Shayna Baszler On Tag Team Run With Ronda Rousey – “She Demanded It”

Shayna Baszler & Ronda Rousey are WWE Women’s Tag Team Champions and it’s because the two women pushed for it to happen.

The WWE Women’s Tag Team Titles were vacant going into this past Monday’s Raw on May 29th. That led to WWE doing a Fatal 4-Way tag team match with Ronda Rousey teaming up with Shayna Baszler against Raquel Rodriguez & Shotzi, Chelsea Green & Sonya Deville and Bayley & IYO SKY of Damage CTRL.

It was the first real match that Rousey was able to have in WWE after dealing with a left arm injury for several months. The match ended when Rousey trapped Shotzi in an armbar leading to Shotzi tapping out quickly to give Rousey & Baszler the Women’s Tag Team Titles.

For Shayna Baszler, it’s her third time as a Women’s Tag Team Champion since she had two reigns with Nia Jax as a partner while Rousey is a first-time tag team champion. Rousey has had a lot of success as a singles wrestler in WWE since she’s a former Raw & Smackdown Women’s Champion.

In an interview with Peter Rosenberg on Cheap Heat, Shayna Baszler revealed that Ronda Rousey went to WWE’s bosses and demanded that they put Rousey together with her good friend Baszler.

“Ronda is Ronda, right. She’s been main title, she main evented WrestleMania. She still gets one of the loudest pops when we walk out. This was something she demanded. We’d been asking for it forever, but she finally put her foot down and went to the office and said, ‘Listen, we’ve been asking for this forever. You keep telling us, ‘After, after, after this [and] this.’”

“I honestly don’t know if she hadn’t done that, if they ever would have got to it. I wasn’t in a position yet to be elevated to a Ronda level, so the fact that Ronda said, ‘No, stop. I’ve done this. I want to do this because this is why I started wrestling.’ So I think that’s huge. She could be main-eventing SummerSlam. She doesn’t have to be where she is, which is elevating these titles.”

As she continued, Shayna Baszler praised Ronda Rousey for not just looking out for herself and wanting to build up the division for the women of WWE.

“Yeah, it’s just a direction that I don’t think they would have looked at, just because Ronda is who she is. As much as, love her or hate her, she brings eyes, and that’s the way she’s always been. She was that way in MMA.”

“I at least want people to understand, this is happening because she demanded it. She demanded to work with me as a friend, so it’s cool to have someone who truly isn’t out for themselves. In show business, that’s so rare, so it’s very cool.”

Ronda Rousey & Shayna Baszler were drafted to Raw in the recent WWE Draft, but as the Women’s Tag Team Champions, they are now allowed to appear on any brand at any time.