Up until the past couple years, if I wrote something about Charlotte Flair, someone would almost always call me a “hater”.
It wasn’t true, at least not literally. But while I’ve always admired her wrestling, her character hadn’t resonated with me in any way for quite some time. I struggled to connect to her work as a result. Plut, it never helped that I was a huge fan of two of her fellow Horsewomen from the start of modern NXT, and the remaining one evolved into one of my favorite pro wrestlers of this
century, and quite possibly ever.
That’s changed. It happened when she came back from her 2023 knee injury, and did so without the Queenly guard she’d had up since… the Submission Sorority Team PCB days, I think. Charlotte’s allowed us to see her humanity, both in her character on WWE television, but especially off it. In particular, her piece for The Player’s Tribune gave everyone multiple ways we could relate to both Ashley Fliehr and the 14-time WWE World champion whose persona Fliehr informs.
Enough about me. Just wanted to provide context for the following, which are quotes from Flair’s recent appearance on Power Hour with Ilona Maher that are making the round on the wrestle web today (Fri., Aug. 28).
In one, Charlotte talks about her reputation for being “difficult” backstage. I know how loaded that word can be from the women in my own life, so I don’t think I called Flair that. I did buy into rumors of her “pulling rank” backstage… and had a few passionate debates with Geno about whether or not Flair went too far to protect her gimmick at times (e.g. in the great belt swap flap of ‘21).
During that one, she also talks about having to let go of her old mentality about wins and losses from when she was a high-level volleyball player in high school and college. AJ Styles just spoke about this in relation to the discussion around how quickly women pick up pro wrestling. Charlotte’s answer proves that part of his theory wrong even as it gives us more insight into Fliehr/Flair*.
“It is tough. Because a lot of people that I work with haven’t played sports, and I also feel being a woman in the industry, sometimes if I do have an opinion, it’s like, ‘Oh man, she’s just difficult.’ No, I’m not difficult. I have an opinion. I’ve done this for a long time. I deserve to have it.
“At the same time, you kind of have to let down your ego as an athlete and go, we are here to tell stories and we’re here to elicit emotion, and if that’s what’s best for the story, then you have to just, like, eat it.
“Because what I’ve learned over the last year, and I was guilty of this, is all I could attach my emotions to is winning, winning, winning. When it’s like, wait, hold on. This still isn’t real. Your losses are making you win as a businesswoman. So, for me as an athlete, having to understand that has been such growth.”
On that part of the business, Flair also answered rugby badass and body positivity advocate Maher’s question about how the matches where wins and losses don’t matter work. There, she talked about how WWE and its producers/agents have let her lay out her own matches for years, which doesn’t surprise me and seems like a good call.
“I’ve had for years now the freedom for putting the match together. They might have, like, ‘She’s winning or she’s winning, we’d like her to win by submission or pinfall’. But in terms of the dance, they’ve always allowed me to put the dance together.”
And while you mull those answers over, you can do with this as you wish. Asked who her favorite person to wrestle is, Flair ended up talking about how much she loves working with her current tag partner Alexa Bliss. But before that she offered:
“I plead the fifth on who I don’t like wrestling… One person.”
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* Pro wrestling is so weird. I love it a lot, but… so weird.
