‘The Nightmare’ Rhea Ripley is the no. 1 contender for the WWE Raw Women’s Championship right now. She will face Asuka for the title at WrestleMania 37 this weekend.
Rhea Ripley has been vastly addressed as ‘The Nightmare’ and she is pretty worthy of that nickname. She dominated the whole NXT division and right now her goals are set for the main roster and from the way she made her main roster debut it looks like she is here to triumph the whole division.
Rhea Ripley Reflects On The Injury That Kept Her Out Of Action During NXT UK Run
But her career did not look very promising when she first came to WWE. She was one of the 32 women who participated in the inaugural Mae Young Classic in 2017. She lost to Dakota Kai in the second round only and things have changed drastically since then for Rhea Ripley.
She went to compete in the NXT UK brand and she did pretty well over there. She won the NXT UK Women’s championship once before coming to NXT UK. But she faced a major injury during her NXT UK run. Recently she talked about that very injury sidelined her for quite a time when she appeared on the Metal Injection Squared Circle Pit podcast, she also talked about her merchandise;
On ideas for her merchandise and how she’s super excited about the direction they’re going:
I was super excited. So, the first shirt that I have, they have the Rhea Ripley one with the sort of metal writing and the chains. But the one after that with my face on it, I actually designed that one so I got shirts from like Suicide Silence and I was like, ‘This look is really, really cool and I wanna make something like this but I wanna use this photo of me that they took with my tongue out, I want all this stuff.
I want this sort of font’ so I sort of, I had a little input with my shirts which is really cool and now they just sort of like keep making them but they know what I like so I put that first input in and now they understand me so they keep making more and they’ll go through me. They’ll be like, ‘Which one do you like?’ And I’ll be like, ‘This one, definitely this one. People will love this.’ So that’s what happens with the shirts and the merch designs and all that.
Says she was supposed to be on the first NXT UK tapings but she popped an eardrum:
I was on the first Mae Young Classic. That was my official debut and that was two weeks after I moved here, and then after that, it was the second Mae Young and because I did so well in the second Mae Young, they wanted me to go to NXT UK and I was like super excited. I remember I was supposed to be on the first tapings of NXT UK but I actually had a popped eardrum so I wasn’t allowed to fly.
But I went there for the tournament for the NXT UK Women’s Championship and I had no idea what was going on. No idea, no one told me anything. I was just like yeah, yeah, I finally get to wrestle. I was just super excited to wrestle because I hadn’t been on TV except for the Mae Young Classics.
We are hoping to see an excellent contest between Rhea Ripley and Asuka at ‘The Showcase of the Immortals’ and we believe these two athletes can produce a five-star match together if given the perfect booking.
(H/T and transcribed by Post Wrestling)