Andrew Thompson recently interviewed Ayesha Raymond, an independent wrestling star who appeared in the 2017 WWE Mae Young Classic. Credit to him and POST Wrestling. Here are the highlights:
Working with Kyoko Kimura in STARDOM/brief interactions with Hana Kimura:
“When I went out to STARDOM and I met Kimura-san, Hana was very young so I only had very few interactions with her and again, my condolences to the family and friends. But, my experiences with [Kyoko] Kimura, she definitely taught me how to be more violent in the most safest way.
But she opened more doors for me in terms of the Japanese entertainment and how they present things and how they are able to make things exciting, safe and kind of chaotic at the same time, which is why when I came back, most people were afraid.”
What went wrong with the World of Sport reboot in 2018, says “Inmates were running the asylum”:
“Mate, I was in Japan,” she laughed. “We did the tapings, and I went to Japan. Most of the social media stuff I was doing, I was doing from my apartment in Japan. When I came back, I got told off. I got told about the tour that was supposed to be happening. Some things led to another and there was no Amazon on tour.
But as far as I’m concerned, it was something that happened, I’m grateful for the opportunity but… I don’t know. It’s COVID, I’ll say it — they shouldn’t have let the inmates run the asylum and it would’ve been fine. That’s all I’m saying.”
Working the 2017 WWE Mae Young Classic:
“Like I said at the beginning, the whole story of Amazon is the story of a kid accomplishing their dream. I gave the story in the Mae Young Classic about my brother. My brother is blind. We did grow up watching wrestling. But that was me. I was a baby born at 20 weeks, I was two pounds, they gave me all the food, I got bigger and I wasn’t supposed to live.
Everything that has ever happened to me in my life and everything that I’ve gone through was collectively justified in that one moment, because it’s what I watched when I was little, it’s what I stayed up on Friday nights to watch, what I woke up on Saturday mornings to watch. These people that I’m working around who have given me advice, people that I’ve idolized since I was little. So, the entire experience alone was breathtaking. I got to basically stand in an arena that I had been making on SmackDown vs. RAW for God knows how long, and the character that I had been making, it was in the ring for real.”
Here is the video of the full interview with Ayesha Raymond:
