Shayna Baszler discussed her approach to submission wrestling, noting that she loves to see people in the audience turn away from seeing her holds. Baszler spoke with Fightful’s Sean Ross Sapp and talked about how she likes slowing down her holds and seeing people freak out in the crowd over how it looks.
“I think just the way I slow down how I do submissions,” Baszler said. “I remember actually, it was before I signed, doing this where I bent someone’s arm really fast and twisted it. There was a woman in the front row that couldn’t watch, had to watch between her fingers. I was like, ‘Oh, this is a thing.’ ‘Cause like anyone, I wanted to jump off the rope and do cool stuff, but Josh would not allow any of that. He tried to drill it in my head, ‘Nobody can do what you do. So why would you do what everyone else does?’”
She continued, “That was the moment where it clicked for me, where I was like, ‘Oh, this is a thing?’ It’s one of my favorite things. When I’m doing that in the ring, you’ll see me, instead of looking out there like normal; you’ll see me looking right there because I want to see those people that have to turn their head away. I love that.”
