It was December 2021 that Mercedes made her return to AEW.
At AEW New Year’s Smash, Mercedes Martinez showed up and assisted Jade Cargill in defeating Thunder Rosa to advance in the inaugural TBS Championship tournament. Martinez has since gone to become ROH Women’s World Champion which she will be defending on July 23rd at Death Before Dishonor.
Martinez sat down with Steve Fall of NBC Sports’ ‘Ten Count’ podcast and looked back at that return to AEW. She detailed how it came to be and shared that initially, she was told her return would probably be a short stint but conversations escalated quickly and she ended up being offered a contract.
I think it was just an opportunity. They [AEW] reached out to me actually. I was actually booking myself crazy for like the last six months before that and just going all out pretty much and literally a week before that show [her return to AEW], I was contacted and basically they just said it’s probably gonna be a quick in and out, Thunder Rosa and I was like, ‘Oh! That’s great. That’s a great program. Let’s see what we can do.’ We already wrestled previously like maybe a month, two months ago anyways so this was just something for me to be back in the mix on, something really big and then from there, the conversation kind of just escalated and just said, ‘Hey, you know what? We wanna bring you in full-time so you know, we want you to be All Elite.’ It was that quick. There was no talking to Tony [Khan] at that moment. It was just like, ‘Here you go, here’s your contract. Get to us when you can’ and that’s it. It was kind of — it was really, really fast, within days so to me, it was like, do I sign this? Do I not? But of course, me, I wanna be on mainstream TV, right? I wanna make sure my legacy still continues so I had no hesitation on that part.
Death Before Dishonor is going to the second Ring of Honor pay-per-view under the Tony Khan regime. She is eager to show what she and Serena Deeb can do in the ring together and said this is a building block for the ROH women’s division.
If you’re looking at me and Serena [Deeb], me and Serena have battled in the past, had our feuds but this is going to bring a new era of women’s wrestling. You’re looking at — not high-flying because we definitely don’t high-fly, right? We’re technical and we’re submission and we’re athletes and we’re wrestlers and that’s what Ring of Honor really encompasses is wrestling, pure wrestling in its form. You know, you’re looking at the chain wrestling and the submissions and anything technical and of course, you know, you’re looking at the power sense of it and those big moments that you wanna take but, I think for me and Serena, we’re taking this very seriously. We’re going in there showing the world what women wrestlers [are about] and we put that emphasis on the wrestling because that’s what this is all about. It’s can the mainstream handle two actual wrestlers and putting on a wrestling clinic and still entertaining because you have to mix in the sports-entertainment and that’s what this is, right? So it’s a rebirth for her, it’s a rebirth for me and bringing a new level of what the women’s division can bring going forward so this is just a building block of what we can do for the women’s division here in Ring of Honor.
As Death Before Dishonor inches closer, here’s the updated lineup for the show:
- Zero Hour Pre-Show: Allysin Kay vs. Willow Nightingale
- ROH World Championship: Jonathan Gresham (c) (w/ Tully Blanchard) vs. Claudio Castagnoli
- ROH World Television Championship: Samoa Joe (c) vs. Jay Lethal (w/ Sonjay Dutt & Satnam Singh)
- ROH Pure Championship — Pure Rules Match: Wheeler Yuta (c) vs. Daniel Garcia
- ROH World Tag Team Championships — 2-out-of-3-falls Match: FTR (Dax Harwood & Cash Wheeler) (c) vs. The Briscoes (Mark & Jay Briscoe)
- ROH Women’s World Championship: Mercedes Martinez (c) vs. Serena Deeb
- ROH World Six Man Tag Team Championships: The Righteous (Vincent, Dutch & Bateman) (c) vs. Dalton Castle & The Boys (Brandon & Brent Tate)
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit NBC Sports’ Ten Count podcast with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
