There was a storyline idea that Athena and Eric Bischoff mapped out.
Newly crowned ROH Women’s World Champion Athena captured the title by defeating Mercedes Martinez at Final Battle in her home state of Texas.
While AEW/ROH has been running shows in Texas for the past several weeks, Athena sat down with Chris Jericho to record an episode of Talk Is Jericho. They went over Athena’s Achilles injury that she suffered in 2019.
Prior to that injury, Athena had a meeting with then-WWE Chairman Vince McMahon about storyline ideas. They agreed to do an ‘anger management’ type of story but several weeks later, Athena went down with the injury.
I actually had a meeting with Vince [McMahon] and it went well. It’s just, we came up with an idea to do an anger management thing and then I tore my Achilles right after that and they ended up doing something similar with Tamina which is really cool because everybody loves Tamina.
After getting hurt, Athena began to communicate with Eric Bischoff, who served as Executive Director of SmackDown at the time.
They came up with an idea for Athena to operate a verified burner account on social media and troll WWE’s weekly shows. When she was good to return, it would be revealed that she was controlling the account. Bischoff wanted to send a company-wide email to ensure that no one talked publicly about Athena’s injury to further keep it under wraps but after that email was sent, the news of her injury leaked.
After all that time of he’s [Vince McMahon] so busy that it was really hard to get into his office and because I was on the undercard almost at that time, it was like — I remember the first thing, he was like, ‘I hear you want character development. What ideas do you have?’ And I really started, I was like, ‘Hold on one second’ and I went and pulled out every character pitch that I’ve given to all these multiple writers and I go, ‘Here are all the ideas that I’ve been pitching. You’re telling me the only thing you’ve heard is that I wanted character development?’ Here it is man! And he was like, ‘Wow’ and he was really shocked. He goes, ‘What can we do? What can we do?’ Because some of the ideas were used for other people, nature of the business, I get it and like I said, we came up with this anger management thing. Like two weeks later, I tear my Achilles and I’m just like, oh my God… It was really cool because at that time, [Eric] Bischoff had kind of taken over creative and I had a talk with him about it. We had a lot of ideas because Vince was like, ‘Hey, talk to Bischoff. Bischoff can get you squared away.’ Me and Bischoff come up with all these cool ideas and stuff. Tear my Achilles, he’s the first person that actually goes, ‘Hey, very bad timing….’ He had this really cool idea of while I was out, I would just be the disgruntled employee. So he goes, ‘I’m gonna send a company-wide email, tell everyone not to talk about your injury because we have this really cool idea to create you a Twitter account that’s verified, like WWE verified and you would just troll the entire show from the internet and eventually, we would reveal that it’s you’ and I was like, ‘That’s cool, okay’ and then it leaks that I got hurt, like right after that email got out… And I was like, man, I’m just gonna sit at home. I’m just gonna sit out and then I had the really cool opportunity to do WWE Backstage which kind of made me fall in love with watching wrestling again because I had to watch so much and at that time, I was watching WWE; Raw, SmackDown, NXT, NXT UK, Main Event, Superstars, Mixed Match Challenge.
On the most recent edition of AEW Dark: Elevation, Athena successfully defended the ROH Women’s World Title against Vertvixen.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit Talk Is Jericho with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
