Becky Lynch and Charlotte Flair don’t like each other in WWE storyline, and the feud may or may not blend into real life.
Lynch was a guest on the “Sports Illustrated Media Podcast” this week. She was asked about reports that she and Flair had a backstage incident after Lynch allegedly went off-script and Flair felt disrespected.
“I don’t know, man,” Lynch said. “We don’t talk anymore. We don’t talk. So all I’ll say is the locker room needs a hero sometimes. And sometimes somebody’s gotta be a hero. I’m all right being that hero. That’s what I’ll say on that matter.”
Lynch then responded to a question about whether real-life heat made working with someone in the WWE story made it more challenging.
“Oh, 100% more difficult,” she said. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s the thing. When you’ve got two people that are wanting to work together to make magic, then you make magic. Sometimes when there’s hostility, when you can’t trust the person, then you never know what’s going to happen. You always have to be on guard. It’s like a game of chess. You have to be thinking two steps, three steps, four steps ahead. What are they gonna do? How am I gonna handle it? If they do this, if they do that, whatever.”
After Lynch and Flair had a segment on WWE Smackdown in which they were supposedly scripted to play “cat-and-mouse” in exchanging championship belts but Lynch dropped hers on the mat instead, PW Insider reported there was a backstage fracas.
“We are told at that point, there was a confrontation between Lynch and Flair over Flair allegedly disrespecting Lynch by ‘trying to make her look bad,’ as one source stated, during the segment and there were loud words between the two,” the report said.
The genre of professional wrestling is most compelling when the lines of surreality are blurred and the audience is left guessing how much animosity is scripted storyline versus real life acrimony.
Lynch and Flair have been rivals in storyline for a number of years, and it’s in both of their best interests from an intrigue perspective to carry on in the real world like they actually hate each other’s guts. In the internet era, this can extend to reports in various wrestling publications that are called the “dirt sheets” by people in the business, to podcast appearances with mainstream outlets.