Ryback Elaborates On Sexist Comments Controversy
On episode 48 of Conversations with The Big Guy, former WWE superstar Ryback addressed a recent controversy involving himself making sexist comments on a podcast.
"I believe there was a little girl who made a video that started all this that 'Ryback is A F***ing Idiot' was the headline," Ryback said of a Tweet that included a video of his comments (included below). "I believe the first thing to help people to understand is that no matter who makes these clickbait things, but essentially they put a title out there that they want to create an emotion to people before they listen to the truth, but regardless that becomes the headline that they try to come across."
Ryback is a f–king idiot pic.twitter.com/pwtrrhYZED
? monica (@nicolesbrianna) July 18, 2017
"This girl took a clip of us where we were talking about GLOW [Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling] and transitioned because there was a spot on that show where the female wrestler body slammed the babyface and she was acting like a heel by 'shaking her a**.' I just went on to say that that is what is missing from today's wrestling today," said Ryback. "Is that to say every woman? No, but then we got into a discussion about all of that, in which the majority of people who responded to that listened to a short clip where it said, essentially women need to shake their a** more, and there was other mentions in there, including men in their underwear."
In the comments, Ryback suggested that females in wrestling today needed to embrace their sexiness more and that he was always a fan when Melina did splits upon entering the ring.
"I even talked about women wrestlers of today are all beautiful and that I enjoy their matches in WWE, but nobody heard any of that stuff; they only heard the 'shake your a**' part, which is the easiest thing for people to call me a sexist," said Ryback. "Oh, you're a sexist. Ryback is as big of a sexist as there is on this planet, so that started in whatever night that it was that will become the next thing that they are going to try and latch on to."
Ryback initially responded to the comments with a sarcastic Snapchat, a video that we've embedded above and something Ryback also addressed on episode 48 of Conversations with The Big Guy.
"I happen to have SmackDown on, and I was back from walking the dogs. I saw the female's match on, and I thought that it was perfect timing," said Ryback. "Charlotte just so happened to be going to the corner and hurried and got the SnapChat on, and sarcastically since I am such a sexist now, sarcastically I said, 'Don't you dare go up on top of that turnbuckle and do a wrestling move, shake that a**!' I repeated that, and they bundled that together with the podcast to create this story that I am this big sexist, instead of completely missing the whole sarcastic tone of that, and that it was not a serious thing."
"These guys are not listeners of the podcast. I was telling you [Pat Buck], that the whole thing that they missed is that it's not to do it for women to just shake their a**es, but that it is f***ing fake, it's Sports Entertainment, this is not real fighting. There's people out there that want wrestling to be this real athletic competition. That is how they want it. There are different promotions that highlight that, but you are only a certain percentage of the audience. There's many more audiences out there. There's people out there that like the theatrics and storytelling and the mannerisms. That is why we do things to get over in the ring to get ourselves over because it is f***ing fake; that is just another example, and the advantage that women have over men that they can have more of a mannerism than men and I talked about that, but they just latched onto that and said that I am this big sexist."
"They bundled in to where I even said that I was joking," said Ryback. "From the whole 'Money in the Bank' stuff we talked about where we were joking about Vince [McMahon] had [James] Ellsworth climb the ladder and it was all a rib on all of that and I was sarcastically joking about how women can't climb ladders, and it was all a fu**ing joke. There are these uneducated kids who don't listen to the podcast, who will just listen to a quick clip and then feel the need to immediately judge and insult them and say whatever they feel like saying, so we did a little bit of blocking this past week."
If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit Conversations with The Big Guy with a H/T to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.
Peter Bahi contributed to this article.