Willow Nightingale highlights an issue women face in the wrestling business.
WWE Hall of Famer Sting had a remarkable run in AEW. He came out of retirement and worked with several young stars throughout his time with the company, leading into his retirement match at AEW Revolution 2024.
Speaking with Bill Apter for Sportskeeda WrestleBinge, Willow Nightingale was asked to discuss her experience working with Sting.
“I never got to work with him directly, and sometimes I do think…I feel like it is much more common for men who are veterans in this business to be doing this into a later age because of patriarchal systems that are in place for women to have shorter shelf lives in professional wrestling. We have babies, our bodies change, and of course, men become fathers and their lives change, but that doesn’t necessarily affect their in-ring careers, and now we live in a day and age where women can have babies and come back to wrestling, and we’ve seen women who are mothers have full-time careers, and I think that’s beautiful and amazing, but you don’t really get to see your idols from your childhood share a locker with you the same way that men do all the time," Nightingale said.
Nightingale went on to note that she got to meet an idol when Aja Kong attended AEW All In. She also explained how she did not have as close of a relationship with Sting because she did not do segements with him.
"For me, what was very, very cool is that I grew up watching Trish [Stratus] and Lita, and I got to watch them again pretty recently, and that’s been awesome. But the closest thing right now is actually somebody I got to meet at Wembley is Aja Kong. She’s somebody who’s an idol for me, and she’s still going, so how do we make that work? But that’s not to take away from Sting. It’s just, you don’t really get the same interaction as you do if you don’t get to share the ring with them, if you’re not doing segments with this person. So I didn’t get to have as close of a relationship to Sting as some of the guys in the locker room, but I did have to run out into the stands for his final match and watch it live. We have a TV backstage that we watch most things, but I was like, no, I gotta be out there and feel it in the crowd, and it was so cool," Nightingale said.
During the interview, Nightingale commented on Tony Khan meeting with Shane McMahon. Check out her comments here.
Click here to see what Nightingale had to say about AEW's women's division.
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