During a recent appearance on the “Lightweights” podcast, Cathy Kelley stated that she had considered changing her name when she joined WWE but was delighted to find out that she didn’t have to.
Kelley was with WWE from 2016 to 2020, then returned in 2022.
She said, “I was actually really bummed when I got to WWE. I was fully prepared to change my name and they were like, ‘No, we love it.’ ‘My legal name, Cathy Kelley?’ ‘Yeah, you’re not changing it.’ I had a list of names. I was going to be Cathy Cole, I was going to be Michael Cole’s niece or something, in my mind. They shot it down and were like, ‘No, you get to keep your name,’ which in retrospect is actually pretty cool.”
During a recent appearance on the “Trading Secrets” podcast, Sonya Deville shared her experience on WWE Tough Enough, where she was a contestant in the sixth season.
Deville was eventually eliminated, as Josh Bredl and Sara Lee won the competition.
Deville said, “You get paid while you are on the show weekly. I don’t remember exactly what it was; I want to say $1,000 a week or something while you are there. Once you are gone, you’re gone. I flew home the day I got eliminated, and I went back to training wrestling the next day. I called WWE and asked, ‘Where can I train in professional wrestling in LA?’ They gave me a school. I went to the school, and that’s where I trained every single day while blowing up WWE’s email, ‘Hire me. Hire me.’ They told me as soon as I got eliminated that they were going to hire me, but I didn’t believe them. I was like, ‘I’m going to fly back home, I’m gonna go back to bartending and reality, and the dream is going to be over. The thing that I just fell in love with is going to be over.’ I was adamant about staying on top of learning how to wrestle and staying on top of them to hire me. Sure enough, three months later, I got the call.”
John Cena has only had matches with Samoa Joe four times during his WWE career. Two of those were singles matches that never aired on TV.
The latest ‘WWE Vault’ video features one of those matches at a house show in Jonesboro, Arkansas, on August 26, 2017. You can watch the clip below:
