Former WWE star Kaitlyn discusses winning Divas title, friendship with AJ Lee, Michael Cole, and more

Former WWE star Kaitlyn sat down with Chris Van Vliet in Houston, Texas to discuss joining WWE with no pro wrestling experience, her friendship with AJ Lee, winning the Divas Championship, Michael Cole burying her NXT match on commentary, wrestling Vickie Guerrero, how the spear became her finisher, why an in-ring return is unlikely, and more!

Do you think this version of yourself would ever wrestle again?

“I hope no one hates me for this, but I don’t really want to get back in the ring. I respect wrestling a lot, and I find it very entertaining. I love the artistry of it. I don’t think I could ever have the appreciation that I have now if I had never been a professional wrestler. Because there are so many aspects to the performance. There’s so many things to think about. The psychology of the match, connecting with people, telling a story with your face and your body, protecting your face and your body, protecting the person that you’re in the ring with, helping them perform to their best. Knowing where the cameras are, knowing how much time you have, being able to change it up if the people in the audience aren’t buying it, if they don’t care about it, so there’s so much to it. It’s such a beautiful art form, so I will always love it and deeply respect it. I don’t really watch it, but occasionally I will if there’s someone that I’m still friends with or that I love. Occasionally I’ll watch a match, but I don’t know. I don’t think I am gonna get back in the ring because I don’t have this burning desire to do that.”

Not everybody gets to be the Divas Champion, and you were only there for four years, but you got to be the person there. You got to win the Divas Championship. So take me to that day when you found out that you’re going to win.

“Just like everything in my wrestling career, it was so surreal. I didn’t really have time to process it, but I knew that Eve wanted to leave, and again, we had such a beautiful relationship; she elevated me so much, and she wanted to leave and start a family and do something different in her life. So I felt this enormous honor to be the person that received the title from her in her farewell match; it was so important because there were multiple things happening. Also yeah, wrestling is scripted and written, and when you’re the champ, they decide you’re going to be the champ. But I think that in a lot of ways is more powerful than you just randomly winning a match. This is just how I see it. I became a person who was worthy of holding the championship, and especially knowing the way that I started, that was so significant to me. I did it. I was scared and afraid that I wasn’t going to be able to live up to being the type of champion that Eve was. Then to be able to win the title in my hometown as a babyface was very cool in front of all my friends and family, and Houston wrestling fans are so supportive, and every once in a while people still recognize me around here. But it was just one of the coolest and most profound moments of my life.”

What was it like when you got to the back after winning that title?

“I did an interview right when I got backstage. Didn’t even know what I was saying. But it was just like it was one of those moments where I was in the quantum, this field of infinite possibilities. I made it to this level of a world champion. Again, wrestling is predetermined; it’s written, but to become someone through the course of three and a half years, starting from absolutely zero experience to then holding the title representing the women’s division of a global company, I don’t even know what word to use.”

Then it leads to this great match that you have with AJ Lee at Payback.

“It’s hard to articulate what that match means to me. It is by far the best match of my career, and not just technically in the ring, but just the rise of the storyline, how invested the fans were in us as women, and how much we had poured ourselves into the process. AJ and I were friends from day one. I had won NXT, so I was on the SmackDown roster, but I was kind of by myself. I wasn’t really a part of the clique with the rest of the Divas yet, and they had started to bring her up on the road shortly after I had won NXT. We were just really tight from day one, and so we spent a lot of time doing jobs, just like getting beat up. I was telling you about this earlier, getting beat up by Beth and Nattie, taking electric chairs. Neither of us had done anything super substantial yet, but we were slowly trying to get ourselves over on social media and Twitter, and anytime we were in the ring, one of the commentators would talk to us about, okay, what do you want me to say about you on TV? We were trying to get our friendship over, and we deemed ourselves the Chickbusters, and I started calling myself the Hybrid Diva, and we were slowly getting there inch by inch. Then her stuff started to really take off with Daniel Bryan, and she became this absolute force, and then I kind of went the other way and went towards the title. I guess we were kind of both at the top in a certain perspective, and so when we got to have our feud, we were doing some epic stuff. They were giving us crossover segments, which, if you don’t know what a crossover segment is, it’s where it’s like if you’re going from 8:59 to 9 o’clock, there’s a high probability that people are going to change the channel to watch another show. So you want to have something very compelling.

So we were getting some of that stuff. We were getting excellent ratings, and she was so good, and she’s still so good on the mic, and people cared; people cared about our story because we for so long had put ourselves over as best friends, and not just on the show but on social media, and we were best friends. We traveled together, we just got each other, and we were there for each other in a lot of moments that were very difficult behind the scenes. Just the pressure of everything, and the travel was a lot. It was not just a storyline on TV. It was both of us with all of our hearts trying to elevate ourselves and the division and what the title meant. My title reign didn’t mean that much. I was champ during WrestleMania 29, was not on the show, so I didn’t feel like my title reign held a lot of weight until literally the last day that I had it. So it’s just funny sometimes when I talk to people who might not know about that storyline, particularly kind of like the meat of it, why it mattered. They’re like, your favorite match was when you lost the title? Yeah, because she had wanted the title for so many years, and we had this opposite story where I got hired because I was athletic and I had charisma and the way that I looked. She loved wrestling from a very young age, and she did indie stuff, and she was at developmental for years, and so we had this totally opposite story happening, and the title was everything to her. So for me to lose the title to her after telling that story and have people care so much about it, to me there was nothing better than that.”

Didn’t you guys go over on your time on this match?

“Yeah, you never go over. You’re supposed to never go over, especially in a pay-per-view. But we did, because our match was sick. It was so sick, and it wasn’t like anything crazy technically. We were really good together because I was the strong style, and she was really light, and we could do some cool stuff.”

You had a great story.

“We were so invested into it, and it just meant a lot to both of us. So yeah, they told us to go home. I can’t remember, but I think originally they gave us like 12, maybe 13 minutes, which is a lot on a pay-per-view for women, especially then. I think we had a pretty big chunk of the match left, maybe like a third of the match left when they told us to go home and she straight up was like, ‘No,’ and I was like, okay, we’re doing this. I think her ability to not even blink and be like, ‘No, we’re not going home right now.’ I was like, all right, okay. I think we went over a couple of minutes, but it was worth it. It was so worth it. The part that’s scary is after that. Because no matter what, if you go over your time, you’re taking time from someone else’s. You have the main event left, and I don’t even remember where we were on the card, but when we got back to Gorilla, that is something that you can get fired for.

One of the most significant things I remember was Cena was in Gorilla, and Cena was always really cool. He would help you if you wanted it, if you really showed up and wanted it, he would help you. He would watch matches, and he would give feedback, and he would be brutally honest with you. The people that saw what he was doing and wanted it, he would help them. So he was always like a mentor in a lot of ways if you wanted the feedback and you wanted to be better, and you would actually take the advice. He was standing back there in Gorilla, and he was just like, ‘Never do that again.’ Then it was like a bead of sweat, and then he was like, ‘But great match, that was such a great match.’ It was so cool.”