Chelsea Green pleaded with WWE general manager Nick Aldis this week to let her keep the WWE Women’s Championship despite a broken orbital bone, and the promo she cut doing it wasn’t padding to a hot streak — it was the entire case for why the title stays on her.
WrestlingInc’s Olivia Quinlan called it the best promo segment WWE has produced in months, if not this entire past year, pointing to a side of Green’s character nobody had seen before and an emotional delivery that landed as real because it was drawing on an actual injury instead of a scripted one. That’s one critic’s read on a single Chelsea Green SmackDown promo. Mickie James, two decades into a career spent judging exactly this kind of thing, called it one of the greatest promos she’s ever watched.
Those are two separate people on two separate platforms arriving at the same conclusion without coordinating. One glowing review reads like a marketing angle. A two-decade veteran going out of her way to say a former comedy act just delivered one of the greatest promos she’s ever seen is the business recalibrating in real time.
The stakes were real, and that’s presumably why the segment worked. Green suffered the broken orbital bone that put her title in jeopardy five days after winning it, and WWE said nothing publicly about what came next. Aldis had every excuse to strip the title on the spot. Instead, he gave her 30 days to get medically cleared.
She won that title alone, at the top of a ladder, in the match that made her interim champion in the first place. Jade Cargill and Charlotte Flair were still fighting each other near the summit when Green climbed past both of them in roughly 11 seconds, with Lash Legend and Tiffany Stratton also in the match and Rhea Ripley’s injury the reason the title was vacant to begin with. “It felt like it took 13 years to climb that ladder,” Green said afterward — a line about the grind of her career, not the actual seconds on the clock.
That grind is worth sitting with. WWE released Green in early 2021, and she spent two years rebuilding on the independent scene and in Impact before a 2023 Royal Rumble return. Ahead of SummerSlam, a WWE producer’s comments on the Netflix series “Unreal” framed her as a wrestler built to elevate the real main event, not become part of it, and fans pushed back before she ever touched that ladder.
I watched the SmackDown segment twice before writing this. Green needed no script assist to make the case for herself — the injury was just the hook.
Mickie James didn’t stop at a compliment.
https://twitter.com/MickieJames/status/2088971329315680315
James has held the WWE Women’s Championship multiple times across a two-decade career and a TNA Hall of Fame résumé, which is another way of saying she isn’t handing out “greatest promo” tweets as a courtesy. She’s watched Green go from the Women’s Tag Team Championship to the AAA Mixed Tag belt to the inaugural WWE Women’s United States Championship, and she says this one is the best of it.
Nobody else in that locker room can follow that, and everyone knows it.
