There are so many things I love about professional wrestling, but I don’t think anything tops watching a babyface get their moment. The weeks – months, really – leading to the big win are filled with uncertainty. Are we actually going to see this happen? Or is the rug going to be pulled out from underneath them just like last year?
Liv Morgan has been able to get fans behind her for years. In 2019, a lot of fans started pinpointing her as a future world champion, taking note of how rapidly she had improved while with the Riott Squad. I believe there are fans who underestimate the impact Liv had in 2018 and 2019.
Raw was in a rough spot in 2018. There wasn’t a full-time men’s champion, with Brock Lesnar effectively holding the title hostage. And the Women’s Division, as usual, was left to feed on the scraps Vince McMahon gave them, which was largely six-woman tag matches. A LOT of them. Women’s wrestlers barely got promo time or time to show their characters and improve. They would get a few seconds in these digital exclusives.
Liv had the additional challenge of being a secondary character in a faction, as Ruby Riott was the main star of the Riott Squad – not that she received much help from WWE.
But what stood out to me then – and what made me keep Liv in mind as a wrestler for the future – was how much she put into every single spot. No, not just every single match. Every single spot.
Morgan would do everything she could to make no-stakes tag matches as entertaining as possible. She was over-the-top. Bumping, screaming, and just being extra. Liv was someone I especially appreciated as a wrestling site editor, because even if it was the second hour of Raw and I was dead tired after a rough day and could not care less about the show VKM put together, I knew that she was one of the wrestlers I could count on to give me a smile. That, by the way, means a lot to fans.
Even then, Morgan knew the importance of setting the foundation of her character, even as WWE were not doing much with her. As a young wrestler, she knew that she was not going to get her big moment to shine that PPV cycle or even that year, but if she could find little ways to stand out and piece together a consistent character with traits that work as a heel or a babyface, she could go somewhere.
One thing wrestlers do is they tell the announcers what to say about their character. During an excellent match against Natalya and the Boss’N’Hug Connection at the acclaimed Evolution Pay Per View, Renee Young and the commentary team used keywords like “rebel” and “free-spirit” to describe Liv, who famously colored her tongue blue as one of many visual examples of portraying that character.
You can see how Morgan’s current babyface persona is rebellious and free-spirited. She plays by her own rules, and she never backs down from anyone. Her rivalry with Becky Lynch earlier this year, as Lynch pointed out on commentary on the go-home show of SmackDown before Money in the Bank, was a real moment where she showed babyface fire and showed she can be in the main event scene regularly.
Liv Morgan built on her foundation in 2019
But if 2018 was the year Liv set the foundation, 2019 was the year she started to break out and fans saw her potential as a future world champion. It was the year we could truly take a step back and see how much she had grown as a performer and athlete since her NXT days.
The turning point may have been this match in July against Charlotte Flair, which has been viewed almost 3.5 million times on YouTube. That is tremendous for a seemingly random match on SmackDown. Liv’s performance against Charlotte turned heads and made people take notice, while her promo after the match was also impressive due to the intensity she delivered it with. She didn’t say much, but she said it with such conviction that you believed she was going to do something big when she came back.
Honestly, nothing really did happen after that storyline-wise, but that’s actually beside the point. I think too many people who analyze WWE are so focused on the failings of the people writing the show that we sometimes forget what the “journey” means. Liv would constantly use that word in a beautiful post-victory promo with Ariel Helwani at Money in the Bank, bring up her fan support.
For the performers, the journey isn’t just about how WWE books their stories, because they cannot count on that. It is haphazard. Little care is taken with wrestlers, save for the likes of Roman Reigns and Brock Lesnar who are the focal point of the creative team (and Vince). So for most wrestlers, the “journey” is about their self-improvement, what they did to create moments fans remembered, and the journey they have taken in that constant cycle of refining and improvement with their fans. Because for a performer, that connection with the fans is sacred and is what is responsible for success; there’s a reason why John Cena’s heartfelt promos to the audience when he returns are so focused on those reactions.
So if we look back at it – and this is a common sentiment – Liv Morgan was ready to be champion in 2021. The Charlotte match was one of the standout moments, but throughout 2019, Liv showed she was headed for a breakout. And 2021 was the year fans were fully behind her to win the briefcase.
Should Liv have won Money in the Bank one year earlier?
Instead, WWE teased her winning the match, only to have Nikki ASH win. Now, Nikki is a talented wrestler in her own right, but Nikki’s title reign was brief, and WWE did nothing to maintain her status thereafter. It made fans even more puzzled as to why Liv did not win, especially since the entire build to MITB was focused on an authority figure, Sonya Deville, going out of her way to screw Morgan over. Liv was THE babyface heading into the PPV.
There were even fans concerned that this was it for Liv. That after not winning MITB in 2021, people would give up on her, and WWE would move in a different direction. As Daniel Bryan so often reminded us during his ingenious heel run, WWE and its fans can be a “fickle” bunch.
But things in WWE often move slower than we would like them to. Despite Becky Lynch being used as a red herring – even being the last woman on the ladder alongside Liv – the plan clearly seemed to be for Morgan to win.
There are two reasons why I make this claim.
The first goes back to the Premium Live Event before Money in the Bank, Hell in a Cell. Morgan teamed up with Finn Balor and AJ Styles to take on Edge, Damian Priest, and Rhea Ripley. Four of those wrestlers are former world champions. Nobody received stronger reactions in that match from the crowd than Liv. Clearly, the fans still believed in her, to the point where she meant more to them and resonated more with them as an audience than either Finn or AJ. If she was getting better reactions than former world champs, then shouldn’t she be a future world champion?
Though the second reason is less about the logic that goes into a determining a Money in the Bank winner, it is perhaps more powerful. It has to do with a promo Morgan cut on Raw Talk the week of the “PLE”.
What struck me the most about the promo above, which begins at around the 1:05 mark, is how she delivered it. Obviously, she was desperate to make statements about needing to win as badly as she needs air to breathe or saying that she HAS to win in order to prove her loyal fans right. But she delivered it without any exaggerating acting or overt desperation. She said what she said in a way that was chilling, because you could feel every single word. She meant it. She said it like it was a matter of fact – not a backstage promo where she was trying to get you to care about her. Morgan already knew you cared and were rooting for her. But she knew she had to deliver.
That’s the thing when a babyface cuts a promo like that. If they don’t win after basically saying the title (in this case, the briefcase is a means to the title) is worth as much to them as their lives, then they are done. There is nowhere to go for them. And for as bad as WWE’s booking can be, such as having Theory win the briefcase to zero reaction, they do get some of the most important decisions right.
The satisfying conclusion to an arduous journey
It took a long time to get there, but the journey was very much worth it in the end. I see so much cynicism already about Liv being a transitional champion and blah blah blah, but for those of us who feel an attachment to performers we’ve watched for years, winning a title is validation. Pinning Ronda Rousey after an intense mini-match (who else was scared she could fail…because it’s Rousey after all!) and winning your first title to become the face of SmackDown on FOX is a HUGE deal no matter how you spin it.
How she proceeds after this depends on things outside our control, but WWE fans cannot forget that they hold some power in Morgan’s success. She made that clear multiple times in promos. The fan support helped her reach the goal she worked so hard to attain, and the continued support can help her remain in the main event picture, regardless of how this title reign develops.
Because as we know with babyfaces, it’s more about the climb; the destination is what renders meaning to the climb, which is even more about the real-life work than the booking itself. Morgan’s title win is the textbook example of that, to the point where her peers have shown her the same support as the fans. For example, the kick-off panel before Money in the Bank singled out how Bianca Belair and Bayley were picking Liv to win. Michael Cole, by the way, did, too, and that close to a show, his words can sometimes be prophetic.
Morgan’s work on the mic, her attention to detail, her commitment to her character, and her willingness to sell and try new things in the ring to entertain the crowd make her a deserving champion and someone who can become even better after winning her first title. When she joined the main roster with the Riott Squad in 2017, she was not even 25 and still in her early years of developing as a wrestler on weekly television. Now, she is a world champion but is still not even 30. So, again, you can be cynical all you want, but if her title win was the “end’ of something, then it was only the proverbial end of the beginning.
Kevin was an editor at Daily DDT, covering professional wrestling, and is now doing the same here at Let Them Wrestle.