Layla is tired of people acting like the Divas era had no real wrestlers and she just called them out for it.
While speaking to Chris Van Vliet, Layla said the biggest misconception about that era is that the women simply could not work. She admitted she was not on the same level as names like Michelle McCool, Beth Phoenix, Gail Kim, Victoria, Melina, or Natalya, but she made it clear plenty of women from that time could absolutely go.
“Is the fact that they say that the Divas are not wrestlers. Like, you know what I mean? Like some of the girls can’t wrestle, they can’t work, stuff like that. Oh, they were so bad.”
Layla then pointed out the obvious problem. Those women were not getting the same time women get today. In her eyes, if WWE had actually given them room to breathe, fans would have seen a lot more.
“There were girls that could wrestle. There were girls like — I’m not saying me, not me — but Michelle McCool, Beth Phoenix, Gail Kim, Victoria, Melina, Natalya. You’re telling me if you gave those women the time that the women get now, they wouldn’t be amazing as these girls?”
Then Layla described what it was really like backstage. The women would be in gorilla watching their match time disappear because men’s segments needed extra minutes. By the time the Divas got sent out, they sometimes had almost nothing left to work with.
“We’d be sitting in gorilla and I’d watch the guys come by and they’d be like, we need five, ten minutes. We need two minutes more here, two more there. And I would watch our time getting chipped away.”
That meant entrances, story, moves, finish — all of it had to be crammed into barely any time. So when fans look back and say the Divas were bad, Layla thinks they are missing the bigger picture. She believes the women were never truly set up to prove themselves the way today’s roster is.
“They’d be like, girls, you just lost five minutes. Girls, you got two minutes. OK, entrance is on dark. And you’re just like… then you go out there, you’ve got to tell a story, get a match, do your entrances within 90 seconds. That’s the misconception. I think they think that we were so bad. It was like, no. They didn’t really want us to be professional wrestlers. They wanted us to be eye candy.”
Bottom line, Layla says the Divas era had talent, but WWE did not always give that talent the time or respect needed to show it. In her mind, the issue was never that the women could not wrestle — it was that the company barely let them.
What do you think about Layla defending the Divas era? Drop your thoughts below and leave your feedback.
Please credit Ringside News if you use the above transcript in your publication.
