Rhea Ripley says she was never supposed to be the inaugural NXT UK Women’s Champion.
“The Nightmare” Rhea Ripley is truly one of the mega-popular stars to come out of the NXT system, specifically NXT UK.
Ripley was the first NXT UK Women's Champion, but she says it wasn't supposed to happen that way. She wasn't even supposed to be in the finals for the tournament to crown the champion.
“It was a wild couple of days. I don't think I was supposed to make it past the second round. I don't really know what happened, everything just kept changing,” Ripley tells Flash Morgan Webster on his podcast, Wrestling Friends. “They kept changing the matches, everything. Going into the final with Toni, I wasn't supposed to be in the finals. I don't know what happened in the meetings or what was said or done, but somehow I won the whole tournament. I don't know where it came from, I thought they wanted a heel to be champ. It seemed like it was made for Toni to be NXT UK Women's Champion.”
Continuing on, Ripley says the sad takeaway for her was an injury suffered by Toni Storm, which dampened the whole experience for her.
“The most depressing thing was, she got injured as well and hurt her back. That didn't make me feel fantastic about myself. 'Man, I keep injuring people.' But because that happened, everyone was like, 'Toni was supposed to win, that's why they had a weird ending that came out of nowhere.' No, it was planned that way. It was just a stressful day,” she’d say.
Rhea Ripley had another occurrence where fate was on her side when she turned what was supposed to be a one-off loss to Shayna Baszler into the championship run that eventually landed her in one of the featured matches at WrestleMania 36. Learn more about that at this link.
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