On Sunday, it took Chelsea Green a little more than 11 seconds to climb a purposefully placed ladder and retrieve the WWE Women’s Championship. In those 11 seconds, with tens of thousands of fans frantically cheering her on, Green completed one of the most unlikely rises in recent memory and upended the perceived hierarchy in WWE.
In her mind, it felt like a lot longer.
“The minute that Jade [Cargill] and Charlotte [Flair], and Lash [Legend] and Tiffany [Stratton] took those last bumps off the ladders, I felt the entire stadium rumbling,” Green told Uncrowned. “When I opened my eyes and I looked left and right, the feeling was incredible. I get chills just thinking about it now. There was this energy that I’ve never felt in my entire career, and I hope I can bottle it up and take it with me for the rest of my life.
“I know I scurried up there very quickly, but to me, it felt like it took 13 years to climb that ladder.”
Green’s wrestling career began in 2014, working for myriad promotions before eventually landing in WWE full-time in 2018. Signed under the NXT brand, Green suffered a broken wrist in her televised debut in 2019 before working her way up to the main roster in 2020. In what became an unfortunate trend, Green again suffered a broken wrist in her televised “SmackDown” debut. She was subsequently released by WWE early in 2021.
After her release, Green went back to working with smaller promotions — Ring of Honor and Impact Wrestling — before eventually returning to WWE as a surprise entrant in the Royal Rumble in 2023. Green’s return match was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, as she was immediately eliminated from the match by Rhea Ripley.
“It feels surreal because it doesn’t feel like I’ve reached the top — and yet, I have,” Green said. “I’m sitting here as the WWE Women’s Champion after one of the biggest pay-per-views of the year, And it all feels so surreal. This is what I wanted when I started my wrestling journey in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and I’m just so proud of myself. I’m so proud that I stuck around. I hung on, and I continued to push through the broken bones and the nose and all the speed bumps that I’ve encountered.”
Chelsea Green’s title win was one of the biggest shockers of SummerSlam weekend.
The reality of Green’s second run with WWE is that she’s kind of sneakily been building to a spot like this. Since 2023, Green has held the Women’s Tag Team Championship, the AAA World Mixed Tag Team Championship and is a two-time Women’s United States Champion — including becoming the inaugural titleholder in 2024. It’s a testament to the work Green puts in to consistently make the most of her roles and television time, her innate ability to get over with the crowd and understanding that stacking in-ring losses isn’t a death sentence for your career.
It doesn’t hurt, too, that the overall fan sentiment toward Green shifted drastically earlier this year when she was featured on WWE’s Netflix reality series, “Unreal.”
As a show that pulls back the curtain on the inner workings of WWE, viewers get an unprecedented look at the decision-making — and key stakeholders — in the promotion’s creative process. During the second season of the show, WWE producer Michael Hayes commented about Green being someone whose job it is to elevate main-event talent rather than being at that level herself.
The blowback was swift and widespread. But it was also perhaps the spark that was needed to ignite this moment for Green, who learned at the 11th hour over SummerSlam weekend that the trajectory of her career was about to change.
“I found out at the very last minute, and I think I there’s something really beautiful about that,” Green said. “There was no overthinking. I was just focused on how can I make this match as good as I possibly can, especially because I haven’t had many opportunities to prove myself at a PLE this big.”
There was also a full-circle moment with Hayes backstage.
“We spoke before the match and he gave me a pep talk,” Green said. “He hugged me. He told me, ‘You know, I’m only doing this because I care.’ One thing about Michael Hayes is, if he didn’t care, he would not be coming up to me and giving me advice and giving me feedback and things like that.”
If “Unreal” gave us a peek at how Green behaves and is perceived backstage, the reactions on Sunday night and in the days since tore the whole curtain down.
In the aftermath of Green’s victory, alternate angles of her win began to surface online. One, shot from near the entrance ramp at U.S. Bank Stadium, shows Charlotte Flair — the most decorated woman in WWE — actually applauding as Green grasped and unhooked the championship belt.
It’s an acknowledgement of not just Green’s journey, but the fact that she has been willing to “give 110% to anything that involves [the women’s] division and our locker room.”
“What my peers and my coworkers think of me means absolutely everything,” Green said. “Those are the people I surround myself with. Those are the people that I’m trying to elevate, that are trying to elevate me. I need them for that win more than anyone else.
“To come back into Gorilla [WWE’s backstage] and have everyone clapping for me and hugging me, there was everyone from the production team to the makeup artists, the stunt guys, the producers, the creative team, the props guys — every single person gave me a hug and told me I was worthy of that moment and congratulated me. That’s so special, because all I want to do is do right by my coworkers in this company.”
Friday will mark Green’s first official event as interim WWE Women’s Champion (with Ripley injured, a unification match will need to happen when she returns). It’ll be the first time in her WWE tenure that Green is the hunted instead of the hunter. Despite the change in status, the new champ vows she won’t deviate from what got her to this point.
“I’m not scratching and clawing my way to the top, because now I am at the top and my entire career has led to this moment,” she said. “I will never, ever, ever change the way that I think about my TV time — every minute, every second, everything counts when you are on live television, and I have spent way too long trying to get here to not make the most of those precious minutes.”
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