Zoey Serrano thought she was genuinely about to pass out during a WWE match with Shayna Baszler — and while she was trapped in the Kirifuda Clutch struggling to breathe, the referee kept relaying the same message from Triple H: keep going.
Zoey Serrano (Credits: WWE)
Serrano told the story during an episode of Zoey’s 10,001 Internet Questions, where she and Baszler looked back on their matches together in WWE. The match in question saw Baszler wrestling with a cast on, and the planned finish called for Serrano to tap out to the clutch.
The problem, Serrano explained, was that she was already exhausted before the submission went on — and once it did, breathing became a real struggle. As she lay there, she kept hearing the referee pass along Triple H’s instructions, and her confusion quickly turned to frustration.
What Triple H actually meant by “keep going”
Baszler was quick to clarify two things. First, she insisted she was not legitimately cranking the hold on her opponent. Second, she explained that Triple H’s message was not “lie there and take it” — he wanted Serrano to keep fighting out of the hold, scrambling up, going down, and working back up again while Baszler stayed attached.
That, Serrano agreed, was exactly what made the sequence so draining. Rather than a quick tap-out, she had to keep battling through the hold, again and again, while already running on empty.
The white belt vs. black belt difference in a choke
The conversation then turned to experience. Serrano revealed she had around two years of submission training at the time and was still a white belt — and Baszler said that matters enormously inside a choke. Less experienced grapplers tend to panic and tap quickly, she explained, while black belts can stay calm, ride it out, and wait for the person applying the hold to tire first.
Baszler recalled her own surprise at choking experienced grapplers who simply refused to quit, waiting for her arms to give out before she did. It was a lighthearted moment, but it underlined a serious point: in a business built on making holds look devastating, the line between performance and real discomfort can get very thin, very fast.
Serrano, to her credit, saw the funny side in hindsight — even if, in the moment, she was cursing the referee and wondering what on earth was happening.
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Source: Ringside News — read the full story there.
