WWE: Sasha Banks Doesn’t Need You to Tell Her She’s The Wrestler of The Decade

Since her 2012 WWE debut, Sasha Banks has spent the last decade changing the game for women’s wrestling despite numerous setbacks within the company. In 2019 she bet on herself and called the company’s bluff– and she won.

In the aftermath of a shocking tag-team title loss at WrestleMania 35, Sasha Banks did the most unimaginable thing a WWE wrestler can do: she walked away.

It isn’t a secret that Banks has has a sometimes-contentious relationship with the WWE universe. She’s known for her Legit Boss persona, an NXT creation built from scratch by Mercedes Kaestner-Varnado and Dusty Rhodes.

From the beginning of her tenure at WWE, the Boss has been living up to her name in a way that makes some fans uncomfortable. She’s been criticized for everything from her willingness to fire back on fans for disrespecting her boundaries to her unhinged glee at making Izzy cry during TakeOver: Respect, a heel move that will go down in history as the meanest thing anybody has ever done to a child at a PPV (and yes, I am counting the ladder match for Dominic’s custody.)

In the eyes of many, Banks proved her haters right when she refused to return to WWE following her tag team title loss. According to her detractors, Banks has always been arrogant, rude, and too full of herself to be humble and do her job. This idea quietly shaped most of the coverage of the event, a frame most evident in the regrettable decision made by prominent wrestling journalists to spread rumors about her emotional reaction to the loss.

Never mind the fact that Sasha Banks and Bayley had spent years trying to get women’s tag titles restored at WWE. Never mind the fact she’d only been informed that she’d be losing that title on the day of the event, despite weeks of storyline build to the contrary and rumored backstage plans to take the titles to NXT and other main-roster PPVs for defenses. Never mind that both her and Bayley did not in fact throw fits and storm out of the locker room after their loss, but remained to cheer on their colleagues in the history-making main event.

The story everyone seemed ready to accept was that Banks was selfish and entitled, threw a tantrum on the locker room floor, and quit for no good reason.

So why does Sasha Banks walking away from WWE make her the wrestler of the decade?

Because Sasha Banks knows what she’s worth, and she won’t let anybody forget it. Not even WWE.

First off, let’s be honest: you cannot discuss the public reaction to Banks’s decision to leave without acknowledging that wrestling has issues with racism and sexism. As a Black woman, Banks exists at the intersection of that issue. Much of the criticism of Banks’s character and attitude revolves the idea that she thinks too highly of herself, is impatient with people who devalue her, and that it is arrogant for her to claim to be as good as she seems to think she is.

And yet, nobody seems to have an issue with Paul Heyman’s overblown bard work on behalf of Brock Lesnar, or Charlotte Flair’s declarations that she had to save the main event of WrestleMania 35 from being worked by a pair of nobodies. That isn’t to say those wrestlers don’t have their detractors, but the general public opinion of them isn’t swayed by their arrogance.

Demanding respect from your peers and better booking and TV time is fair game for the vast majority of wrestlers, but when Banks does it, fans call her an entitled brat.

It’s hard to ignore how that plays into negative stereotypes of women of color, and the way that framing is frequently applied to Women of Color who step up and demand the respect they deserve.

To be fair, fans who aren’t as familiar with Banks’s overall work might genuinely wonder why she has such healthy self-esteem. NXT was good to Banks, but main-roster WWE hasn’t done their best work with the Boss. Her title runs have disappointingly short, her character development has been uneven and difficult to follow, and she’s frequently been mired in weird storylines and pair-ups.

Banks has not been shy about sharing her displeasure with this in the past, and for good reason. A wrestler who lacks Banks’s talent and charisma likely would not have survived this kind of treatment, much less thrived as a fan favorite.

And yet, despite the fact that WWE has struggled to let Banks live up to the potential she showed in NXT, she has remained one of the most visible and beloved figures in the WWE universe. Banks’s merchandise is a frequent top seller in the WWE shop. Wrestlers like Sami Zayn and Cesaro get credit for putting NXT on the map, but it’s Sasha and Bayley who blew the roof off the arena at those Brooklyn TakeOvers. Bank’s WWE resume is a list of company firsts: first women’s match main eventing an NXT PPV, first women’s Hell in a Cell match, and the very first entrant in the inaugural Women’s Royal Rumble.

People can say what they like about Banks’s persona, but what she’s managed to accomplish in the company cannot be disputed. Banks is not lying when she calls herself a trailblazer, or when she says she’s responsible for setting a new standard for women at WWE. If any wrestler at WWE can lay a fair claim to calling themselves the Beyonce of WWE, it’s Sasha Banks. 

Unfortunately, this work has not translated into better storylines and title runs. For the duration of her main roster career, WWE has been happy to use Banks in the ring, but haven’t been giving her the respect she deserves. She’s been employed by a company that will use her body to make matches compelling and her face to move merchandise, but doesn’t seem to value her creative input and sense of her own work.

By walking away from WWE after the opportunity afforded by the women’s tag titles was taken away from her, Banks reminded WWE what she’s worth. She called their bluff. And eventually, instead of cutting her loose or forcing her to wait out the rest of her contract in obscurity, they worked with her to bring her back home.

As Banks herself notes, it isn’t fair for us WWE fans to guess what’s going on in the head of Mercedes Kaestner-Varnado. We can’t speculate as to why the woman who plays Banks decided to return to WWE. We know she’s loved the company since she was a child, and dreamed of wrestling for them since she was a ten-year-old begging wrestling training camps on the east coast to give her a shot.

We know that she was going through a period of extreme stress and depression leading up to WrestleMania 35, as revealed on her WWE Chronicle special, and that she used her time off to heal her body and mind and find joy in the work again. We know she kept wrestling while she was away, even taking a trip to Japan to train with Meiko Satomura in the Sendai Girls dojo. We know she stayed in communication with WWE the entire time, and was never publicly considered by them to be in breach of her contract as they worked to bring her back onto the active roster.

Any doubts about WWE recognizing the value of having Banks on the roster were definitively squashed on the eve of her return. After four months away from TV, Banks returned to the ring by crashing Natalya’s heartfelt memorial speech for her father, slapping her mourning friend square across the face, and pulling her signature purple hair off of her head to reveal a new blue look and a terrifying new heel persona. Sasha was not just welcomed back by WWE; she was given a new persona and a renewed push as a top heel on the roster once more.

How did the fans respond to Sasha ending her hiatus by ruining Natalya’s moment and beating her with a steel chair? By chanting “Thank you, Sasha.”

So thank you, Sasha. You stood up for yourself this year, and you won. You set an example for every one of your fans who has struggled with their sense of self-worth in the face of adversity, and you proved us right for believing in you. Blue really is your color, and the 2010s will go down in wrestling history as the decade you changed the game for everybody, whether they were ready for it or not. But you never needed anybody to tell you that you were the best wrestler of the decade. You already knew it. And now everybody else does, too.