Willow Nightingale Reflects On Meeting Aja Kong At AEW All In, Watching Sting’s Last Match

Willow Nightingale recently recalled meeting Aja Kong at AEW All In and watching Sting’s last match at AEW Revolution in the audience. Nightingale spoke with Bill Apter for Sportskeeda WrestleBinge and you can see a couple of highlights below (h/t to Fightful):

On her experiences 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.”

On meeting Aja Kong at AEW All In: “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.”