Naomi challenged Eve Torres for the WWE Divas Championship at TLC 2012.
That sounds perfectly normal.
What is considerably less normal is that Naomi had to qualify for the match earlier that evening by winning something called the “Santa’s Little Helper” No. 1 Contender’s Diva Battle Royal.
Welcome back to 2012.
Watching WWE from this period in 2026 is an exercise in accepting that genuinely talented women occasionally had to navigate concepts that sound like somebody discovered the Christmas aisle at a discount shop and immediately started booking wrestling.
Nine women entered. They wore festive outfits. Eve Torres sat on commentary. The winner received a Divas Championship match later that same night.
And somehow, beneath all that tinsel, WWE accidentally found something interesting.
They found Naomi.
Naomi Had Already Wrestled Once
This matters more than the match itself initially lets on.
The champion tried to keep Kaitlyn from getting another opportunity.
Instead, she created a challenger she knew almost nothing about.
A perfectly functional wrestling story is buried beneath the Christmas hats.
What makes it particularly fascinating from a 2026 perspective is Naomi’s position within WWE at the time. She had finished second on NXT Season 3, but by 2012 her principal main-roster role was as one half of the Funkadactyls alongside Cameron, dancing during Brodus Clay’s entrance.
That context changes how this match feels.
We know what Naomi eventually became.
We know the longevity. We know the championships. We know how distinctive her presentation eventually became. We know that she was capable of being much more than an accessory to somebody else’s entrance.
The people watching TLC in December 2012 didn’t have that benefit.
They had a woman who had just won a festive battle royal on the pre-show and was suddenly wrestling for the Divas Championship.
Naomi was dropped into a title match with almost no preparation, and, more importantly, the audience had almost no preparation for her either.
Then the bell rang.
And Naomi Is Immediately Interesting
The championship match lasts 2 minutes and 58 seconds.
That is obviously absurdly short.
There is no point pretending otherwise just because we’re looking back fondly at someone who became important. Three minutes is barely enough time to establish the central idea of a wrestling match, never mind develop it.
But Naomi uses those three minutes remarkably well.
She immediately attacks Eve with speed, using kicks and an early roll-up before hitting a rope-assisted flip into a sliding dropkick. Then comes the running rear attack that sends Eve from the apron to the floor.
Naomi follows her.
A springboard dropkick sends the champion towards the barricade and gets exactly the reaction it deserves from Brooklyn.
This is where watching in 2026 becomes interesting.
None of these sequences feels particularly alien to women’s wrestling now. We regularly see WWE women’s matches built around athletic transitions, dives, counters, strikes and increasingly complicated movement.
In this environment, however, Naomi looks like somebody has accidentally loaded a wrestler from another generation into WWE 2012.
Not everything is perfect.
It doesn’t need to be.
What matters is that she moves differently.
Naomi has an explosiveness that immediately sets her apart from the Divas division’s presentation. She isn’t simply doing moves quickly. Her offence appears designed around what her body can uniquely do.
And suddenly Eve has a problem.
Eve Torres Understands the Role
When revisiting this match, it’s easy to focus entirely on Naomi because her career trajectory makes her the fascinating historical subject.
That would be unfair to Eve.
Eve Torres is very good here.
More importantly, she understands exactly what the match requires.
Naomi needs movement.
Eve therefore removes movement.
After being surprised by the challenger, Eve slows everything down. Naomi’s open-space athleticism has already caused her problems, so Eve attacks the legs, controls the neck and starts dragging the match towards something considerably less comfortable for her challenger.
It is basic wrestling logic.
Basic wrestling logic is good.
We occasionally spend so much time celebrating increasingly elaborate wrestling that we forget someone eventually has to make it mean something.
Eve does.
She doesn’t suddenly attempt to out-flip Naomi. She doesn’t decide that because Naomi has produced an impressive athletic sequence, she must respond with something even bigger.
She stops her.
Eve’s character is also rather wonderful during this period. Her entire championship run is constructed around opportunism. She won her third Divas Championship after Kaitlyn was attacked before Night of Champions, inserted herself into the match and defeated Layla. Her subsequent programme with Kaitlyn involved escapes, manipulation and the authority her position as Booker T’s executive assistant afforded her.
Naomi being here is partly Eve’s fault, too.
She interfered because she didn’t want Kaitlyn.
Congratulations.
Here is the terrifyingly athletic dancer you apparently weren’t worried about instead.
Three Minutes Is Still Three Minutes
Then, just as the match threatens to become genuinely interesting, it ends.
Naomi breaks free from Eve’s control and climbs the turnbuckle.
She attempts a diving crossbody.
Eve moves.
Naomi crashes.
Heart Breaker.
One.
Two.
Three.
2:58.
This is where my 2026 brain struggles with the Divas era more than anything else.
It isn’t merely that women’s matches were shorter.
It’s that WWE would occasionally show exactly why someone deserved more time, then refuse to give it to them.
Naomi spent the evening winning a nine-woman battle royal, then wrestled again and produced several of the most athletic moments of the women’s portion of the show.
The reward is less than three minutes.
There is a case to be made that the brevity actually helps Naomi slightly. She arrives, explodes, scares the champion and loses because inexperience finally catches her. Nothing hangs around long enough to expose the lack of build.
But imagine another five minutes.
Not twenty.
Not an epic.
Just five.
Give Eve enough time to properly disrupt Naomi’s momentum. Give Naomi a genuine comeback. Give the crowd time to consider that this completely unexpected challenger might actually win the championship.
Instead, the match disappears almost as quickly as it arrives.
Godzilla has taken longer to decide which building to destroy.
Then Eve Takes a Photograph
Of course she does.
After winning, Eve orders the ringside photographer to photograph her posing over Naomi’s fallen body with the Divas Championship.
This is magnificent heel nonsense.
I mean that sincerely.
Eve understands that winning isn’t quite sufficient. She has to make the victory unpleasant.
There is something wonderfully petty about stopping after a three-minute championship defence and deciding the appropriate next step is an impromptu photoshoot beside the person you’ve just beaten.
It also makes what happened next even more interesting.
TLC 2012 turned out to be Eve’s final pay-per-view championship defence. She left WWE the following month, after Kaitlyn finally defeated her for the Divas Championship on Raw’s 20th anniversary episode.
Nobody in Brooklyn necessarily knew they were approaching the end of Eve’s run.
Watching now, we know how close that ending was.
That gives this tiny match far more historical weight than WWE seemed interested in giving it then.
The Most Interesting Thing Is What WWE Nearly Missed
Eve was the established champion, and Naomi was the surprise opponent from a pre-show battle royal.
The result makes sense.
Everything around it is stranger.
Naomi had spent much of the year dancing alongside Brodus Clay. Eve even mocked that role on commentary, dismissing Naomi as someone she thought was “just a dancer”. Naomi’s response after winning the battle royal was equally revealing: she said she had been waiting for the opportunity to show what she could actually do in the ring.
Then WWE gave her 178 seconds.
And she showed them anyway.
That is what survives when you watch this in 2026.
Not the butterfly championship.
Not the Christmas costumes.
Not even Eve’s wonderfully obnoxious photoshoot.
It’s Naomi bouncing around the ropes and suddenly making the division feel faster.
Some wrestlers need elaborate stories before an audience understands them. Others you watch for thirty seconds and immediately understand why somebody should probably be paying attention.
Naomi belonged to the latter category.
The setup belongs completely to 2012: nine women in festive costumes competing in a “Santa’s Little Helper” battle royal so one of them can wrestle again later that night.
The performance points somewhere else.
Watching it fourteen years later, the frustrating question isn’t whether Naomi was ready to become Divas Champion that night.
She probably wasn’t.
It’s why WWE had somebody capable of wrestling like this standing beside Brodus Clay for so long before allowing us to find out.
And given what Naomi would eventually become, TLC 2012 leaves another question hanging.
What if WWE had noticed a little sooner?
