Kaitlyn On Why AJ Lee Match At WWE Payback Is Best Of Her Career

Kaitlyn reflected on her Divas Title defense at WWE Payback at 2013 with AJ Lee and how it became the best of her career. Kaitlyn faced Lee, who was a close friend with her title on the line at the PPV. Lee picked up the win to capture her first Diva’s Championship.

Kaitlyn talked in detail about the match in her interview on Insight With Chris Van Vliet. She recounted how she and Lee went over time and how much the story of the match meant to them. You can check out the highlights below:

On Her Match With Lee At WWE Payback:

“It’s hard to articulate what that match means to me. It is by far the best match of my career, and not just technically in the ring, but just the rise of the storyline, how invested the fans were in us as women, and how much we had poured ourselves into the process. AJ and I were friends from day one. I had won NXT, so I was on the SmackDown roster, but I was kind of by myself. I wasn’t really a part of the clique with the rest of the divas yet, and they had started to bring her up on the road shortly after I had won NXT. We were just really tight, and we were just really tight from day one, and so we spent a lot of time doing jobs, just like getting beat up. I was telling you about this earlier, getting beat up by Beth and Nattie, taking electric chairs. Neither of us had done anything super substantial yet, but we were slowly trying to get ourselves over on social media and Twitter, and anytime we were in the ring, one of the commentators would talk to us about, ‘Okay, what do you want me to say about you on TV?’ We were trying to get our friendship over, and we deemed ourselves the Chickbusters, and I started calling myself the Hybrid Diva, and we were slowly getting there inch by inch. Then her stuff started to really take off with Daniel Bryan, and she became this absolute force, and then I kind of went the other way and went towards the title. I guess we were kind of both at the top in a certain perspective, and so when we got to have our feud, we were doing some epic stuff. They were giving us crossover segments, which, if you don’t know what a crossover segment is, it’s where it’s like if you’re going from 8:59 to 9 o’clock, there’s a high probability that people are going to change the channel to watch another show. So you want to have something very compelling.

“So we were getting some of that stuff. We were getting excellent ratings, and she was so good, and she’s still so good on the mic, and people cared; people cared about our story because we for so long had put ourselves over as best friends, and not just on the show but on social media, and we were best friends. We traveled together, we just got each other, and we were there for each other in a lot of moments that were very difficult behind the scenes. Just the pressure of everything, and the travel was a lot. It was not just a storyline on TV. It was both of us with all of our hearts trying to elevate ourselves and the division and what the title meant. My title reign didn’t mean that much. I was champ during WrestleMania 29, was not on the show, so I didn’t feel like my title reign held a lot of weight until literally the last day that I had it. So it’s just funny sometimes when I talk to people who might not know about that storyline, particularly kind of like the meat of it, why it mattered. They’re like, your favorite match was when you lost the title? Yeah, because she had wanted the title for so many years, and we had this opposite story where I got hired because I was athletic and I had charisma and the way that I looked. She loved wrestling from a very young age, and she did indie stuff, and she was at developmental for years, and so we had this totally opposite story happening, and the title was everything to her. So for me to lose the title to her after telling that story and have people care so much about it, to me there was nothing better than that.”

On Going Over Time On the Match:

“Yeah, you never go over. You’re supposed to never go over, especially in a pay-per-view. But we did, because our match was sick. It was so sick, and it wasn’t like anything crazy technically. We were really good together because I was the strong style, and she was really light, and we could do some cool stuff.”

On the Story Of the Match:

“We were so invested into it, and it just meant a lot to both of us. So yeah, they told us to go home. I can’t remember, but I think originally they gave us like 12, maybe 13 minutes, which is a lot on a pay-per-view for women, especially then. I think we had a pretty big chunk of the match left, maybe like a third of the match left when they told us to go home and she straight up was like, ‘No,’ and I was like, okay, we’re doing this. I think her ability to not even blink and be like, ‘No, we’re not going home right now.’ I was like, all right, okay. I think we went over a couple minutes, but it was worth it. It was so worth it. The part that’s scary is after that. Because no matter what, if you go over your time, you’re taking time from someone else’s. You have the main event left, and I don’t even remember where we were on the card, but when we got back to Gorilla, that is something that you can get fired for.

“One of the most significant things I remember was Cena was in Gorilla, and Cena was always really cool. He would help you if you wanted it, if you really showed up and wanted it, he would help you. He would watch matches, and he would give feedback, and he would be brutally honest with you. The people that saw what he was doing and wanted it, he would help them. So he was always like a mentor in a lot of ways if you wanted the feedback and you wanted to be better, and you would actually take the advice. He was standing back there in Gorilla, and he was just like, ‘Never do that again.’ Then it was like a bead of sweat, and then he was like, ‘But great match, that was such a great match.’ It was so cool.”