Charlotte Flair looks back on a major mark she made in 2018.
Across her WWE career, Charlotte Flair has captured 14 world championships, main-evented a WrestleMania, won two Royal Rumbles, and conquered many grueling match stipulations. If you ask her about her true “arrival” in WWE, though, she’d point to a match involving none of those things. In fact, she wasn’t even meant to be in the respective match.
“… When I look back on my career so far, and on my favorite matches, the match with Ronda [Rousey] at Survivor Series really stands out,” Flair wrote in The Players’ Tribute. “Not just because of what it was — The Baddest vs. The Queen, an actual dream match — but because of what it wasn’t. Like, that one stands out to me because of what it didn’t have. Titles on the line? Nope, nothing. Hype? Not at all, zero hype. Great story? Long build? Time to prepare? None of that. What we had was three days.
“Three days before Survivor Series, we found out that the match they’d booked Ronda in couldn’t happen — so she needed a replacement opponent. And if you know the wrestling business, then you know that one of the unwritten rules is: If there’s a match you sold a show on, and you’re not able to deliver it, you have to pull out all the stops to make it up to that crowd. You have to give them ‘the next best option.’ WWE decided I was that option.”
With Becky Lynch sustaining a broken nose and concussion just days before Survivor Series 2018, Flair stepped in as her replacement against Ronda Rousey. What unfolded was initially a back-and-forth performance between Rousey and Flair. Eventually, Flair snapped, so much so that she struck Rousey with a kendo stick, causing the referee to disqualify her. Still, Flair continued to unload kendo stick shots on Rousey, then capped off her outburst with a steel chair stomp to Rousey’s neck.
Flair Praises Her Outing With Rousey
“I’ve had a lot of great matches in my career……. and I think if you asked most people to pick the moment when I ‘arrived,’ they’d pick a match from much earlier. But to me, that Ronda match in L.A. is the one,” Flair wrote. “Because I think that’s the first moment in my career where I really, finally felt undeniable. Where I felt like I got to do what I do best, without any of the other bulls***. You know when you watch someone like a Patrick Mahomes or a Josh Allen play quarterback — and when they’re in the two-minute drill, it’s like they just flip on this switch and play FREE???
:That’s how I felt against Ronda at Survivor Series. It was like for 15 minutes we were in the two-minute drill. There was no time to prepare for it, no time to think through it. But also no time to get in my own head about it. For one match, I just got to be a world-class athlete, thrown into a high-pressure moment, asked to go out there and execute. I just got to flip on that switch, go off instinct and play free. I felt like no one in the world could touch me that night.”
“The Queen” and Rousey met again in the main event of WrestleMania 35, with Becky Lynch rounding out their triple threat for both the WWE Raw and SmackDown Women’s Championships. Lynch found victory in this case by pinning Rousey.
