 |
| Baker's blood is the emblem of her rise to wrestling superstardom Photo Credit: Lee South |
Shida went onto defeat Nyla Rose for the Women's Championship at Double or Nothing 2020. For Baker, her destiny would not be defined by titles as much as it would be by sheer force of personality. It was such a 180 degree turn from how she was presented in the early days of AEW that one could be forgiven if they didn't believe overcooked white meat babyface Britt Baker from 2019 was the same person as the one who earned her slot in the first ever female main event in Dynamite history this past Wednesday. A four-month feud with the feisty and pugnacious Thunder Rosa culminated in a Lights Out match where Baker once again bled, this time by design. In order to appreciate Baker's arrival as Queen Shit of AEW, one has to look at the journey.
Baker's tenure in AEW was rough from the start, but it wasn't her fault. She was playing a role reserved for someone else without really adjusting it to suit her strengths. Having Baker stand in for Kylie Rae, who worked one show for AEW and bounced for reasons I'm not sure anyone but her and the brass in the company will ever know, was the first of many mistakes the company made with respect to their women's division. The only thing notable about her first year or so with the company was commentary turning her other, legit profession into a meme. Most of the time, wrestlers don't come back when they've been turned into memes, or if they do, it's because they've embraced becoming one. Look at R-Truth in WWE.
Realizing that it wasn't working, management let her embrace the natural sass in her personality. I'm not saying Baker is probably a trashy, mouthy asshole in real life, but the best heels take what people may critique about their personality, subvert it to become evil in cartoonish ways, and crank the volume all the way up until the dial doesn't turn anymore. What made Kylie tick wasn't inside Baker, so unlike some other wrestling companies that operate on the idea that the fiat will of the man in charge is the best idea, they changed the game on her and let her embrace her Philadelphia Catholic school tough girl interior (yes, I know she's from Pittsburgh, but when I see her ham it up, I see someone in a Little Flower uniform with an Arctic Splash iced tea carton about ready to stab someone in the eye with a pencil, you just have to believe me on this).
First, they let her be bad. Then they gave her an assistant that she could mindlessly boss around and even mangle her name. Seriously, Rebel hasn't had to do much as Baker's foil, but what she does do is spectacular. Then they let her continue to be on camera as she recovered from a leg injury, all while abusing poor Tony Schiavone in the process. Even playing from the match clip I posted above, she has taken to putting on the glove that referee Paul Turner gave her out of safety for Shida as she tried to complete the process of her Lockjaw finisher with a bloodied hand. She was given the challenge to be a second big bad in a division that had Nyla Rose and not much else, and she rose to the occasion.
The piece de resistance so far culminated Wednesday night, as she and Thunder Rosa got to finish their brutal and deeply chippy feud as the first ever women who got to compete in an AEW main event on Dynamite. Rosa's involvement in AEW started as part of the company's relationship with the National Wrestling Alliance, of which she was Women's Champion at the time. The showcase matches led to an angle where Baker attacked her for being an "interloper," and ever since, they've been at each other's throats. Usually, when the cold war would bubble over into the hot war of a wrestling match, Baker would win due to nefarious tactics.
When the heel cheats a whole lot, the babyface needs to win the final match in a decisive manner where they have more firepower available to them. Enter the Lights Out match, AEW's infamous unsanctioned falls-count-anywhere, no disqualifications match. It was the first of its kind to happen on Dynamite and the first to involve wrestlers who weren't named Jon Moxley, Kenny Omega, or Joey Janela. The match was a spectacle of violence, everything that the Omega/Moxley exploding ring barbed wire deathmatch from Revolution was supposed to be with a satisfying ending. They broke out tables, ladders, chairs, and Rebel's sham crutch for good measure. They went into the crowd at one point.
However, the thing that made this match go full-circle from that fateful moment in the mysterious "BTE Compound" roughly a year prior was that both women, including Baker, bled. While some on Twitter claimed it was another "hard-way" (or for those new to the lingo, unintentional), I suspect that this time, the blood was intentional, either through fake blood capsules or the old-fashioned way, through the ol' gig blade. Wrestling rarely is poetic, and if it is, that beauty comes by happenstance, at least traditionally. I'm not saying Tony Khan isn't a carny grifter, but I'm also saying Vince McMahon, Bill Watts, and Jerry Jarrett didn't post on the Death Valley Driver Message Board. I wouldn't be shocked if everything was supposed to happen the way it did to evoke that original imagery from Baker's shocking about-face, where she showed that just because she couldn't do the ebullient and innocent heroic foil for Rose and the ill-fated Nightmare Collective (remember them? I do no matter how many times I tried to forget) didn't mean she wasn't a megastar in waiting.
And thus Dynamite is at a point where few people dreamed it could be even last year at this time. They're in a position where they have three star-making heels among the women who could be stalwarts for them for years to come. Rose is there based on her size and ferocity, but monster heels aren't a bad thing. Jade Cargill gets the bump from having an association with Shaquille O'Neal, but don't ever accuse her of being handed a position when she serves looks that murder. Baker, though, might be the most genuine one of the lot. She scratched and clawed her way to prominence, and now, she stands at the precipice of being the one player who could change the perception of AEW's women to everyone, the media, the fans, and most importantly, to her bosses. The sweat and the tears are implied, but she shed the blood, and wrestling overall was better off for it.
