If any of the quotes from the following podcasts or video interviews are used, please credit those sources, and provide an H/T and link back to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
** In early August, Jacob Henry, son of WWE Hall of Famer Mark Henry, announced that he signed an N.I.L. deal with WWE. Jacob appeared on Busted Open and shared that he’d been in contact with WWE for quite some time. He’s focused on wrestling for The University of Oklahoma, but he’ll be training for pro wrestling as well.
For me, my dad called me… I’ve been talking to the WWE for a while now. This entire summer, we’ve just kind of been organizing time to sit down and have a conversation about signing a possible deal, an N.I.L. or whatever you like to call it and my dad called me and he said, ‘Hey, I’m doing the Remix Rumble. It’s in Cleveland.’ He’s like, ‘I want you to come out, show up, have a good time.’ That’s why my voice is gone. It’s a little busted right now but, you know, we’re doing good and I came to the show and I got on stage and I was talking to the people and I felt like I had to say something and I was like, you know what? There’s not a better time, but then to announce it right now in front of all these people, all these fans and it meant the world to me and I didn’t think it was gonna blow up the way it did. It blew up and now, everywhere I go, people are recognizing me and I get to talk to people. I’ve had wrestlers come up to me and talk to me and man, I can’t wait to chop it up with them in a few years. But, it means a lot. A lot of work that I’ve put in. Let me clarify people, because some people are confused. I’m not leaving The University of Oklahoma. I’m not dropping out of college. I am going to wrestle this season. We don’t know what my sports career is gonna head and feel like. I might play football and wrestle, I might play football, I might wrestle. I know for sure though, my main focus right now is wrestling at The University of Oklahoma and giving it everything I’ve got there. But, I’m gonna still be training professional wrestling-wise. Not gonna go into full details about it, but I just want people to know that, hey, I’m not dropping out of college if you’re freaking out about that. My mom, she was the first person.
** Guest appearing on AEW Unrestricted was current AEW Vice President of Content Development, Jennifer Pepperman. She reflected on her time with WWE during the COVID-19 pandemic and dove into Bayley turning heel on Mercedes Moné. Pepperman shared the small visual details that led up to that moment. She spoke about telling the story visually by having Mercedes always holding Bayley’s title and staring at it. Pepperman said a lot of people thought Mercedes would be the one to turn heel.
When you do have the invisible camera, it allows you to do sort of very subtle things in the camera and really help you tell story in a very different way. One kind of little tiny thing that we — I don’t know if people noticed but we were leading up to Bayley turning on Sasha (Banks) and everyone thought it was gonna be Sasha turning on Bayley and any time we did a backstage pre-tape, and this was before Mercedes (Moné) had won a title and stuff, I always would have her holding Bayley’s title. Like, holding it and looking at it and then, maybe a little bit too long in giving it to her. You could do something like start tight on a title, see someone’s hands, pick it up, come to their face and then widen out, Bayley’s warming up and oh, here’s your title. Just a little sort of nuance, things like that.
** Now-free agent Bobby Steveson (Damon Kemp) was invited onto Monte & The Pharaoh. He detailed how he got started with WWE and shared that when the company was not hiring during the pandemic, Paul Heyman was his point of contact and said Heyman was very helpful to him and his brother Gable Steveson. Bobby started working at a prison in Minnesota and seven months into that job, a Zoom call was set up for himself, Gable and Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque. Bobby was on break when the meeting was taking place. He opted to be late on his return from break to stay on the call. He received a strike for not returning when initially asked. Bobby stated that he was willing to be fired for that call.
Coming out of school in 2020, it was COVID year. So, I got a funny story for you guys. So it was COVID year and so, NXT wasn’t hiring. The guy, my point of contact was Paul Heyman. Great guy. He did everything for us. Great dude, and so, they weren’t hiring at the time so he was like my point of contact and always helping me out, helping my brother out. I owe him everything for the opportunity, and so 2020, I graduated and NXT, they weren’t hiring because COVID shut the place down and I think that’s what (led to) a lot of releases or something like that. So, I was like, alright, I got a Criminal Justice degree. I wanted to do Secret Service but in order to do Secret Service, I needed to have two full years of an actual job… And so I went on to work in a prison so I was working in the… Stillwater. Stillwater prison, it’s a level four prison. I was working up there for seven months and as I was working there, NXT was starting to open up a lot more and starting to hire people and stuff like that. So it’s funny, a funny story with Triple H, me and my brother, we were on a Zoom call and we were just talking about the hiring process and he was just talking about NXT and stuff like that. Introducing himself more on a personal level. Great guy, owe him everything, and it was funny because I worked a double shift that day and during that break is when he scheduled the Zoom call with me and my brother and I was like, ‘Aw crap. This is my break. I can only be out here for so long.’ But I was like, ‘It’s also Triple H.’ I gotta pick one. Triple H or hurry up and get back in for my shift. So I was in a parking lot on my break in-between shifts because keep in mind, in the prison, they need five guards in each cubicle — whatever the hell it was called — for them to do rounds and check on inmates and stuff like that so they couldn’t really start working until I was in there because it’s like a safety thing or whatever. So I’m in the parking lot, I’m on a Zoom call with Triple H… I got a 15-minute break and of course, something goes wrong with the Zoom call so it pushes my time. It’s like 20 minutes late already so I’m gonna be 20 minutes late to go back inside. Now I’m like, screw it. I’m staying on this phone with Triple H and so the Zoom call finally happens, we start talking and stuff like that and I’m getting called on my radio, ‘Officer Steveson, you need to report back to the unit.’ So, I was sitting there. I turned it down a little bit and I was like, alright, turn that down a little bit. Start talking to Triple H. He’s just talking about the business and talking about everything he does and stuff like that… I get another one, ‘Officer Steveson, you need to report back to your unit.’ I was like, no, screw that. I’m not going, not going and then, it was funny because all of a sudden, they blew up on me on my walkie talkie I had. ‘Officer Steveson! You need to report back to your unit now!’ And then I was like, ‘Dammit!’ I told Triple H, ‘I’m like, ‘Hey man, I’m so sorry. I gotta go. I’m kind of on the clock right now.’ I pushed my break back literally — I was only supposed to be out there like 15 minutes and I swear I was out there for like 40 and I definitely got a strike, I definitely got a strike from the warden of the prison. That was strike one, strike one. I was like, I am not missing this call.
This was the call. I was like, ‘I’m not missing this. I’ll get fired on the spot to stay on the phone with Triple H.’ But, it worked out. It worked out.
** Joining Chris Van Vliet for a recording of his Insight podcast was WWE Hall of Famer Beth Phoenix. She spoke about her husband Adam Copeland’s cage dive at AEW Double or Nothing that resulted in him fracturing his tibia. Phoenix knew something was off by the way Copeland landed.
Yes, I did (watch the match when Adam Copeland got injured at AEW Double or Nothing). I barely talked to Adam that day and I assumed, you know, any sort of gimmick match like that, there’s a lot of inner workings going on and so I didn’t assume I’d talk to him with any length of detail before the match. I had my family with us and my family’s like, ‘Oh! We want to watch Adam’s match’ and um, this might not be the one to show the kids because I knew there was a level of violence and barbed wire and all those things. I just didn’t want to traumatize them any more than we do with watching wrestling. But, there was a brief opportunity. I think it aired like 11:30 at night or whatever and I had it on my little cell phone and I was watching it while the kids were asleep, like kind of in bed quietly and when he began climbing up to the top of the cage which I was unaware was going to happen, kind of had this pit in my stomach and dread which I do with all high-risk things. I’m his wife. Wife first, wrestler second. So, everything was set up to go well. I could see everybody was in their place and it was just one of those things. Those unpredictable — sometimes things happen in wrestling and no matter how well-trained we are, how well we try to minimize risk and minimize injury, crap happens. So when he landed, I was pretty sure something was up just from the way he landed. I was like, I don’t think that’s kind of how he wanted it to go, and then the rest of the match, I could see he was a little heavy-footed on that left foot so I was like, uh, something’s up. We always text after the match and he texted me and said, ‘I think I tweaked my ankle’ and I was like, ‘Okay’ and I just kind of was like, ‘We’ll see what happens’ and then, you know, he had to go to the hospital to get looked at so I got more information and then we were wrapping our minds around, okay, it’s tough news to get that MRI or that X-ray back and show, okay, I’m injured. I’m not just hurt and I can’t work through it, I’m injured. So, like I said, it was a bit life-changing in that way, especially having an injury this late in the game of his career. What does that recovery look like? It’s entirely different. We’re finding this out, all brand new, one step at a time. Because we’ve never wrestled at these ages before so when things come up, this is a learning curve. So yeah, I had a lot of mixed emotion watching that live. It was a tough thing to see.
On WWE TV in 2022 and 2023, Phoenix and Copeland had the opportunity to work together. At the ’22 Extreme Rules P.L.E., Phoenix was involved in Finn Bálor and Copeland’s I Quit match and she took a con-chair-to from Rhea Ripley.
She did (Rhea Ripley gave me a con-chair-to), and again, they had never done that to a woman before. We were like, ‘Are they gonna let us do this?’ It’s a violent, violent thing to see and it’s a violent thing to see a woman doing it to another woman so, there was just so much Shakespeare in that, in the ending of that match that it was just beautifully orchestrated and everybody played their role perfectly. But there was, like, something, there’s a couple of funny hitches. I was so nervous and I’m out of practice and they’re all on their game because they get so many reps and they’re just doing wonderfully and then, my job was, of course, involving handcuffs, which anytime you have a prop like that, handcuffs can go wrong in so many ways. They don’t latch or they break or the key goes missing. So, getting the key from Rhea was a portion of this finish and then I had to unchain Adam (Copeland) from the handcuffs because he was handcuffed to the ropes. Well of course I’m so nervous, I grabbed the handcuffs and I’m trying to open the wrong handcuff, the one that’s on the rope and he’s just like, ‘What are you doing?’ He’s like, ‘Grab the other handcuff on my wrist. Free me, free me, free me’ and I’m like, ‘Oh yeah! I’m so sorry!’ So, it was chaos but in the end, it was just so much fun and I remember coming to the back and we all just kind of were like reveling in the crowd reactions. The story we told is what we wanted to tell like that. That played out as beautifully and as perfectly as it could and it was really fun. It was great bad guy work, great good guy work.
Elsewhere in the conversation, Phoenix was asked about being part of the 2020 women’s Royal Rumble match. She suffered a cut on the back of her head and began to bleed after hitting her head on an L.E.D. post. Phoenix did not realize she was bleeding until Charlotte Flair pointed it out to her. She thought she was going to be pulled from the match. Initially, Phoenix was not sure if she was going to do the match because it was the night of Adam Copeland’s in-ring return.
So, when I had retired from wrestling, the ring posts didn’t have those big digital L.E.D. wraps on them, and they were a smaller post and so I’d never been in the new rings with all the cool technology and all the upgrades and this was really early after I came in (the 2020 women’s Royal Rumble match). I had a little interaction with everybody and then we kind of settled in and I was working with Bianca (Belair) a little bit and I was sitting on the top turnbuckle and Bianca and I were going back-and-forth or whatever and then she gave me a punch to the face and I whipped my head back like that and the back of my head hit the L.E.D. post, which was a little bit wider than what I was used to. I feel like I just — from not getting in the new ring and being rusty. I went, ‘Whoa!’ Hit my head right on the edge of that and I thought, oh, that hurt and Bianca, to her credit, was like, ‘Are you okay? Are you okay?’ I’m like, ‘I’m fine.’ Then, I’m working with somebody else in the Rumble, just doing my thing and I looked down to pick somebody up and I was like — it was Charlotte (Flair) actually. I was like, ‘Charlotte! You’re bleeding,’ and she was just like, ‘No, it’s you dude’ and I’m like, ‘What!?’ Because it was all in the back and I didn’t see it and then I looked down and I saw the blood dripping and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I think I’m bleeding.’ I don’t even know from where and then I touched the back of my head and I was like, ‘Oh no,’ and so, I was in the Rumble a good, long while and a part of the whole story. So, I was talking to the doctors there and like, ‘Are you okay? Are you dizzy or anything?’ I’m like, ‘Nope. I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine.’ I was like, ‘Please, can I stay?’ I was afraid they were going to pull me because of the injury. But let me stay and so yeah, so I just stuck it out and it made for this badass warrior-looking performance that was just really me misjudging the ring post. But it turned out great and luckily, it was just a few staples in the back of the head.
And everybody was so worried and here’s the crazy part: So, again, I was not even sure I should do the Royal Rumble because it was Adam’s return. I was there for his support, not to have my own performance and then here I get my head split open and he’s watching from the back about to have his return after nine years and then he’s worried about me and I’m like, ‘I’m sorry. I just didn’t want to add stress to the day. I’m so sorry.’ But that’s just the risks we take every time we get in the ring. You can’t predict things to go smoothly. Fortunately, our children weren’t there because I feel like that would have been… and our littlest was like two or three. I would not want her to see that.
Looking back on the earlier portions of Phoenix’s career, she touched on the formation of her pairing with Santino Marella. When Phoenix pitched the idea to Vince McMahon, she had not ran the idea by Marella and was just hoping he’d be fine with it if it were approved.
Okay, so, I had kind of had my run as The Glamazon. Big dragon to be slayed and then the dragon was slayed, I was beaten and after the dragon gets beat the first time, you got to reinvent a little bit. I found myself in catering a lot and I found myself not really being used on television. I was like, oh my God, they’re moving on from me, I’m done. My character’s done. What now? And so my thought was like, okay, what have I not done? I was like, I could be a valet or a manager but that kind of doesn’t make sense for this, like, big, tough character I’ve created and Santino (Marella) was just on the cusp of finding some comedic beats. He was no longer the Boris Alexiev tough guy. He was kind of doing the unibrow and finding some comedic beats. I had seen the Eddie Murphy movie, Norbit. It’s vintage. But, the whole premise is this big, mean girlfriend and this kind of wimpy, almost abused boyfriend, and so I wrote up a one-page pitch and I walked into Vince’s office and I said, ‘Vince, I have this idea.’ I didn’t even tell Santino. So I was just kind of hoping and praying that he’d be okay with it…
** Prior to SANADA and Zack Sabre Jr.’s match from night 15 of the 2024 NJPW G1 Climax, SANADA was interviewed by Daily Niigata and spoke highly of Sabre Jr. He stated that the match they had against one another in the 2018 New Japan Cup made him value the fundamentals of wrestling again.
Zack Sabre Jr. is a wrestler from the U.K. who values the traditional fundamentals. This match (New Japan Cup 2018) made me value the basics again, and it was also the moment when the foundation of SANADA as a professional wrestler was born. That was our first match, and I didn’t throw my opponent in any way that people often imagine. We hardly touched the ring ropes… and I think it was a one-of-a-kind match.
** While speaking to NJPW1972.com, Bad Luck Fale told the outlet about some of his goals and aspirations for the NJPW TAMASHII brand. He hopes to do a full tour in addition to introducing championships and tournaments for junior heavyweights.
While we’re beginning to have events more regularly and now with the Oceania Cup around the corner, our ultimate goal is to host a full tour dedicated to a tournament similar to those in Japan. By showcasing each wrestler’s skills and abilities at events like the Oceania Cup, I’m confident that we’ll achieve that milestone.
Championships and tournaments for junior heavyweights and other categories are in our plans. The future is bright for TAMASHII.
** STARDOM 5STAR Grand Prix Results (8/15/24) from Korakuen Hall in Tokyo, Japan
– Pre-Show: Three-Way Tag Team Match: God’s Eye (Hina & Lady C) def. Cosmic Angels (Aya Sakura & Sayaka Kurara) and STARS (Hazuki & Momo Kohgo)
– 5STAR Grand Prix Block D: AZM (6) def. Tam Nakano (0)
– 5STAR Grand Prix Block B: Thekla (2) def. Ranna Yagami (2)
– 5STAR Grand Prix Block A: Koguma (2) def. Miyu Amasaki (2)
– 5STAR Grand Prix Block D: Tomoka Inaba (6) def. Saya Iida (2)
– H.A.T.E. (Natsuko Tora, Rina & Saya Kamitani) def. Waka Tsukiyama, Xena & Mei Seira
– 5STAR Grand Prix Block C: Natsupoi (4) def. Ruaka (1)
– 5STAR Grand Prix Block B: Saki Kashima (2) def. Hanan (3)
– 5STAR Grand Prix Block C: Manami (5) def. Yuna Mizumori (0)
– 5STAR Grand Prix Block A: Syuri (4) def. Anna Jay (2)
– 5STAR Grand Prix Block C: Maika (6) def. Konami (4)
– 5STAR Grand Prix Block B: Risa Sera (2) def. Suzu Suzuki (3)
– 5STAR Grand Prix Block A: Saori Anou (3) vs. Starlight Kid (3) – Time Limit Draw (15:00)
– 5STAR Grand Prix Block D: Mayu Iwatani (6) def. Momo Watanabe (0)
** Pro Wrestling NOAH announced that Daiki Odashima will be making his in-ring debut for the promotion on September 14th at Korakuen Hall. Odashima has been training since late 2023. He earned his spot in NOAH by passing an audition that aired live on former GHC Heavyweight Champion Kenoh’s YouTube channel.
** Guest appearing at Jazwares’ AEW San Diego Comic-Con panel were Mercedes Moné and Brody King.
** There are media appearances from Hiroshi Tanahashi in Fruits Smile Magazine and Da Vinci magazine.
** Shingo Takagi is featured in Wine Kingdom magazine.
** Johnny Gargano has been making the media rounds and he spoke to Post and Courier.
** WWE World Heavyweight Champion GUNTHER was interviewed by Jim Varsallone.
** Adrian Hernandez posted his interview with Omos.
If any of the quotes from the following podcasts or video interviews are used, please credit those sources, and provide an H/T and link back to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
