Last week marked the 10-year anniversary of Mercedes Mone and Bayley's historic match at WWE NXT Takeover: Brooklyn, which took place on August 22, 2015. The match was one of the foundational pillars to the "women's revolution" that WWE underwent in the 2010s, paving the way for the multitude of opportunities women on the WWE roster enjoy. Mone reflected on that match after her win at AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door 2025, where she retained her TBS Championship against Alex Windsor, Persephone, and Bozilla.
"[I want to] make women's wrestling global...I want to leave a legacy that cannot be undone," Mone said. "That's what I want to do...I get to have so many opportunities and so many blessings thanks to AEW...I want people to know that women's wrestling is the best."
Mone said that in her quest to make the AEW women's roster as good as it can be, she's run into a lot of talent whom she inspired.
"Every time I meet one of these women, they tell me 'Thank you so much for your matches,'" Mone continued. "It inspired me to be who I am. I just celebrated my 10-year anniversary of the Brooklyn match [against Bayley]. That is the number one match that girls come up to me and say, 'Becauyse of that match, I'm a professional wrestler,' and now I get to wrestle them. It means everything to me, and I can feel the inspiration. I can feel it when I fight them. It is the greatest feeling in the world."
Mone isn't the only one thinking about who they were and where they were ten years ago, as her opponent, Bayley, has recently been struggling with the literal voices of her past on WWE programming.
