The Forbidden Lore Of WWE's Becky Lynch
John Cena might not have known what exactly, but he knew something was missing - or, more accurately, something was dormant. When Becky spoke to Steve Austin on the Broken Skull Sessions in 2022, Lynch revealed that she used to ask Cena for advice. One time, he was blunt with it. “Who are you?” he asked. “I don’t know who you are”. Cena was correct to ask, because the ‘Irish Lasskicker’ was a pun masquerading as a persona with an identifiable purpose and attributes. Becky didn’t even know who she was portraying, much less the fans.
Cena did not know that Becky was a legitimately funny person with a savage brand of charisma that she just needed to harness, or rediscover, to connect with fans - but one of the most committed subsets of hardcore wrestling fans knew. While WWE was still in its ‘Ruthless Aggression era’, Becky Lynch, miles and miles away from it, performed under her real name of Rebecca Knox.
Rebecca Knox was a pro wrestling prodigy at a time when the overwhelming majority of fans wouldn’t have known. By her own admission “an unconventional kid”, a whim to get fit led her, at just 15 years old, to a training school operated by Fergal ‘Finn Balor’ Devitt. Becky downplays how good she was. She stresses - as she did in her autobiography and ‘Chronicle’ WWE Network special - that she was hopeless when she first started. “I was godawful. Most uncoordinated, couldn’t pick up a damn thing,” she said. Like virtually every greenhorn, she also couldn’t pick a good ring name: ‘Komeera’ was Knox’s almost immediately abandoned first effort. Becky will talk around her potential and early progress, but only as far as “I was doing well”.
Throughout this time, Knox crossed paths with - and often outclassed - a range of names you might not have expected. In one March 2006 match, the line-up of which reads like some randomly-generated booking bot account on X, Knox teamed with Sid Sylum and Gurv Sihra (you might remember him as WWE’s Sunil Singh) to defeat El Phantasmo, Kyle O’Reilly and Nikki (Nicole) Matthews. In those early days, Knox also shared a ring with Lisa ‘Ivory’ Moretti, Nattie ‘Natalya’ Neidhart, and bonafide Japanese legends Aja Kong and Gran Hamada, with whom she teamed on a 2005 tour of Japan with IW*GP.
Knox was a very detail-oriented technical wrestler with the rare ability to hypnotise fans with honest to goodness mat work. She was crafty, and enjoyed luring her opponents into traps. Becky Lynch laid the foundations for her exceptional match against Bianca Belair at WrestleMania 38, and its heart-pounding opening sequence, sixteen years before the bell rang.
Knox was catching fire, for whatever that was worth as a women’s wrestler, for SHIMMER in 2006.
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