Professional wrestler Thea Trinidad who is currently going by the name of Zelina Vega in WWE recently talked about her 9/11 anniversary match being cut from Friday Night Smackdown. Zelina won the first ever WWE Queen’s Crown tournament a number of months ago.
Zelina Vega mostly became famous among the professional wrestling fans during her works in the independent circuit promotions. She went by the name of Thea Trinidad. She also worked in TNA Wrestling for three years where she was known as a Rosita. She won the TNA Knockouts Tag Team championships one time during her TNA run. She was quite famous on the independent circuit as well.
Zelina Vega Looks Back At Her Match Being Cut From 9/11 Anniversary Smackdown
In 2016 she came to WWE for the first time in her career. At first she was portrayed as the manager of Andrade “Cien” Almas. It took her quite a time in WWE to become a wrestler. After spending two years on the NXT she came to the main roster for the first time in 2018. She participated in various matches against various big names. But in most cases she had to face failure. She was mostly portrayed as a jobber in WWE for the most part of her career.
But her push came out of nowhere. Since returning to WWE recently on Friday Night Smackdown she was constantly jobbing to different wrestlers. Meanwhile, the Queen’s Crown tournament was announced in which she participated.
Fans were rooting for Shayna Baszler or Doudrop to win the tournament, but it was quite surprising that Zelina won the whole thing. This victory was quite surprising, and nobody saw this coming. After her back to back wins over Doudrop it is quite clear that WWE is trying to push her. One of the main reasons behind this push has to be her amazing mic skill.
Thea Trinidad who is currently going by the name of Zelina Vega in WWE recently spoke to Cheap Heat podcast where she talked about her 9/11 anniversary match being cut from Friday Night Smackdown. She said;
“It was weird. I didn’t think this was going to be a question that would keep coming up because I didn’t think it was going to be so massive. It was such a thing and I had no idea the kind of support I was going to get from that. People don’t understand that when you’re doing live TV, you can’t really predict certain things.
“You can’t predict if someone is going to go over time. We have times, know how this works, you have times you have to hit, but if you’re doing a promo, you don’t have anyone talking to you in your ear telling you, ‘you have a minute left.’ I think it was Edge and Seth [Rollins], they went over, and Roman [Reigns] and Brock [Lesnar] went over. By that time, they had both used an extra four minutes.
“By that time in the show, the only thing they could cut was our match. It wasn’t a personal thing, it wasn’t. I say it because I was upset and broken-hearted because I wanted to be part of it. At the same time, it’s not like I knew Vince was going, ‘I’m going to do this to her,’ because he would never do that. By the time it did get cut, I spoke to them, and they knew it hurt me. They didn’t want that to be the case. They just let me do 9/11 the way I needed to with my family.”
“The next day, Vince called me and he must have apologized 30 times. It was him expressing how sorry he was and it wasn’t personal. ‘I know how you can see it as a personal thing, but it wasn’t. I’m so sorry, I would never do that to you. Let’s work together and make this right and do this together.
“Let’s meet on Friday and talk about it.’ We did. It ended up being something that…would I have traded four minutes at a MSG show for the sake of doing it for my dad versus now being The Queen and being Tag Team Champion? Not saying that’s why it happened.”
H/T to Fightful for the transcription