Nightingale spoke candidly about women not getting the chance to share a locker room with their idols as often as men do.
As Willow Nightingale was being interviewed by Bill Apter of Sportskeeda WrestleBinge, she was asked about getting to work with Sting in All Elite Wrestling.
That question led to Nightingale diving into her thoughts about women not consistently getting the chance to share a locker room with their childhood idols as often as men do.
I mean, I never got to work with him (Sting) directly, and sometimes I do think that it’s like… this is a complex thought. I feel like it is much more common for men who are veterans in this business to be doing this into a later age because of patriarchal systems that are in place for women to have shorter shelf lives in professional wrestling. We have babies, our bodies change and of course, men become fathers and their lives change. But that doesn’t necessarily affect their in-ring careers and now we live in a day and age where women can have babies and come back to wrestling and we’ve seen women who are mothers have full-time careers and I think that’s beautiful and amazing. But you don’t really get to see your idols from your childhood share a locker room with you the same way that men do all the time… So for me, which was very, very cool is that I grew up watching Trish (Stratus) and Lita and I got to watch them again pretty recently, and that’s been awesome. But the closest thing for me right now is actually somebody I got to meet at Wembley (Stadium) is Aja Kong. She’s somebody who I’m like, well, that’s an idol for me and she’s still going. So how do I make that work? But that’s not to take away from Sting. It’s just like, you don’t really get the same interaction as you do if you don’t get to share the ring with them, if you’re not doing segments with this person. So I didn’t get to have as close a relationship to Sting as some of the guys in the locker room. I did have to run out into the stands for his final match and watch it live. We have a TV backstage that we watch most things. We have talent viewing. But I was like, no, I gotta be out there and feel it in the crowd and it was so cool.
Nightingale is the reigning CMLL World Women’s Champion and she’ll be defending the belt against Zeuxis at the company’s 91st Anniversary Show.
She is coming off the heels of competing at AEW All Out, where she fell in defeat to Kris Statlander in a Chicago Street Fight.
If the quote in this article is used, please credit Sportskeeda WrestleBinge with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcription.
