Tessa Blanchard Comments On Being Told She Is Only Successful Because Of Her Dad

Tessa Blanchard is set to square off with Gail Kim tonight at Impact’s Rebellion pay-per-view. However, despite her immense talent, Tessa is often slated by fans who say she is only in the position she is in because her father, Tully Blanchard, who was part of the Four Horsemen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCvJSqXhQLU

Tessa sat down with Chris Jericho for his Talk is Jericho podcast and said it is not only wrestling fans that get on her back for her last name, but even fellow performers too:

“I broke my shoulder, or my collarbone, I shouldn’t say my shoulder, and I had surgery, six screws and a plate in here. I was wrestling a girl at Lucha Underground and the girl that did this to me told me, ‘Tessa, I didn’t have a last name in this business. I had to work for everything that I had.’ And that’s what she told me. Things like that would happen quite often where a girl in Japan told me, ‘Tessa, you’re only here because of your dad’. And that would happen to me left and right, left and right and one thing that I pride myself on is my mental strength”.

She did say that these comments don’t affect her, and she is confident that she is one of the best female performers in the world. She also noted that she didn’t take hand-outs from her father and wanted to pay her dues like everyone else:

“I think that a lot of females can’t hold a candle to me when it comes to mental strength because that kind of s*** doesn’t even go in one ear to go out the other. And I believe that if you have that mental strength, you can take any situation and change it into the way that you think about it and make it a positive thing, and I had to find that because those are the kind of things that would really eat you up and I feel like having a name sometimes is a little bit harder because I never wanted to disappoint my grandpa or my dad or my step-dad. I wanna carry on their legacy and do them proud but also create my own at the same time and that’s really a difficult thing, because there’s plenty of generational wrestlers who people say that about, ‘You’re only where you are because of this or because of this, not because of hard work‘ and I was never gonna let that be the case. I wanted to go and I wanted to drive the miles for no pay, I wanted to set up the rings, I wanted to set up the chairs, I wanted to go to training six-seven days a week for hours upon hours and blow myself up to where I can only work on instinct. I wanted to sleep in my car. I wanted to do all of that.”

She concluded her comments by saying that while her last name might have helped her initially get noticed, she had to rely on her ability in the ring when it came to impressing promoters and bookers:

“No matter what it is, I wanna be great. I wanna be the best at it. My last name, I’ve always said, it might get my foot in the door, it might get me in front of the right people, it might get an opportunity, but at the end of the day when I get in the ring it doesn’t do jack s*** for me. It doesn’t take the bumps, it doesn’t drive the miles, it doesn’t do any of that.”

This comes after Tessa commented on why she isn’t currently signed with WWE, and also denied the rumours that she was kicked out of the WWE Performance Center after an incident with ex-boyfriend Ricochet.

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• tully blanchard
• chris jericho
• tessa blanchard
• IMPACT

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