Road Dogg says he was confused by fans’ reaction to Becky Lynch in 2018.
Since moving to the main roster in 2015, Lynch had been popular, but her actions on that Summer night in 2018 set her on the path to superstardom. The star had earned herself a shot at the SmackDown Women’s Champion Carmella on the show, but Charlotte Flair was later added to the match. In the end, Flair got the win by pinning Lynch.
After the match, Lynch attacked Flair turning heel. Or at least that was the theory. Instead of booing, fans cheered Lynch to the rafters, and even when she hammered the “heel” turn home on the following episode of SmackDown she was cheered even louder.
This switch set the star on the biggest run of her career which saw her win the Raw and SmackDown Titles in the main event of WrestleMania 35.
During this period, Road Dogg was working as part of the writing team on SmackDown and watched on in surprise as fans cheered. Speaking on his Oh You Didn’t Know podcast, the veteran said fans were wrong to cheer the star.
“The idea was that Charlotte came in and weaseled her way in and won the title, and kind of stole it from [Becky]. Becky had a title match. So, why — and that’s just where maybe I’m older and I don’t understand, but you don’t just get handed crap around here. So to me, the whole thing was, I thought the fans were wrong.
You’re cheering the wrong person here because — what if the Bad News Bears were shaking hands with the team, or whoever, your baseball-playing son is shaking hands saying, good game, good game or your softball-playing daughter, good game, good game and the team that loses just beats the crap out of the person. Do you pop for that, or do you go, ‘Oh my god, what are you doing? That’s horrible sportsmanship.’
That’s what Becky did, and people loved it. It let me know then, like, oh okay. There’s no goodness left at all [laughs]. It’s all Twitter, the world is Twitter. The world is Twitter now.”
Continuing on, the WWE Hall of Famer remained adamant that Lynch was being a heel.
“This is still my stance and I’ll have this conversation with anybody, and maybe I’m wrong, but it’s my belief. Becky was the heel with every move she made, but the crowd ate it up. Yeah, we predicted that they would pop for Becky [at SummerSlam] because Becky’s star was rising.
I thought, ‘Well surely they’re going to see that Becky is just a spoiled sport here.’ She lost. I’m sorry, you lost, and then because you lost, you beat me up. You beat up your friend. I can sit here and talk all night about how she should be the heel in this story, but because of society and how the culture is, and I would say wrestling twitter, which leads the conversation a lot of times.”
Becky Lynch Heading For Clash With Rising Star
Fast forward to 2023 and The Man is still one of the biggest stars in WWE. Although she’s yet to finish her rivalry with Trish Stratus, it’d been reported that Tiffany Stratton is next up for Becky Lynch.
Stratton kept a watching brief on Raw as Lynch overcame Zoey Stark.
H/t to Fightful