World Wrestling Entertainment, Becky Lynch and the Irish media

Abstract

In 2013, Becky Lynch, an Irish professional wrestler, was signed by WWE, marking the beginning of her rise to superstardom. By 2020, Lynch had become a major WWE star, participating in the first women’s Wrestlemania main event with Charlotte Flair and Ronda Rousey. While not the first Irish wrestler in WWE, Lynch is the first to reach superstar status. This article focuses on her portrayal in Irish media, which often finds itself in a unique position between sport and entertainment. Despite her popularity, professional wrestling’s blend of sport and entertainment leads to its coverage primarily in entertainment sections, occasionally crossing into sports biographies. Through an analysis of Lynch’s media portrayal from 2013 to her 2020 maternity leave, this piece explores the tension between her self-presentation and media representation, arguing that the wrestling’s ambiguous status and traditional gender biases in sports reporting downplay Lynch’s athletic achievements by emphasizing her femininity.

Keywords:

• Professional wrestling
• Irish Sport
• gender
• media
• WWE

Introduction

Listen, I know that the deck is stacked against me, but I’m changing the industry anyway…

Becky Lynch (2018)

Professional wrestling is sport pantomime. Performers may execute their roles to the best of their ability but ultimately the winners and losers of titles and bouts are decided by those in charge of wrestling companies. Why then, should sport sociologists, or historians, concern themselves with wrestling? Professional wrestling presents itself as an outlandish version of competitive sport. It features belts, rankings, rules, rivalries, television coverage and all the trappings of ‘modern’ sport. Professional wrestlers possess the same athleticism as ‘legitimate athletes’ and, as Malcolm et al.’s (2023) recent work on mBTI in wrestling showcased, suffer through the same injuries. It is precisely wrestling’s liminal sporting space which demands attention because work at the margins of sport often tells far more than work in the mainstream. Thus far, the richest vein of scholarship on professional wrestling has not come from sport historians or sociologists, but rather those researching performance and theatre studies (Laine and Warden 2016). This article studies depictions of Irish wrestler Rebecca Quin, or Becky Lynch as she is known within World Wrestling Entertainment (henceforth WWE), in the Irish media. Professional wrestling is a pre-determined sport. In other words, athletes compete against one another under the illusion of sport (matches, rankings, combat, titles etc.) but the results and, oftentimes, fights as planned well in advance. Because of wrestling’s status as sport and entertainment, reporting on Lynch was found, not in sporting columns, but rather in entertainment pieces. Critically entertainment columns presented Lynch’s career and victories as legitimate. Here wrestling was presented as sport (and not a pre-planned endeavour). Those same columns also re-affirmed traditional gendered ideals about Lynch’s femininity. Thus, readers of Lynch in entertainment columns were presented with traditional scripts about a legitimate (at lease presented as such) female athlete. For scholars, such a positioning reaffirms the need to study athletes in both sporting, and non-sporting media.

During the period studied (2013–2020), Lynch was positioned by the WWE as a powerful wrestler whose gender-bending character (nicknamed ‘The Man’) subverted tropes about women in wrestling. Within the WWE and within wrestling media, Lynch’s gender was rarely, if ever, commented upon. Unlike the pretty or powerful discourses noted in previous studies (Bruce 2016), wherein female athletes were presented as pretty (therefore feminine) or/and powerful (therefore masculine), Lynch was predominantly presented as powerful, with little reference made to her gender within the WWE. Lynch and the WWE’s presentations were nuanced, and played with ideas of gender in wrestling. This differed from Irish entertainment columns which largely re-affirmed traditional discourses.

Lynch became the company’s top merchandise seller, featured on the cover of the 2020 WWE video game WWE 2K20 (being the first woman to do so) and, displaying her global appeal, she was the sixth most followed female athlete on Twitter in 2019. As ‘The Man’, Lynch displayed an arrogance akin to Conor McGregor, the Irish mixed-martial arts champion, who was likewise enjoying successes in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Although Lynch publicly disagreed with comparisons, her public support for McGregor from 2018 to 2020, and some very similar speech patterns meant that others continually made connections between the two (Corby 2019). Regardless of these comparisons, Lynch’s ‘The Man’ moniker was presented within the WWE as subversive and, as Lydon (2022) argued, an attempt to play with a hegemonic masculine trope of the brash, aggressive but assertive champion. Some select quotes from Lynch’s various speeches (or ‘promos’ as they are referred to in wrestling) highlight ‘The Man’s’ cocky demeanour.

I say I deserve it. I say I’m the best. And there’s not a woman on this roster that can tell me different.

Stop being so condescending to the champ and get out of my ring.

You should cosplay as a waterboy because of all the time you spend on the sidelines.

Everyone’s tough until The Man comes around.

I wasn’t born to be a Champion, I fought to be a Champion (Skudder 2022).

WWE also presented this image during the promotion of the WWE 2K20 video game. In a filmed advertisement featuring an assortment of male wrestlers from the past and present of the WWE (presented as being shot in the home of 1980s megastar Hulk Hogan (Terry Bollea), Lynch drops into the house, breaking through a glass ceiling and disrupting the party. As a visual image, Lynch literally breaking a glass ceiling was blunt but nevertheless served a broader point of establishing that the company’s self-titled ‘women’s revolution’ had arrived (Lydon 2022). Lynch’s reputation thus established, it is worth commenting on the WWE’s popularity, and placement, within American media at that point.

While other wrestling companies do exist, the WWE is the most globally recognizable company, a billion-dollar commercial enterprise and, as many have noted, typically what the public conceives of when discussing wrestling (Wood and Litherland 2018). Surveying the period 2013, when Lynch first signed with the WWE, to 2020, this article uses roughly one hundred media sources (divided between Irish print newspapers—broadsheets and tabloids) and divides reporting on Lynch into three separate approaches—biographies discussing her rise to fame, articles discussing her beauty/fashion/motherhood, and articles which present wrestling as a legitimate sport. In line with reporting on other female stars in combat sports, including Irish boxer Katie Taylor (Free 2015), Lynch’s athleticism, embracing of violence, and toughness, were often overlooked in favour of her beauty and femininity. Whereas athletes from recognised sport are beginning to be recognised more holistically in Irish sporting columns, the same was not true for Lynch, whose pursuit was not recognised as a sport. The article thus stresses both the strength of traditional discourses and the importance of sporting knowledge among journalists. In the case of Lynch, the dearth of reporting on wrestling in sport pages shifted its coverage to entertainment sections, thereby heightening discourses on traditional gender roles.

Wrestling and women’s media coverage

Analysis of media depictions of women wrestlers is typically centred on Olympic/amateur wrestling as opposed to professional wrestlers. The findings on amateur wrestling largely affirm debates concerning the paucity of coverage given to women’s sports as well as the sexualisation or hyper-feminization of women athletes (Walton 2005; Sisjord and Kristiansen 2008). While research has been done explaining how professional wrestling companies often play with racial prejudices in both progressive and regressive ways, this can involve the inclusion of racially insensitive stereotyping and commentary at its worst, or thoughtful character depictions at its best (Harkulich, 2018). Hill-Cann and Burr’s (2023) study of an all-women’s professional wrestling pay-per-view broadcast critiqued the broadcast’s duality. Laudatory praise was given to the women as athletes but there was a lingering misogyny found in the sexualisation of female wrestlers by commentators and fans. This is beginning to change, however, as the role of women in professional wrestling is increasing in terms of coverage and attention (Dunn 2016).

Since the 1980s (Kane 1989) studies of gender bias in media coverage typically focus on the relationship between athlete and media outlet. This can take the form of qualitative analysis-based studies (which scrutinise discursive constructions of athletes, comparisons with men’s coverage, etc.) or, as is often the case, quantitative-based studies (often focused on time given to such sports, their photographic volume etc.) (Cooky et al. 2021). The marginalisation and symbolic annihilation of athletes (Liston and O’Connor 2020, Tuchman 1978) and efforts to challenge hegemonic norms about how a woman should behave or look (Krane 2001) have long dominated the literature. Barker-Ruchti’s (2009) research on the media is particularly relevant for this piece as it highlighted the ability of Swiss newspapers to construct and represent cyclist Karin Thürig according to traditional hegemonic norms.

This article’s conception of hegemonic femininity in sport is informed by an understanding of gender dynamics that shape women’s experiences and representations within athletic contexts. Drawing upon Raewyn Connell’s hegemonic masculinity (2020), the framework here is transposed to interrogate how certain forms of femininity come to be celebrated and normalized, positioning them as the ideal or ‘hegemonic’ within the domain of sports. Equally influential, especially given the performative nature of professional wrestling, has been Judith Butler’s concept of performativity. Combined, such work posits that hegemonic femininity in sport is not a static set of characteristics but rather a performative act, repeated and reinforced through societal norms and behaviours (implicit and explicit). In Lynch, it is possible to find a tension between her character work as a gender-subversive figure, and her implicit cultural script (such as make up, long hair and a slender figure), which often came to be the focus of journalists. In wrestling scholarship, ‘work’ is used to describe a wrestler’s ability to uphold the fictitious world of professional wrestling. This could also be described as ‘living the gimmick’ and is something which Lynch excelled at.

This paradigm examines how attributes traditionally associated with femininity—such as grace, beauty, and passivity—are selectively amalgamated with traits like competitiveness, strength, and aggression, which have been typically prized in male athletes, to construct a narrow, often paradoxical model of acceptable female athleticism.

In professional wrestling, individual performers have characters. They are ‘heightened’ versions of individual personalities or, at the very least, border on some form of realism (Hunt 2005). Because of the need to remain in character, televised interviews in wrestling and even interviews with mainstream (i.e. non-wrestling media) are often ambiguous in their authenticity. Characters in professional wrestling are fluid. They may well be the original concept of the performer, but they are mediated through the wrestling company (Barker 2019). Lynch’s rise to fame came at a moment when the WWE was turning away from sexualised depictions of wrestlers towards coverage of women wrestlers as athletes. In 2015, a thirty second match between two women wrestlers created an online reaction which culminated in a trending hashtag of #GiveDivasaChance on Twitter. In subsequent weeks women wrestlers spoke openly about their secondary status within the company (Corteen 2021, 230–243). In 2016, the WWE began to give more attention to women’s wrestling, even, at times, focusing more on women’s storylines (Anonymous 2020). Lynch was central to the self-titled ‘women’s revolution’ and the WWE co-constructed Lynch’s ‘The Man’ character to be powerful and gender-bending. Lynch, unlike other wrestlers on the roster, was rarely sexualised by the WWE during the period studied here.

Toni Bruce (2016) stressed the shift from either/or to and in women athletes’ media coverage. Whereas previously women athletes were often presented as pretty or powerful, Bruce cited a shift, in the United States at least, to pretty and powerful discourses. This has been substantiated by a range of studies (Thorpe et al. 2017; Litchfield and Kavanagh 2019) on athlete social media use, which has seen athletes embrace both their femininity and their athletic prowess in the public space. In the case of Lynch, it is notable that the WWE’s commentary team, and the speeches Lynch gave (co-written between Lynch and WWE writers) focused almost exclusively on her grit, determination, and skill. Newspaper and entertainment columns reported on Lynch but often struggled to distinguish between the real-life Rebecca Quin, and the character she adopted.

Surveying Irish national and regional newspapers from the period 2013 to 2020, the researchers found 134 mentions of Becky Lynch, the majority of which were found in entertainment and lifestyle sections, with only a handful appearing in sporting columns. Part of this absence may be due to the reliance of Irish markets on British broadcasters Sky Sports and BT Sports for wrestling content. Wrestling is typically shown on paid television channels in Ireland, through Sky or BT, and is hence not part of the free to air TV channels readily available in Ireland. Thus, a great deal of reporting on wrestling comes from British media, as opposed to Irish media. Of the 134 mentions in Irish only media, 40 were found to be duplicates or simple reports on matches (i.e. ‘Becky Lynch faces other wrestler this Saturday at 3am Irish time’). Research was conducted over a six-month period from February 2021 to July 2021 through online newspaper resources Irish Newspaper Archives, The British Newspaper Archive, and the Irish Times Archive. Due to the restricted nature of Irish television access to wrestling, print media was privileged. In searching for articles on Lynch, the authors alternated between her birth name, Rebecca Quin and her character name within the WWE, Becky Lynch. Other search terms included ‘women’s wrestling’, ‘Irish wrestler’, ‘WWE’ and ‘women’s revolution’. From an epistemological standpoint, we position ourselves within a constructivist paradigm, believing that knowledge is socially constructed, and that the media plays a pivotal role in shaping societal understanding. To rigorously analyse the data, we employed Braun and Clarke’s thematic analysis framework (2006). This commenced with a phase of familiarization, where each article was read and re-read to glean initial ideas. Following this, initial codes were generated, pinpointing interesting features of the data. These codes were subsequently collated into potential themes, which were then reviewed and refined. This iterative process ensured both the validity of our thematic clusters and a nuanced understanding of media representations of Lynch. In total 18 codes were identified, which were centred first around six themes (fakery, beauty, athleticism, rise to fame, motherhood, danger). A second round of coding was then undertaken. Once complete, the research revealed three main media narratives about Becky Lynch. They are Lynch’s unlikely rise to fame, her adherence to traditional feminine roles and, finally, her wrestling career.

Lynch’s rise to fame

Research concerning how the Irish media depict women’s sport is limited when compared to other countries (Liston and O’Connor 2020). While some excellent work does exist (see for example Free’s work on boxer Katie Taylor (Free 2015), far more attention has centred on coverage of men’s sport in Ireland. This ranges from how conceptions of masculinity are mediated through sport (Free 2018) to how gay athletes experience sport within Ireland (Madden 2013). Drawing from Liston and O’Connor (2020), it is pertinent to note that women’s sport has typically been excluded from serious or sustained sporting coverage. Free (2015) and Van Ingen and Kovacs’s (2012) work on Katie Taylor, Ireland’s most successful female prize-fighter, cited the tensions found within media reporting. On the one hand, Taylor has exhibited strength, determination, and an ability to withstand pain. These traits have, traditionally, been associated with male athletes, thereby representing a potentially subversive trait to Taylor’s femininity. Such tensions have been explained away, as Free (2015) found, by discussions of her beauty, religion, and traditional female values. In this way, Taylor is ‘normalised’ despite her boxing career.

The desire to balance traditional feminine norms with an athleticism that may seem challenging to femininity can be found in the first major theme in reporting on Lynch; her ‘rags to riches’ story. Lynch’s pathway to the WWE was not a linear one. She began wrestling in 2005 in Europe and North America but was side-lined for several years through an injury. Lynch began wrestling again in the 2010s and was signed by WWE in 2013. The impact of ‘rags to riches’ stories in which the protagonist overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds has long been problematized (Andrews et al. 2011). Such narratives serve to celebrate the individual but, in doing so, ignore broader socio-economic factors and barriers. Lynch’s story is presented in the same style as Nike’s ‘willpower knows no obstacles’ campaign studied by Posbergh, Andrews, and Sam Clevenger (2023). Nike’s marketing campaign, aimed towards women, accentuated the role of individual effort in achieving success while ignoring the contexts women find themselves in. Regarding Lynch, little mention was made of her coming to wrestling at a time of economic downturn in the Republic of Ireland, or that women’s sport in Ireland received fewer supports, or of the alienation experienced by many Irish teenagers, especially from working class backgrounds (Windle et al. 2023). Instead, attention was given to stories of Lynch’s personal struggle for success. This contrasted with the WWE’s narrative of Lynch’s successes, which often praised the difficulties she overcame in a material sense, noting her working-class background, a lack of support and role models etc. (Anonymous 2020).

The clearest example of this came in Amy Connor’s (2019) article for the Irish Times which talked of ‘the girl from Baldoyle’ (a Dublin suburb) who pursued her dream following serious setbacks. Mention was made of short-lived careers, a disappointing University experience and her experiences as a role model. Interestingly Lynch was quoted noting the difficulties many women experienced breaking into wrestling or being taken seriously but this was a backdrop for a more generalised story of individual success (Connor 2019). While Connor’s piece was written as light entertainment, the same narratives were found in sporting media. In one of the few instances of a sporting outlet discussing Lynch, Irish online sports website The 42 (Fennessy 2019a) published a similar interview which sought to explain ‘how a former Aer Lingus flight attendant became one of the most famous Irish athletes on the planet’. In it, the author notes that Lynch’s parents divorced at a young age, that Lynch fell in with ‘a bad crowd’, and had an eating disorder. Such instances were quickly glossed over in favour of her eventual rise:

Having come through bullying, body image issues, depression and a generally turbulent upbringing, Lynch says she has used the pain from these problems to drive her to superstardom … (Fennessy 2019a)

The eventual message was that Lynch overcame these obstacles through hard-work and determination. What is not discussed, for example, is that Lynch struggled with her self-­image in two industries known for their rigid ideas of the female body (wrestling and personal training), or that she struggled to find purpose in Celtic Tiger Ireland (Roy 2021).¹ Instead, her ‘obsession’, which eschewed ‘being normal’ or taking rest, was the key to her successes (Fennessy 2019a). The most substantive article on Lynch’s career came from Michael Verney of The Irish Independent (2019b), who noted Lynch’s struggles with alcohol and drugs at a young age in an isolated Dublin suburb. Nevertheless, wrestling was presented as an outlet for Lynch to escape from these problems and gain worldwide fame. In much the same way that American media often celebrates the ability of athletes to ‘escape’ their surroundings, reporting proved uninterested in either the broader issues in Ireland which Lynch raised (about either her personal or social surroundings), or some of the broader issues within wrestling noted in her own career—such as the high risk of injury or the demands placed on women’s aesthetic appearances (Laprade and Murphy 2017, 2–15).

Becky Lynch as woman

Lynch’s WWE success was predicated on her ability to disrupt traditional feminine tropes in wrestling. Interestingly Irish newspapers often mentioned the ‘women’s revolution’ in the WWE, and Lynch’s part within it, while simultaneously praising her beauty and femininity. This was in much the same way that boxer Katie Taylor was described with reference to her femininity in spite of emphasis added) her sport (Free 2015). Indeed, like Lynch, a great deal of gendered constructions of Taylor were done in non-sporting pages. What differentiated Lynch from Taylor was that Lynch’s chosen career, professional wrestling, occupied a liminal space within Irish newspapers, by which it is meant that reporting on Lynch was often found in entertainment AND sporting columns as opposed to Taylor who was primarily featured in sporting columns when reporting on her successes. This ran counter to how the WWE, and Lynch, positioned her character who, while not asexual, was rarely, if ever, praised for her beauty or femininity. This was not the case in Irish reporting, especially after Lynch revealed, unexpectedly, that she was going on maternity leave to give birth to her child.

One such column was that penned by Jenny Friel (2019) with Extra.i.e. In it Friel describes Lynch as a ‘flame haired, leather clad’ wrestler, and notes that Lynch’s sport is defined by ‘fake eyelashes, outlandish costumes and very big hair’. As the article ends it questions if any ‘potential partners are put off by her (Lynch’s) rather bolshie and aggressive WWE persona?’ Lynch’s response that she doesn’t have difficulty finding partners allowed Friel to note rumours of Lynch’s partner. A great deal of attention was given to Lynch’s career as an air steward and the fact that her mother previously worked as an air steward as well in discussions of Lynch’s beauty (Friel 2019). While such discussions were perhaps more subtle in their sexualisation of Lynch, more overt columns appeared after a 2017 pay-per-view, The Royal Rumble. During a match with Kanako Urai (stage name ‘Asuka’), Lynch’s nipple briefly emerged from her vest, which caused television cameras to ‘black out’ coverage. The next day Dublin Live and The Sun, two publications which focus on the entertainment aspects of sport, reported on Lynch’s ‘nip slip’ (Lynskey 2019; Cutts 2019). The objectification and sexualisation of female wrestlers in the WWE, which was, in effect, its business model during the 1990s and early 2000s, continued to hold sway among outside media outlets who had not evolved in their reporting on wrestling.

The focus on Lynch as woman, rather than athlete or performer, was mimicked in photographs often chosen to represent the Irish wrestler. Frequently accompanied with a tagline about the ‘former Aer Lingus flight attendant’ (Slattery 2016), it is notable that dozens of images of Lynch are not action shots of Lynch in the ring. Instead, images were those of Lynch, in her wrestling gear, but not wrestling. Newspapers often neglect images of female athletes playing their sports but, instead, focus on still images in which the athletes are shown not so much as professionals, but more akin to models wearing sporting attire (Kane, LaVoi, and Fink 2013). This was the case with Lynch who, either pictured alone or with her fellow female wrestlers, was depicted like a model rather than a wrestler known for their intensity (Corteen 2021). An interesting comparison, especially given the Irish context, is Irish wrestler Stephen Farrelly (stage name ‘Sheamus’), who has been with the WWE since 2006. Sheamus has likewise received a great deal of media attention in Ireland as he was the first major wrestling star in the WWE who came from the Republic of Ireland. In reporting on Sheamus he is regularly shown flexing his muscles or engaged in a match (Verney 2015). As the ‘Celtic Warrior’, Sheamus is often depicted in the WWE as a fearsome and tough, brawling wrestler. He is presented in typically hegemonic male terms—strong, powerful, and muscular.

Aside from the ‘nip-slip’ publicised by Irish newspapers, the most obvious form of media praise for Lynch’s traditional femininity came in 2019 on the announcement of her pregnancy. In May 2020, on WWE’s weekly television programme Raw, Lynch made the surprise announcement that she was leaving wrestling, to give birth to her first child. Newspapers celebrated her relationship with fellow WWE performer, Colby Daniel Lopez (stage name ‘Seth Rollins’), and her desire to become a mother. Much of the coverage in Ireland was simply a rehash of a larger interview with the US publication People magazine (Hahn 2020). In the interview Lynch discussed always wanting to start a family, how she was excited to have a ‘a little flower girl or a page boy’ and that she was happy to leave wrestling for an indefinite period to focus on being a mother. The Sun proved particularly interested in Lynch’s pregnancy. In May 2020, Joe Brophy (2020) wrote about the ‘whirlwind romance’ between Lynch and Lopez, and her desire to leave her ‘work family’ to begin a family of her own. The article was initially mediated through Lynch’s partner, whose joy was noted, before Brophy went on to discuss what the pregnancy meant, more substantively for Lynch’s wrestling career. Two months later, Aoife Finneran in The Sun (2020) reported in the entertainment section that contrary to popular belief, Lynch would attempt to balance her career and her family commitments. The article opened with a report of Lynch’s appearance on a popular wrestling podcast in which she noted her determination to return to wrestling as soon as possible, and that men rarely hesitated in starting a family, so why should she?

Becky Lynch as athlete

While parallels can be drawn between Lynch and fellow Irish athletes Conor McGregor and Katie Taylor—and these parallels were explicitly drawn during the period studied – Lynch differed in that her rising celebrity owed to both her own performances and a slick marketing system which could determine who would win and lose matches. Professional wrestling’s liminal status between sport and theatre has long provided issues for those reporting on the event (Jones 2019). While more mainstream American sporting journalists like to blend the two worlds by reporting on the fights themselves as real events while simultaneously commenting on the ‘booking decisions’ that underpinned them, Irish entertainment outlets proved uneasy about Lynch’s sport. Should they report it as factual, or should they note the theatrical element underpinning everything? Reporting on Lynch tended towards the latter, which suggested either an uneasiness about where to place her achievements or an ignorance about how to report on a sport typically neglected in mainstream Irish media. In 2016, the Sunday Life reported on Lynch’s tough road to Wrestlemania in the same manner that one would expect to see of a prize-fighter’s rise to prominence (Anonymous 2016). This was an ongoing theme in Lynch’s coverage as the Evening Herald published a near identical article three years later in 2019 (Verney 2019b). That same year The Irish Independent reported on Lynch’s win at Wrestlemania, in the first all-female main event. Once more the match was reported as legitimate, a point reiterated in the fact that former UFC champion Ronda Rousey took part in the main event (Verney 2019c). While it would be spurious to say that Irish journalists expected readers to believe the matches were real, a more critical piece by Dave Hannigan (2019) in the Evening Echo highlighted the problem in depicting Lynch as an athlete, and not a performer.

In a provocative article, accompanied with the line ‘Wrestling is a Farce, Not a Sport’, Hannigan lamented the uncritical celebrations found in Irish newspapers and on social media about Lynch’s win. While Hannigan is known for his particularly critical, at times acerbic, reporting on American sport, this marked the first time he turned attention to professional wrestling. Noting that he, too, was once a wrestling fan, Hannigan pointed out that Lynch’s victory, while entertaining, was predetermined. Reporting on the WWE in this way, Hannigan pointed out, meant that newspapers ignored more problematic elements of the wrestling industry. Most notably, this included the dozens and dozens of wrestlers who died in their 30s and 40s from drug overdoses (Hannigan 2019). Arguing for greater scrutiny on Lynch’s employer, Vince McMahon, Hannigan’s prose critiqued outside media for not paying attention to the real debates happening in wrestling reporting. A contemporaneous article (Fennessy 2019b) on Lynch celebrated the growing strides made by women within the WWE alongside Lynch’s own sporting achievements. While the article noted the company’s previous mistreatment of female wrestlers, it was written in glowing terms:

women’s wrestling has been elevated to a different level. Effectively relegated to a sideshow in the past, it now rivals the men’s equivalent matches both for athleticism and gripping storylines

This was a theme throughout the research. Reporting on Lynch’s sport was uncritical, Lynch was presented as an athlete in the same way as other Irish prize-fighters, and the WWE, when mentioned, was celebrated for finally giving female wrestlers screentime. For example:

Gone are the days when they were only there to model or show their bikini bodies. Under the Levesque regime, they have been encouraged to showcase their athletic ability and wrestling skills.

The only tentative suggestions found in reporting that Lynch’s trajectory was predetermined were comments insinuating that Lynch was ‘not supposed’ to be a mega-star or that few had predicted her popularity (Friel 2019). One illustrative quote remarks that

She [Lynch] was never supposed to be the main event, but mere mid-card filler. She refused to take no for an answer and her tireless self-promotion has won the hearts and minds of fans … (Verney 2019a)

On rare occasions that the scripted nature of wrestling is noted, as happened with The Irish Independent in 2019, this is quickly glossed over with notes on Lynch’s victories and losses (Meaghar 2019). In interviews, Lynch continually switched between her real-life experiences and on-screen feuds. This explains, perhaps in part, the confusion in how to accurately report on her career within Ireland.

Conclusion

This study on Becky Lynch’s career from 2013 to 2020 offers valuable insights for researchers interested in sports, gender, and media. Lynch’s journey in the WWE, where she adopted a character challenging traditional femininity norms, presents a unique case for examining gender portrayal in Irish media. Despite her unconventional character, Irish newspapers often sought to highlight her traditional feminine aspects, revealing a contrast in media representation. Additionally, wrestling’s scripted nature led to its coverage in entertainment sections more than sports, showcasing varying media attitudes towards her gender-defying persona. The article primarily focused on Irish media, suggesting the need for broader research including different media sources to understand the complex interplay between athletes, sports, and media. It also identified a significant research gap in the field of wrestling in Ireland, particularly sport’s complexity for journalists when it comes to shaping sports narratives and celebrity. Future work could focus on Lynch’s tweets and their media coverage could offer deeper insights into sports reporting layers. Further, examining the public’s response to Lynch’s successes, like her Wrestlemania victory, could illuminate the joint creation of sports celebrity in today’s digital age. Lastly, the study hints at the potential for comparative research involving other Irish wrestlers in WWE, like Sheamus, to explore gender and media portrayal in Ireland more broadly. Lynch’s career, in the context of Irish media, underscores the complexity and potential learning opportunities from the intersection of sports entertainment, gender representation, and media coverage

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This was the name popularly given to refer to a period of great economic prosperity within the Republic of Ireland from c. 1994 to 2007. Prosperity was not equally spread across all strata in Irish society and was followed by a financial crash in 2008 and several years of austerity.