Taylor Wilde went from being out of a job to being the face of women’s wrestling in a year’s time. Not bad for a hockey gal from Canada.
“Completely surreal. It really was the pinnacle of everything I’ve done up to this point,” said Wilde of her three-month reign as the TNA Women’s Champion last year.
Wilde, who will be appearing at the TNA house show at the John Paul Jones Arena in Charlottesville Friday, Feb. 6, had fallen on hard times after what should have been her big break with WWE fizzled out when she was released from her contract in 2007. She had actually given up wrestling to go back to college when TNA called her in early last year for a dark match before a “TNA Impact” taping last April. By July, she was in the ring on TV defeating Awesome Kong for the women’s title.
“It was a dream come true, it really was,” said Wilde, who made her professional debut in 2003. “And to be able to have my family and my friends watch me on TV to attain such an achievement, it really was, it was things coming full circle.”
Her tag partner comes from a different side of the mat game. “I was always a fan. I had no idea that people went to wrestling school. I thought people just went on TV and started fighting,” said Roxxi, who trained under the famed Walter “Killer” Kowalski before making her in-ring debut in 2001. Wilde has the hockey background, having played on teams growing up through high school, but Roxxi is a “self-described hackeysack kid that partied all the time.”
Roxxi ended up in TNA in 2007 after TNA star Abyss saw her on an independent show in upstate New York and recommended her to the promotion. She feels right at home in TNA, which doesn’t treat its women’s division as the meat market that seems to exist up in the WWE.
“It’s great to have someplace that stands behind you so much and supports, like, our entire division,” Roxxi said. “All the girls that are here, they’re all really been training for a lot of years and on the independents and doing everything. So it’s not like we’re just in there with girls that just showed up at the show that day, you know?”
“All the girls work really hard to bring a different element to the wrestling world, to what’s been portrayed in the media the past couple of years,” Wilde said. “We’re women of different backgrounds, different ethnicities, different shapes, different sizes.
“To have the opportunity with this company, it was an amazing opportunity, but at the same time it just showed all the diversity in the female wrestlers, and just showed another angle, that someone who’s five-one-and-a-half, has been wrestling five years, can still achieve her dreams,” Wilde said.
Wilde and Roxxi were once in-ring rivals, but even before they were tag-team partners they were good friends.
“We are,” Wilde said. “We’re a little scary. We …
” … finish each other’s sentences and stuff,” Roxxi said.
“We say we’re half-brains, and we only function fully when we’re together,” Wilde said.
“I’m blessed to have her as a partner, both in life and in the ring. She’s a real force to be reckoned with, and I’m just glad she’s on my side,” Wilde said.
You can win a pair of tickets to the show to see Wilde and tag-team partner Roxxi take on The Beautiful People by clicking above.
– Story by Chris Graham
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