the fans. But for me personally, I like the prospect of — so the other four girls in this match aren’t just like four other girls in the division. You could legitimately make an argument that the five of us are like neck and neck for the top of the division.
“Obviously, Rhea is the champion and she’s a real dominant champion right now,” Baszler explained, “but you could really argue that any of the other four of us could contend with her. This isn’t like a throwaway match where, to have Rhea on the card, we’re going to put her in a match. It’s nothing like that.”
Baszler said any one of the five competitors winning wouldn’t come as a huge shock. For her personally, a title win would be great, but beating 4 of the top women in WWE to do it would make it much sweeter.
“That’s the thing I’m looking forward to the most is that little byline in my bio,” she added.
No easy target
Shayna Baszler isn’t looking at Crown Jewel like a singles match. She noted that some might joke about performers beating multiple people in a given match, but it’s absolutely true here.
“With the four of us, there’s nobody that’s like the ‘easy win’. There’s no easy target in this match. Even taking away the fact that it’s a fatal five-way, so whoever gets the win first. You can’t just think about beating one person. You legitimately do have to beat four other people because everyone’s going to be trying to stop you from beating someone else.
“Fans maybe joke or there’s comments on social media when we have a match like this. [The wrestler will say], ‘I beat four other people.’ They’re like, ‘You beat one.’ The others were in the match, but legitimately you have to beat four others because like I said, I need to lay out these three so that they don’t stop me from pinning or submitting this one. And for Rhea, you put her in a singles match against any of the four of us, and that’s going to be a tough match for her. Now she’s got to deal with all the others. It’s by far her toughest defense, I think.”
WWE Crown Jewel takes place on Saturday, November 4, with a 1 p.m. EST bell time. Watch our full interview with Shayna Baszler below:
