Sasha Banks On Her Lack Of Complacency, What Keeps Her Hungry

RAW Superstar Sasha Banks was a recent guest on E&C’s Pod of Awesomeness and opened up on a myriad of professional wrestling related topics. Highlights appear below.

On What Keeps Her Striving For More:

What keeps me hungry is always striving for more. It’s cool having all these first time evers, but it’s never enough for me. For me, I want consistency. I want consistency with long storylines, consistency of having longer matches on RAW, consistency of always striving for the best and never settling for less. It’s always amazing being part of first time evers, but I want to be at a time where it’s considered something normal and I feel like we’re really getting there right now. You see on Monday Night RAW and SmackDown Live that the women are getting to main event now. I’m not saying that it’s not special anymore, but it’s really cool that it’s becoming normal. Even seeing our live events and seeing that the women are closing live events, which I never thought would be possible, it’s so insane. Them just announcing the tag team titles, there’s always going to be something more to strive for and that’s what keeps me going. I want to be the best and I want to do this as long as a I can, while being happy because I love wrestling with all my heart. It’s the only thing I know and I love, so that’s what strives me. I feel like I have to continue to show the world what women’s wrestling can do in this company and that we can take over and keep on striving for more and hopefully soon we can also main event a WrestleMania one day. To see how far we’ve come from awhile ago to now, it’s been incredible.

Sasha Banks Opens Up About Her Lack Of Complacency:

I never wanted to be second best. I feel like with anything you do in life, you should strive to be #1. You should strive to be the best. I don’t get how people can be here and just sit around and wait for their turn or be OK with having a match for one week and the next week they’re off for two. I don’t know how you would do that when this job is so hard as it is, and I feel like you have to work your ass off to get where you want to be, and you have to knock on those doors, and if you’re not happy, you have to let them know. Don’t just tell me that you’re happy, you have to show me. I have to show them every single week that I’m here to be the best. When I go out there every Monday night, within my matches I have to make sure that I’m stealing the show or having my best match of the night, so that’s what strives me to be better because I just can’t be complacent.

On Adapting To Main Roster Life:

I feel like I’m still learning how to do it the right way. I will get to the airport and not know where I’m going. They’ll be like, ‘Where are you going?’ I just hand them my ID, ‘I don’t know. You tell me where I’m going. I don’t know.’ The day of I’ll get a rental car. For me, what I learned most is bringing your own food on the road, so you don’t have to stop anywhere. When I first got on the road, it was hard for me to get rental cars because I was too young. I think, at the age of 23, is when you can rent and I got called up on the main roster, I think when I was 22 or something like that. Everything I’m learning still. Getting to the gym on time, getting to the arena on time, so that I can still get in the ring and eating healthy on the road, it’s very hard, especially when the drives can be so crazy sometimes where it’s either two hours one night or the next night is five hours or whether you want to go halfway or the full way and how expensive hotels can be sometimes. It’s not easy. The hardest part is the travelling. What we get to do in the ring is the fun part and what we look forward to and that’s only a legit 10 minutes that we get to do that and the travelling is everything else.

Banks Compares Her Time On The Main Roster To NXT:

It’s night and day. At NXT we do tapings once every two months and of course, we have our live events and train every single day. We’re also very protected where when we did those away loops in different states, we had a bus and would travel as a team. On the main roster, you do this stuff all by yourself. It’s live every single Monday night. It’s live every single Tuesday. Plus our live events, where there sometimes can be drives that are six hours and you get no sleep. You have to be very independent. I think that’s the biggest thing that I’ve learned since getting called up on the main roster, but also doing TV live every single week – things can change a legit 5 minutes before you go out, or time would cut and you would have to adapt so quickly. Down in NXT, everything is kind of set in stone. You don’t really lose time because it’s a taped taping. They can cut and edit whatever they want. I think that’s the biggest difference, for me.

Readers may listen to Edge & Christian’s interview with Sasha Banks in its entirety below:

(Transcription credit to Michael McClead for Wrestlezone.com)