Chelsea Green Reveals Which WWE Angle Inspired Her Proposed Idea With Mickie James
Chelsea Green returned to Oral Sessions with Renee Paquette to talk almost all things wrestling. In particular, focus was put on Green's release from WWE earlier this year and her subsequent stops in Impact, NWA and Ring of Honor since then. Green talked about losing her confidence in WWE, and how working for these new companies brought it back.
"In WWE, I felt like nobody had faith in me," Green said. "I knew when I went in that I was hired for a reason, that they had faith in me going in. And then I felt like I lost their faith, and I don't know where in the two and a half years that happened, or if that's just something that happens in that company. All of a sudden, I got released and all these companies have come to me and say 'we trust you, we have faith in you, we love you, what do you want to do?' And I'm like 'I'm not ready for that!' But I am ready, and I have Matt to remind me that I am ready. And I've really kind of put pen to paper and tried to figure out 'what's this new Chelsea going to be? What's this new Hot Mess going to be?' Again, I don't want to go back to what I just doing before and what was easy.
"I have a fresh start and I want to start over again and build the new version of the Hot Mess. But each company is different and each company wants something different out of me. So I'm figuring it out as a I go. I'll never forget going out to wrestle at Slammiversary and having Tommy Dreamer say 'you already did the work. Now we all just want to go see you out there smiling and happy and we all just want you to be in that ring. So don't even think about it.' Maria Kanellis at Ring of Honor said the same thing. She's like 'you look so stressed. We're like so happy to have you here. We just want you to go out there and do exactly what you've been able to do. Pick up a microphone and talk.' And I'm like 'hold up, what? Why is everyone so nice to me?!'"
Green also took some time to fire back at those who believe she only makes anti-WWE statements, pointing out that she's had many positive things to say about the company. It once again led to her talking about losing confidence in WWE, which led to her, at one point, messing up her finisher after years of hitting it correctly.
"The minute that you say anything. I've said so many great things since being released about WWE," Green said. "And the minute I said it in my Ring of Honor promo, it was an absolute witch hunt. It's a giant company and no matter what you do. Look at J-Lo. I'm sure she has bad days on tour and not only bad days, but just kind of down times and up times. That's the tough thing with wrestling; you're giving everything at once, and then it's all taken away and you kind of lose yourself in those moments of being the top guy and then being nothing. You could see the struggle mentally that I was going through. If you go and look and watch my NXT matches, the very first NXT match that I had on live television, I did my finisher backwards.
"You work so hard to get this dream job, and then you get there and you realize 'oh man. This is not what I envisioned. This is not what I imagined.' And sometimes you are feeling a thousand percent and sometimes you feel this small, and on those days that you feel this small, this affects every single bit of you. When I went out there for that day, I didn't believe in myself, I felt that no one believed in me. I felt like I had so much to prove, and I forgot about the list of accomplishments and the reason that I was there. I had already proved myself. And I hit a finisher backwards that I had been doing, at that time I had been doing it for six years. It really proves that the pressure that is on every single one of these people. I wish that Twitter knew that."
One of the things that plagued Green during her WWE run was a broken wrist, an injury that keeps popping up for her. She detailed how she first injured it and why she needed to get surgery again following her WWE release.
"It's so hard to say because if I hadn't broken my wrist, would I be fired?" Green asked. "Maybe not. At the end of the day, literally nothing happened. I jumped off the apron, rolled back like I normally would have done, and my wrist snapped, or my forearm snapped. The issue was not the move or what happened or that my bones are brittle like so many people have told me. 'I need to take calcium,' like thank you very much like I don't know that. The issue is, I already had an implant from when I broke it live at NXT and what we didn't know is that I'm allergic to metal implants on my bones. We did not know that until we went back in for surgery, put a larger implant in, and my bones reacted and I had swelling. This was right after I was released, I had a lot of pain in my arm and I had been fully cleared and ready to go months prior to being released. My arm just kept getting worse to the point where I couldn't lift five pounds at the gym. I went back to my surgeon and he was like oh my God. Your bone is rejecting the plate and trying to swell away from the plate.' I had emergency surgery the next day.
"Then, of course, my bone was healing from that when it re-broke during my 90-days. I understood why Ring of Honor wouldn't let me wrestle with a cast on, because of the commission. Like that's real. The Maryland Athletic Commission, they don't mess around and I understood there was no way. I couldn't even, as you saw, I had to do my promo on the ramp. I couldn't even go into the ring. They don't play. But in Nashville with Impact? They were really good, like 'we'll protect you and we'll do as much as we can, but we still want you to be on Slammiversary.' And I didn't want to lose that. After 90 days of not being able to do anything and hyping everybody up, how lame would it have been for me to say 'yet again, here I am with a broken arm and I'm unable to work.' So I'm so thankful that I'm working with this broken arm. It's broken, but it feels great."
Green, who's arm remains in a cast, still doesn't know when exactly she will be 100% healed from the injury. She also revealed that she is continuing to wrestle against the advice of doctors.
"I wish I could give you a date," Green said. "But the problem is, I got my cast off and I got a removable cast. They want that removable cast to stay on for six months because of the damage done with previous surgeries and implants on it. At this point, there is no clear date and my doctor is like, 'I already know you're not going to listen to me, so go ahead and not listen to me, but know the repercussions of what's happening here.'"
Finally Green talked about her bond with NWA Empowerrr producer Mickie James. The bond developed during their time in the WWE, following a proposed angle between the two that was dropped.
"With Mickie, that is someone I didn't even realize I was emulating until I was so deep into the Hot Mess and people were comparing us and I'm like 'you are so right,'" Green said. "And then of course we built this bond over not being able to have our storyline together. When we were told we were getting this storyline, it was going to be Mickie-Trish 2.0. Mickie was going to be Trish, I was going to be Mickie, and then it was possibly going to lead with something with Trish, who knows? We had so many plans and so many ideas. We were talking on the phone every day and we were so excited.
"So we bonded over the loss of our brainchild and ever since then she's just been so Team Chelsea. How could I ever, who would've thought that when I started wrestling that Mickie James would be behind me and that I would be able to text her, call her at any point in time. How cool is that?"
If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit Oral Sessions with Renee Paquette and provide a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription