Becky Lynch says Ronda Rousey was ‘mishandled’ in WWE

Becky Lynch says Ronda Rousey was mishandled in WWE. 

During recent media interviews, Rousey has been critical of WWE, stating it's "an absolute s**t show" and that the company wasn't willing to work with her on developing a story that would lead to Rousey vs. Lynch at WrestleMania. 

Lynch was asked about Rousey's comments during an appearance on The MMA Hour on Wednesday and responded:

I have a very different view and a very different experience of WWE. I always wanted to do this. This is what I always wanted to do. I love this. I love this, and is it perfect? No, nothing is. 

She continued:

Stuff like the creative, no, it’s not always great. There’s been a history of it not making sense to me, but nobody’s personally going, ‘How do we make Becky Lynch look awful?’ But they have so much going on, there is so much going on and the fact that we pull everything off the way that we do, and even at a time when notoriously the shows were getting rewritten as we were going live on TV, and we still go them done and we still went out there, we still hit our times and we still made the show work — and no, it was not always great, but a lot of it was all doing the best we can. Nobody wants to go out there and do bad work or make anybody look bad.

Regarding how WWE handled Rousey specifically, however, Lynch believes part of the issue may have been that management had too much confidence in her wrestling ability. 

Lynch said:

She was coming off a different industry. She was a star and she should have been handled differently in terms of — I think she had such a great first outing that everybody thought, ‘Oh, she can wrestle.’ I mean this with respect, but she couldn’t wrestle.

What we do isn’t something that you can just have one good match and then, ‘OK, yeah, I’m off to the races.’ It’s a craft, and you have to learn your craft, and you have to be diligent about learning your craft. But everybody treated Ronda like she already knew it because when she first came in, she was good in that first bout, but she was also working with Kurt Angle, she was working with Triple H, Stephanie McMahon. It was a well-rehearsed match because everybody wanted her to succeed. And then it was, ‘OK, she can do this, off to the races,’ and that was mishandling her because she was a star in her own right and she’d done so much for MMA.

So in terms of that and booking, that wasn’t done well, but my experience coming from nobody thinking that I was going to be worth anything and making myself very valuable to the company and very valuable to wrestling in general, it’s because I loved it. Because I loved it and I sought out to do it. She came in and I think she found a place that she enjoyed, she liked, but she never sought to do it from a young age, and I think that changes the experience you have when you go into a place.

Rousey and Lynch have been doing media rounds of late to promote their upcoming books. Rousey's "Our Fight" releases on April 2 and Lynch's "Becky Lynch: The Man: Not Your Average Average Girl" hit bookshelves on March 26.