Despite teasing that fans would have to “buy the book” to learn more about why she & Naomi walked out of WWE in May 2022, Mercedes Moné did provide some insight during her interview on New York’s Hot 97 last week.
For one thing, the former Sasha Banks revealed that she hadn’t been happy at the company for a while. After discussing how being a pro wrestler was a lifetime dream of Moné’s, Hot 97’s Nessa asked if she’s ever considered quitting the business. Mercedes said that should did towards the end of her WWE run, but her passion for performing and the response she got from fans convinced her to stick with it:
“Only within the last two years, when I was going through leaving WWE. I’m like, should I be done with wrestling? Because this is not fun for me. All this noise is not fun, and then I was like, ‘no, you love this.’
“It’s not the noise — it’s the noise in the ring, it’s the noise when you perform, it’s the noise when you go out there with the crowd. It’s not this Internet noise, it’s not the politics. You can work through that. There’s gonna be politics everywhere, and it’s how you work through that.
“It’s really how I grew from a ‘Legit Boss’ to a CEO. I wanted to be a CEO of my own life, I wanted to take control of my life and my career, so two years ago, I was really questioning myself, if I should still do this. I was like, no, you’re amazing. You still have so much more to give and do that you can’t quit on your dreams now.”
Nessa then asks why she did decided to leave WWE two years ago. The answer is still light on specifics, but their dealings backstage before that May 16 Raw seem to have been the final straw:
“There’s so many reasonings. The biggest thing was just listening to my heart and my soul.
“Something didn’t feel right that day, how we were talked to didn’t settle in my heart, and I just instantly knew, if I wasn’t gonna take control of my life right here and now, then I was never going to be happy there by having someone talk to me the way that they do or feeling like you just don’t belong.
“Like okay, I’ve been doing this for 14 years, and to feel like this, this low, my soul is like no, get up, go. It was the hardest decision.“
And while she doesn’t specifically connect it to her decision to leave, one example of how WWE probably made Mercedes’ job less fun came up when they were discussing her role on Disney+’s The Mandalorian. Moné’s talked before about WWE not working with her to give her time to film the Star Wars show. They was she tells it to Nessa, they went out of their way to mess with her biggest Hollywood gig to date:
“I love WWE, but they tried so hard to not make me do The Mandalorian. [They] put me on house shows when I was supposed to film. It was pulling teeth just to get on that show, just to be a part of that show.”
Throughout the interview, Mercedes expresses gratitude for her time in WWE and the opportunities it gave her, including signing her current big money deal with AEW. And WWE is certainly doing well under new management, so we suppose alls well that ends well.
Moné’s future book will still probably be worth a read, though.
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