Shayna Baszler Responds To ‘You Can’t Wrestle’ Comments Aimed At Her And Ronda Rousey

Ronda Rousey teamed with Shayna Baszler to take on Natalya & Shotzi on the February 17 episode of WWE SmackDown. Rousey & Baszler were victorious in the bout as Rousey submitted Shotzi with an armbar

During the match, Rousey was serenaded with “You can’t wrestle” chants from the Montreal crowd. 

Appearing on WWE Die Woche, Baszler responded to the chants and general “you can’t wrestle” comments directed at her and Rousey. 

“It’s funny because you’ll hear, ‘you can’t wrestle’ or people tell us ‘we can’t wrestle’ or ‘learn how to wrestle,’ ‘all we do is MMA.’ We’re probably the only two girls in the locker room, maybe on the roster, there are maybe this many [holds up five fingers] that know how to do a double leg takedown. A real double leg. That’s wrestling. It’s funny the way people think about us because we’re too good. I like when I’m doing stuff and I look in the audience and people have to watch my matches between their fingers and they’re like, ‘oh no.’ I like that,” she said.

She continued, “I dabble in comic books and there is a Batman comic where someone says, ‘Why do you call yourself a bat? You don’t fly.’ He says, ‘I don’t fly because I don’t need to fly.’ Me and Ronda don’t fly around because we don’t need to. Other people have to do that because they don’t know how to grab your arm and twist it in any direction, we do. It’s different if you look at it that way and open your mind. It’s specifically the United States. Europe especially, Japan, they’re a little more open to this style of wrestling. I spent a lot of time in Japan wrestling and that’s where I really got comfortable. Like anyone, when I first started in pro wrestling, ‘Josh (Barnett) I want to have a top rope move, I want to do cool stuff.’ ‘No one can do what you do, you need to embrace what you do.’ When I went to Japan and lived there and wrestled for a while, I really got comfortable and went, ‘Ah yes, I don’t need to do that, this is cool. This is the cool stuff.’ It’s been fun.”

Baszler and Rousey are former MMA fighters with Rousey taking the UFC to new heights as the first woman to main event a pay-per-view and a former UFC Women’s Bantamweight Champion. 

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