Michelle McCool was the first-ever Divas Champion and held the WWE Women's Championship on two occasions. She first signed with WWE in 2004 after participating in the WWE Diva Search and later retired in 2010.
McCool has since made sporadic appearances (competing in the 2023 Royal Rumble match, for example) but has largely retired from in-ring action.
The fan favourite, who is married to WWE Hall of Famer The Undertaker, was part of an era where women's wrestling wasn't prioritised and she reflected on that during a recent interview with Chris Van Vliet.
Asked about the short matches and having to fight for airtime, McCool said, "That was the hard part during my era. When you hear about the Attitude Era, you hear about the Divas era, which we were kind of like a forgotten era. We were kind of like the in between, which for a while I was frustrated with that, but then I was like, there's nothing we did all we could with what we had, and I'm grateful for that, but it was hard to tell a story."
"They started giving Layla and I more and more time, which was nice, more and more freedom, which was nice, also led to a lot of other people not liking that, because that's the wrestling business, which made that difficult as well, because you have to have somebody to work," she continued. "But it was hard. It was a struggle."
McCool went on to reveal that there was one occasion when WWE wanted her and Victoria to go back out to the ring and redo their match. Why? Because there were concerns they'd showed up the company's male Superstars.
"There was one point where Victoria and I had a match. We came backstage, getting changed, and they came back and said, Hey, y'all need to come back out and do your match again. We're like, What do you mean come back out and do our match again? They're like, your punches and kicks look better than the guys."
"We're like, Wait a minute. We have to go redo our match because our punches look too good? That doesn't sound like an us problem," she explained. "Chris Jericho at the time, he stood up for us, and he said if the guy's punches don't look as good, that is not the girl's fault. That's not their fault. Regardless, we had to go out there and re-do our match, and there was a period of about three or four weeks that girls couldn't punch or kick."
You can watch the full interview with McCool in the player below.