Kristine Leahy’s Fair Game on FS1 purports itself to be an in-depth interview with athletes and celebrities in their own space, as anyone who saw this omnipresent promo spot can tell you by heart.
With SmackDown on the way to Fox in October, it’s not a surprise that shows like Fair Game would highlight WWE stars. That included Bayley, current SmackDown Women’s Champion, who guested this week. There’s one segment of the interview up on YouTube, which you can watch here, but it doesn’t include a lightning round of questions that featured Leahy learning in real-time that WWE stars are maybe not treated so well by WWE management.
Fortunately, writer David Bixenspan preserved the clip, which was initially tweeted out by the show’s account but then deleted:
https://twitter.com/davidbix/status/1150120053947412480
As to why it was deleted, it’s not hard to see why no one involved would be thrilled with that portion. From Leahy’s perspective, coming into a WWE interview without the knowledge that WWE wrestlers aren’t unionized (and indeed are essentially exploited) isn’t a great look. Even Last Week Tonight took a very deep dive into WWE’s treatment of wrestlers earlier this year.
Bayley, obviously, wanted no part of diving further into this, likely (and sadly probably correctly) realizing that doing so would mean potential reprisals from WWE management. And the whole thing is on a Fox network, which is now a WWE rights partner and is therefore providing some of that money Leahy mentioned. And here’s Leahy, (rightly, it should be noted, if a bit comically) correctly pointing out the obvious inequity in WWE’s labor system.
Essentially, Fair Game is the last place you’d expect to see any WWE star get asked about something like that, but it happened, apparently completely by accident. Of course it’s getting swept aside. Hopefully someone at Fox (or anywhere else) bothers to ask WWE management about these issues at some point, preferably on purpose.
[David Bixenspan via Twitter]
About Jay Rigdon
Jay is a columnist at Awful Announcing. He is not a strong swimmer. He is probably talking to a dog in a silly voice at this very moment.