Posted in: Sports, TV, WWE | Tagged: lita, wrestling, wwe

WWE Hall-of-Famer Lita Discusses The Women's Evolution

Published Sat, 01 Aug 2020 13:30:18 -0500

WWE Hall-of-Famer Lita was a guest on a recent episode of Corey Graves's After the Bell podcast, and one of the topics they covered is the much-lauded Women's Evolution. Though Lita's full-time career lasted just under a decade, she remains one of the most beloved WWE stars of all time. Lita's full-time run with WWE ended in 2007, and she was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2014. But she recently made a brief in-ring comeback in 2018 to compete at the Evolution PPV. Graves wanted to know how Lita felt as a wrestler from the Attitude Era and Ruthless Aggression era, seeing the environment that today's female WWE Superstars operate in.

Lita and Trish Stratus are victorious at WWE's 2018 Evolution PPV

"What I love seeing now is the rise in women supporting women, like the whole locker room cheering each other on and seeing that a good match for two women is a good match for the entire locker room and for other opportunities," Lita said. "I feel like for me and for Trish at the time, it was like more fend for yourself. Cool, we've got this spot, but we're in this spot under the boys' rules, so we gotta fend for ourselves and hope that we continue to get these opportunities and forge this path for ourselves, hoping that other people could join in. But we gotta keep our heads down because we got this tiny little light coming through the door that we gotta try to just, we can't kick it in because we're gonna get smacked back, so we gotta kinda keep like creaking that door open to let people come in."

"It's so rad," Lita said of the current environment for female superstars. "I love now, as big as the moments were that were the firsts, it's cool that we're running out of firsts. That's where you've made real progress. Where it's not like the girl's match, it's just like, who are the matches on the card tonight, who am I stoked to see on the card tonight? It's not defined by gender."

"Yeah, for sure," Lita said when Graves asked her if she ever experienced envy at what today's female superstars are allowed to do. "When I saw that first Money in the Bank match, Elimination Chamber, these things that a woman could go nowhere near," Lita explained. "If somebody would have thrown that into the pitch meeting, it would have been like a record scratching. Going to seeing it happen, I don't know exactly what that word is if it's envy or what, but there is like a part of the first, I'm like, no way, this is so cool. I can't believe these girls are getting to do this, because it was so ingrained for me for so long to be like, shut up, you're so lucky that you're getting to do this, have this opportunity, so you better like it and play ball and do your bra and panty matches when we ask you to do those, so you keep getting to be thrown through a table occasionally."

Listen to the full podcast interview here. Lita is currently working on a new show called KAYfABE along with fellow wrestling vets Christy Hemme and Gail Kim, though the show had the misfortune of attempting to crowdfund just as the coronavirus pandemic was starting, and is on hold for now.

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