EPISODE 6 THE TRYOUT

I landed in Birmingham all butterflies and enthusiasm.

I’ve always found, throughout all of my endeavors, that confidence is fleeting and largely circumstantial. However, waking up in this circumstance, I was confident. Everything had led me to this moment, every detour, every blunder, every head-scratching What the fuck was I thinking? incident, all led to this. And there was no way I was leaving without a contract.

I showed up in my most flattering workout gear, tanned up and makeup on best as I could do, which wasn’t great, to be fair, but God loves a trier.

WWE had provided breakfast before the tryout. Everyone on their best behavior, elbows off the table, dabbing their faces politely with napkins, leaving the last piece of cantaloupe, all signs of people looking to impress.

We got to the tryout hall and were introduced to the people who would decide our fate: Canyon Ceman, who was the lead talent scout; the voice of my teen years, good ol’ Jim Ross. There was Norman Smiley, a well-respected former WCW wrestler, and coach at NXT; Robbie Brookside; Gerry Brisco, a former wrestler and vastly underrated on-air stooge; and William Regal, who is nothing short of a wrestling legend and someone I was a huge fan of growing up. As they all stood in front of the ring with unreadable faces—the Mona Lisas of talent scouting—delivering their speeches, intended to be either motivational or sobering, I couldn’t help but smile from ear to ear.

I was going to endure anything and everything.

I would pass out or die before I quit. That was the deal I made with myself.

It might sound silly, well, because it is, but when the drills got tough, I would sing “Lose Yourself” by Eminem to myself. “You better lose yourself in the music, the moment / You own it, you better never let it go,” shuffle, sprawl, sprint. “You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow / This opportunity comes once in a lifetime,” sprint, sprawl, sprint.

No matter how much I was hurting, I could never let it show. A smile was permanently plastered on my face, like I was going for a pleasant stroll through a meadow, even if it felt like my lungs might explode into a thousand pieces.

There were people who gave up when it got too hard or stopped mid-drill. It had been over a decade since my teenage self was yelling at the dropouts of Tough Enough on TV, and now I was witnessing it here, live in person, mind as boggled as it had been years before. When the possibility of achieving your dreams simply lies at the end of a round of burpees, do the fucking burpees.

By the time the physical part of the tryout was over, I knew I had outworked everyone. The coaches seemed to like me and I worked well within the group of thirty other hopefuls, even if I had mentally berated many of them for being little bitches.

Then it was time for my favorite part of wrestling—the promo. The part where you get to talk to the audience and tell them who you are and why they should care.

I put together a promo akin to my old indie character, Rebecca Knox, decorated with rhymes and puns and doused in energy. Rattling through it, I felt I was giving the Gettysburg Address, for the amount of confidence I had in my content.

However, I couldn’t tell if it was the shits or maybe they just wanted to see something else when Regal spoke up, in his very Regal voice, distinct yet soft-spoken.

“Tell us your story.”

Without the armor of my prerehearsed “masterpiece,” I told the class my life story up until this moment. Opening up about my struggles with leaving wrestling and spending years trying to fill the void it left caused my voice to tremble and tears to fall from my eyes. I was on the brink of a whole new world.

Canyon pulled me aside afterwards.

“You did very well on this tryout and we liked you. We do want to offer you a contract, but I gotta be honest, we don’t know what day your stuff is going to land on Vince or Hunter’s desk. They could just be looking for models that day.”

“Yeah, of course. Thank you so much; this has been the best experience of my life.”

The other thing going against me was my age. They were looking for women aged eighteen to twenty-five and men aged eighteen to thirty. I was right at the cutoff point of being an old spinster.

Regardless, there’s moments in life that feel like the whole universe is conspiring to make something happen. This was one of those times.

I walked away with only a slight twinge of doubt.