Former Tag Team Champions To Collide At WWE SummerSlam?

Ronda Rousey and Shayna Baszler look to be set for singles match after huge falling out.

by Scott Carlson
Ronda Rousey
WWE.com

Ronda Rousey and fellow former MMA fighter-turned-wrestler Shayna Baszler are likely to square off at SummerSlam next weekend after the Baddest Woman on the Planet issued a challenge on Raw Monday night.

The two longtime friends finally achieved a dream of winning tag team gold in May, capturing the WWE Women's Tag Team Championship. Less than five weeks later, the duo lost the titles at Money in the Bank when Baszler turned on Rousey, leaving her to drop the straps. Baszler would later explain that Rousey snuck into this business through the back door, parlaying her fame rather than paying her dues.

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Monday, Rousey verbally punched back before issuing a challenge for SummerSlam. While Baszler did not formally respond and the match wasn't made official, it seems all-but-certain that we will see this contest at the upcoming PLE.

Rousey is rumored to be leaving WWE after this feud with Baszler, which would explain Shayna positioning herself as a defender of paying your dues and loving the wrestling business and accusing Ronda of just using her notoriety as a way to get around all of that -- a fact Rousey leaned into on Raw.

If this is the end of Rousey's run with WWE, it will most likely go down as a huge disappointment from where she was when she left the first time after main-eventing WrestleMania 35. Her recent run has been a series of diminishing returns to the point where she doesn't feel anywhere near as special as she once did.

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Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.