Mercedes Moné has held the AEW TBS Championship for well over one year now. After winning gold in her AEW debut, the former Sasha Banks of WWE has been pushed to the top by Tony Khan and various smaller promotions around the world, resulting in her current run as 9 Belts Moné. While some may see this as the biggest run of Mercedes’ career, one multi-time champion and respected veteran disagrees, and has issued a scathing take on the whole belt collector gimmick of pro wrestling.
The CEO extended her TBS Championship reign to at least 465 days by retaining in a Fatal 4 Way at the fourth annual AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door PPV on August 24 in London. The match went 15 minutes and 30 seconds as Mercedes retained over AEW’s Alex Windsor, Stardom’s Bozilla, and CMLL’s Persephone.
As Mercedes Moné prepares to defend against Windsor on tonight’s live AEW Dynamite, a 21-time WWE champion and well-liked veteran has revealed why he was not impressed by the Fatal 4 Way, or Mercedes’ AEW run. Stevie Richards discussed the match and Moné with his co-host on the latest episode of The Stevie Richards Show, and feels she was doing much better in WWE.
Stevie Richards Believes AEW’s Mercedes Moné Was Better In WWE As Sasha Banks
The AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door 2025 PPV featured 13 matches, and just five of those were one-on-one encounters. On the latest episode of The Stevie Richards Show, the ECW Original recalled how the only Forbidden Door Fatal 4 Way was loaded with what felt like “people just setting up spots to do spots,” including the obligatory Tower of Doom.
Big Stevie Cool reviewed Mercedes Moné vs. Persephone vs. Bozilla vs. Alex Windsor, noting that it felt like all four wrestlers had “Hot Wheels Feet” or “Roadrunner Feet,” where they did a lot of running around to set up different spots. Richards then shared his thoughts on the defending TBS Champion, and how the massive WWE machine helps certain talents.
“I don’t understand how Mercedes Moné has gotten worse since she got in AEW. This proves that the WWE machine can really protect people’s weaknesses, and then when you go to a place like AEW… and how many wrestlers have gone over there and actually looked better? This includes Christian Cage and Edge. There’s not many that look up to par or better after they leave, and that’s just a testament that WWE will make you believe, and shove it down your throat that these people are a star, and they’re so much better at the Jedi Mind Tricks than AEW. WWE… and they’re starting to creep into that overbooking territory. The overbooking is something WWE, in recent years, and really like long ago, they were really good at not exposing the weakness of an overbooked match, but now in 2024-2025, you can see people’s weaknesses in WWE start to get exposed because the matches get longer and longer. AEW has had that problem since day one, and here we are,” Stevie Richards said.
Richards continued and revealed his thoughts on the 9 Belts Moné gimmick. The 54-year-old offered a nugget of advice on how to book champions in pro wrestling.
“And this girl… I mean, collecting belts? Dude, if everything’s a championship, nothing’s a championship. Which one was she defending? The TBS one… so why are you bringing the other titles out?,” Stevie Richards said.
Stevie’s co-host mentioned how Mercedes used all of her title belts for the special Forbidden Door entrance, adding that the belt collector gimmick worked for Ultimo Dragon, was OK when done by Kenny Omega, but no one cared when Austin Aries did it. It was then noted how only Mercedes’ AEW and CMLL titles are really known, with some puzzlement over The Owen Hart Cup belt being included.
Richards asked if the belt collector gimmick really did anything big for Ultimo Dragon, pointing to how the Japanese legend was just in his own “wrestling bubble in the wrestling bubble,” and didn’t earn matches with Goldberg or Hulk Hogan. He then recalled Kurt Angle’s run in TNA, and wondered why Mercedes Moné was booked in a Fatal 4 Way at Forbidden Door.
“Did carrying 9 or 10 belts get anybody more over, ever? There’s only one person that I can think of, and I don’t know how many belts he had when… Kurt Angle had like two or three belts in TNA. It was like, who’s going to beat this dude? He was a machine, and you were saying, ‘Yeah, I can see this guy just beating everybody.’ This, though… and this is the thing with Mercedes Moné: why are they booking her in a multi-person match on one of the biggest shows when she can really do a lot better? When she wrestled Toni Storm, that was a really good match on All In: Texas, right? I thought she had a breakthrough match with that, but why would you follow it up with this?,” Stevie Richards said.
Richards then made the case for why there’s only one way to make these sort of matches work: Elimination. Stevie even suggested holding all multi-person matches under Elimination Rules because that allows for finishes, certain surprise pins and submissions, such as the champion losing early on to guarantee a title change.