Bayley Talks FTR Helping Her Understand How Tag Team Wrestling Works

In eight years time, Bayley has surpassed expectations in WWE. Whether it was becoming the first-ever women's Grand Slam Champion, to jumpstarting the women's tag team division by becoming its inaugural and two-time champion with Sasha Banks, or holding down the company during uncharted times by creating a new form of entertainment during the pandemic/ThunderDome era, "The Role Model" promises there's a lot left in the tank when it comes to shattering the glass ceiling in not just women's wrestling but in WWE.

"I still have so much that I want to do," Bayley stated on Oral Sessions with Renee Paquette. "So, I got signed when I was 23. I've been here for at least eight years now. My first eight days there, I thought I wasn't going to last cause I was homesick already. It was way too hard, and it wasn't what I thought it was going to be. It just felt weird. Like, I wasn't connecting to it.

"Now, I've been here for eight years, and I have been able to literally do everything and more than I ever wanted to do. But there's still so much that I feel like I need to do to feel complete with everything here, especially starting a new character. It feels like I just started over."

Speaking further about her two-time tag team title run with Banks, Bayley believes WWE can do more and risk more for the women's tag team division.

"I still feel like there's so much more they can do with the tag division," she stated. "We had so much fun in our second run because that was what we really wanted to do, and I wish it could have gone on longer – just to be a couple of idiots on every single show. I wish we could have done NXT and Raw more. That was how we wanted the tag titles to be represented. Now, they have them in NXT. It's awesome. We were on house shows every week, and we'd get thrown in tag matches just to get everyone on the show. We just did a tag match, but we never learned the psychology of tag team wrestling."

Thanks to AEW's dominant tag team FTR (fka as The Revival) Bayley and Banks grasped a deeper understanding of how tag team wrestling worked, which would rub off throughout their title reigns.

"We never really learned the psychology of tag team wrestling, and once we did that like we sat down with Dax [Wheeler] and Cash [Harwood] – so hard to call them that now. Once we sat and learned from them and just watching their matches, I really fell in love with it," she mentioned. "So it made me want to fight for [the WWE Women's Tag Team Championship] even more. It also gives something for all the girls to do because you can't always go after the women's titles.

"[FTR] would make us watch Arn [Anderson] and Tully [Blanchard] all the time. I'd be like, 'Hey, can I have a match that I should study?' Just for the basis of the storytelling. So you can tell by watching a tag match that you get beat up for a long time, and you're just working for that big tag because you wanna see all the fireworks happen and all that stuff. But they would teach us how much you can tease that and make the people anticipate it or think that it's gonna happen. Or make it happen, but then you, all the fireworks start, and then something happens to where it's like, 'Oh no, it's not the end of the match? I thought it was.'"

You can listen to Bayley's full interview here. If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit Oral Sessions w/Renée Paquette with a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.