Former WWE star Sonya Deville (Daria Berenato) appeared on The Ariel Helwani Show to discuss several topics, including how her General Manager role came about.
Deville said, “When I came back, I went into Vince’s [Vince McMahon’s] office and we were chatting about ideas and what I could come back and do. I was like, ‘I just got this custom suit made. It’s back at the hotel. I can go get it. Maybe I can just be a boss.’ Not Sasha Banks, ‘The Boss,’ but something like that. He’s like, ‘Yeah, go get it.’ I go get the suit, I come back in his office in the suit and he’s like, ‘That’s it. You’re going to wear it tonight. You’re going to walk down the hallway and I’m gonna have people lined on both side and you’re just going to look at them.’ That’s all he told me. I didn’t know his plan was for me to be with Adam Pearce or be GM or any of that. He just said, ‘Walk down the hallway in a suit.’ I didn’t know anything else. So, I walked down the hallway in a suit that night. That was it. As weeks went by, they were like, ‘I think we’re going to start having you do some stuff with Adam Pearce and you’re going to be like an assistant to him. ‘Okay, what’s the endgame?’ I always hoped the endgame was, obviously, me and Pearce aren’t going to have a WrestleMania match, but we would get into some sort of thing and he could run Raw and I could run SmackDown. It didn’t go that way. I just went with Adam Pearce for a while on Raw and SmackDown, super fun, and eventually got out of the role and into a story with Bianca [Belair].”
On potentially making a return to MMA:
“I think the chances of me continuing my wrestling career and the chances of me reigniting my MMA career are about the same right now. I’m in the stage of my life right now where everything is going to be based on what I want and what I feel inside, it’s not for any other reason, so wherever my passion is the strongest is where I’m going to go. I was heartbroken when I left MMA for wrestling, I was really messed up about it for probably about a year to two years. I was just getting started, I was fresh, I was 21 years old, I took three fights, it was going great, even though the last one was a loss, it was close, I felt good, I was on that journey and I was obsessed with it. I was excited to embark on the WWE journey, but very conflicted, because I really, really loved fighting.”
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