Former WWE star Summer Rae appeared at ringside during this week’s Friday Night SmackDown as the commentary team hyped up her involvement in the 2022 Women’s Royal Rumble match. The episode referred to Rae as a “WWE Legend,” which some fans online took offense to given she never won a championship with the company and was only on WWE’s main roster for four years (the first year of which she spent as Fandango’s dance partner). Rae took to Twitter to respond to those criticisms.
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“I am seeing so many complaints that WWE called me a Legend … I don’t make the rules, y’all. They said what they said,” she said sarcastically. Fans who have been following both her and Natalya on Twitter will notice that they’ve been trading insults over this very notion in recent weeks.
Other than an independent event in Australia in 2018, Rae hasn’t wrestled a match since her departure from WWE in October 2017. In an interview with Renee Paquette on a recent episode of The Sessions, she explained the injury that led to her stepping away from the ring.
“I had a bone spur in the vertebrae in my neck, C4. I have thoracic outlet syndrome. I think you can live with bone spurs. Thoracic outlet syndrome is horrible. A lot of major league pitchers have it,” she said. “What they wanted to do was remove my first rib. Your first rib is technically your trap. In order to remove your first rib, I mean, fans come up to me and say they have the rib removed, and their scar is big. You can’t get physical therapy for two months.”
“Just to learn how to sit up in bed, when you’re missing a rib, it’s crazy,” Rae continued. “So the rib is constantly putting pressure on my nerves. I was like, ‘Absolutely not. I’m not doing that.’ I’m going to just always have physical therapy and a chiropractor.’ It was bad when I was first learning how to work out with it, but I’ve kind of learned to work around it.”
