The topic came up as Kylie was speaking about running into Wes Lee at a WWE tryout.
At IMPACT Wrestling’s 2020 Bound For Glory pay-per-view, Kylie Rae was scheduled to challenge for the Knockouts World Championship. She did not appear at the event and the following month, she stated that she would be stepping away from pro wrestling for the time being.
In early 2022, Kylie dove into her departure from IMPACT and in a new interview with the Going Broadway Podcast, she shared that she’s been able to chat with a number of talents she worked with there and apologized for she how left.
This came up as Kylie was talking about her WWE tryout opportunity and running into North American Champion Wes Lee, formerly known as ‘Dezmond Xavier’.
It’s cool to see people’s journeys, like Dezmond Xavier. Well he obviously wrestles under Wes Lee now so I apologize but I knew him from like AAW and being at IMPACT with him and another thing was I get to — so the whole IMPACT thing was I’ve had the opportunity to see a lot of the people who I worked with there and take time with each of them and apologize… and every single one have just been so nice and understanding about it in a sense of, ‘Why are you even apologizing? You need to take care of yourself first, real life first, your mental health, your health in general. You need to take care of you’ and I’m like… ‘I appreciate you saying that but it’s still, I wish I would have handled it differently.’ It’s like how you said, hindsight is 20/20 but just being able to have those opportunities to talk in person with them and maybe that was the reason why it happened. You never know. Again, I’m a believer in God. I believe he puts things in your path.
As Kylie continued to talk about her past struggles, she mentioned that Brian ‘Road Dogg’ James, WWE’s Senior Vice President of Live Events has been supportive of her journey and what she’s overcome.
For example, Road Dogg, he’s somebody who, especially with the sobriety thing, it’s just like he’s always been extremely supportive… He’s supported my journey and what I’m going through now. So, I don’t know if that helped or what but yeah, it was so wonderful. I don’t know what the future will hold but it was wonderful and I guess the fact that I keep getting contacted to do extra work for them (WWE) is probably a good sign and who knows? Maybe they don’t want to give me too much at once just because they’re aware of — after the last day of the tryout, I don’t think I can say who because I don’t want to throw anybody under the bus but they pulled me aside and they’re like, ‘Hey, do you have time to talk?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah’ so… it was almost like a half-hour conversation of, ‘Hey, where’s your headspace right now?’ Please walk me through how you’re feeling, what’s going on in your life? I wanna get to know you, I wanna see where you’re at.’ So it was a good conversation. They’re obviously aware of some of the stuff I’ve gone through and they made it clear that they take mental health seriously now where they might have a schedule of you have to be here, X, Y and Z dates but if you’re not feeling well today and not just a physical sickness, they’ll say, ‘Hey, if you need a mental health day’ and that was so refreshing to hear because there was a time it wasn’t like that. It was like, no, you gotta power through and you gotta be here.
Kylie spoke in-depth about her WWE tryout and her match on Main Event. POST Wrestling has a write-up of those comments on the site.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit the Going Broadway Podcast with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
