Catching up with Dana Brooke before WWE RAW, Mandy Rose's former tag team partner was asked what it was like to not only lose her 24/7 Title but watch Niki Cross throw it in the trash(ish) as if it didn’t matter to her one bit.
“I’ve shown up and I have shown out every single d*mn day,” Brooke said in a WWE Digital Exclusive. “And I have worked extremely hard for everything I’ve had, including that 24/7 Title. And seeing Nikki Cross just throw it in the trash? Everything I worked for; it was painful. I have defended and I have elevated that title with every single fiber in by body because I was proud to wear that gold around my waist. I was proud to call myself a champion. So if Nikki Cross and Damage CTRL want to waltz in here and disrespect my hard work, they have another thing coming to them. I will not go down without a fight.”
For Brooke, losing the strap and then watching it not only end up in the trash but also on the alumni section of the WWE website must have hurt to her core; after failing to find much traffic over the first six-seven years of her career in WWE, Brooke secured her first championship win with the 24/7 Title in November of 2021 and held the strap on 13 more occasions until November 7th, 2022, when she seemingly lost it for good. While her reign wasn't the most prolific of the belt's very controversial tenure, with R-Truth lapping her multiple times over, Brooke did get to call herself a champion for 336 combined days over a little under a year, which is something that not too many wrestlers, male or female, can boast.
While going to bat for the belt probably won't bring it back if Brooke wants to test her mettle against Cross, Bayley, and any other member of Damage CTRL, giving the belt's top-female champion a chance to wrestle for the strap's honor wouldn't be the worst idea imaginable, especially after she went to bat suggesting that the 24/7 Title could be transitioned into a female Intercontinental Championship.
Dana Brooke hoped WWE would have a very different plan for the 24/7 Title.
Though it now looks incredibly ironic, earlier this month, Brooke sat down with Steven Fall of NBC Sports Boston for an interview on his Ten Count show and let it be known that she would like to see the 24/7 Championship transitioned into a midcard strap for the women's division, as transcribed by Fightful.
“I’ve been wanting to transition the 24/7 Title into an IC title. I think it would be amazing,” Brooke said. “We’re building a roster, we have amazing women on the roster. With everyone coming back, why not? We have the tag team titles, but not everyone is teamed up. You have the storylines that are going for the women’s titles, but the rest are just little stories in the mix. Why not go for an IC Title? This way, it’s not secondary, it’s just another thing to pour your heart and soul in and have that title and be given that opportunity and enhance the women’s division.”
While it feels incredibly unlikely that the promotion will un-retire the 24/7 Championship anytime soon, as Akira Tozawa has taken up playing poker with JBL and Barron Corbin in a post-24/7 world, Brooke isn't the first wrestler this fall to suggest the WWE should christen some sort of new women's championship, as Raquel Rodriguez also discussed adding a third singles with Fall back in October.
“We have women from all over the world, from all over the country, from different backgrounds, different ethnicities. I think having an Intercontinental Championship, having a North American Championship for the women would be something, you know, a huge leap forward for the women’s division and wrestling in general.”
Will the day eventually come when Paul “Triple H” Levesque adds another championship to the WWE portfolio? Potentially so; he added a proper NXT Women's Tag Team Championship belt back in 2021 after formerly having the WWE Women's Tag Team Champions have to be defended across three different brands and might just add a trios belt down the line to help accommodate the influx of trios across the three brands. But for now, Brooke's best course of action may be to simply take care of her business in the ring, wrestle Cross for the honor of her belt, and prove once and for all that her almost-year-old run with the strap split into 15 segments was valuable after all.
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