10 Fascinating WWE Backstage Facts About Charlotte Flair

At WrestleMania 39, Charlotte Flair and Rhea Ripley earned rave reviews for their SmackDown Women’s Championship clash. It was the sort of match ‘The Queen’ typically thrived in and pragmatically the sort of one she desperately needed after a number of television offerings had gone awry.

Hard-hitting beyond even the regular brutality expected from both, the attritional war was the making of Ripley exactly three years on from Flair’s controversial NXT Championship victory over her at 2020’s cursed pandemic-era ‘Show Of Shows’. The echoes of their screams of agony at the Performance Center felt a lifetime removed from the reverberations generated by their blistering strikes inside SoFi Stadium; the match was a WrestleMania classic in the making, and it shared something in common with another too - it ran over time at the card’s expense.

This is per Ronda Rousey’s autobiography, anyway. Her claim that it went “20 minutes” past time is presumably off - the whole thing went just over 23 minutes - but, like Shawn Michaels and Razor Ramon’s Ladder Match at WrestleMania X, a bona fide classic caused issues elsewhere on the show. The Usos/Sami Zayn & Kevin Owens match allegedly lost some of its time, which at least doesn’t seem as harsh on the talents as 1994’s indiscretion. That resulted in a 10-man tag being cut completely, with Michaels and Roman earning a stiff bollocking from Randy Savage for costing their colleagues a major payday. Rousey noted only Rhea suffered a consequence, temporarily wrestling less working more at ringside for The Judgment Day until her sentence was served.