While speaking to former ring announcer Lillian Garcia on the Chasing Glory podcast, SmackDown star Zelina Vega opened up about being rejected by WWE at tryouts before eventually signing.
During the interview, Zelina Vega spoke about being rejected by WWE pretty much every single year from 2010 to 2017, when she eventually signed her first WWE contract in June of that year:
“It was hard in the moment. I was 18 or 19 when I had my first tryout,” she replied. “I got turned down every year since 2010, except for 2011 – 2012, but every year after that. And then, like, around 2017, I said, ‘ok, I’m out.’ They had me as a Rosebud for, like, six months. So I was driving from New York to, like, everywhere, just to prove to them how much this meant to me.
“It’s funny. I feel like a lot of people, who are just coming up now, they have no idea what that process is [like]. They have no idea what, you know, really paying your dues to get to that point means. You know, when you’re sacrificing when you don’t have money, when you don’t have anything… I did what I had to do ’cause I knew, like, something in me just knew, that this is what I was meant to do.”
Vega also opened up about being a big WWE fan as a child, noting that she hated Trish Stratus because she was such a big fan of Lita, both of whom have since been inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame:
Well, when I was a kid, I watched WWE, and you always saw, like what really captivated me, besides the wrestling, was the performance. It was [their segments] backstage and, you know, I hated Trish because how dare she hit Lita like that? That what really drew me in.
“I remember my mom saying something like, ‘Well, they’re actors, too. They have to do both.’ I was like, well since I’m very young and I can’t start wrestling yet, maybe I’ll just start acting and see how [it goes]. I started doing it in high school and then college.”
Lillian Garcia revealed this week that the producers of the fantastic “Last Dance” documentary on Netflix are working on a series for WWE Hall of Famer Stone Cold Steve Austin. You can read more about that by clicking here.
What are your thoughts on the above story? Let us know in the comments on Twitter or Facebook.
Thanks to WrestlingInc for the transcription.
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