Charlotte Flair Recalls Not Being Able to Use Her Dad’s Signature Elements in NXT

– Charlotte Flair spoke with Metro in the UK about her career and how that’s been affected by being Ric Flair’s daughter. You can see highlights below:

On not being allowed to use Ric’s mannerisms in NXT: “When I first started, I wasn’t allowed to ‘wooo’, do the figure four, nothing was supposed to be associated with my dad. And then at NXT Takeover against Natalya [in 2014], I won the NXT women’s championship. That day, I debuted my music which had his music in it, and I ‘woooed’ for the first time. It just happened organically because my dad was at ringside, but that was never something I set out to do … It wasn’t wanting to continue the legacy, it just happened. How do you ignore the fact that your father is Ric Flair?”

On Ric calling for her to be pushed: “My dad is a very opinionated man, which everybody knows. For me, I just want a story. ‘I have many stories, but I want ones people are going to sink their teeth into and take me to that next level again. I’m a storyteller.”

On women getting equal billing to men in WWE: “Even though I wasn’t in the company growing up, I was never was raised to think that I couldn’t do anything a man could do. So, even though I didn’t know what my future held when I started in NXT and I didn’t have any experience and I was scared of my own shadow, when I started to pick the business up, I never went ‘I can’t do what he can do’. ‘You know, why aren’t we main eventing NXT? Why aren’t we main eventing on the main roster? My mentality was ‘Well, I’m that good, I should deserve it just like the men’. When that happened and I walked out, there was no difference in presentation or athletic ability.”