Ivelisse Velez recently spoke with the Women’s Wrestling Weekly Podcast. You can check out some highlights and audio from the interview below:
On Her WWE Tryout: “It was awesome! It brought me a little back to “Tough Enough” because boy they wanna definitely push you to your limit and it was great experience too in the sense that…. It’s all about teamwork too. Like it is not like just in ring stuff too. I really liked and enjoyed how they focused on wanting to see people have a good attitude as a team players with other people. That was really cool to experience and particularly the group we had was very very elite stacked particular group even with that… the whole competition thing was there for sure but not to the point that where you would feel uncomfortable or anything like that. We were all very supportive of each other throughout the experience.”
On The Difficult Moments That Led Her To Her WWE Tryout: “For quite some time now, I’ve been wanting to cut my Lucha Underground things short for about two in a half years. I’ve been telling them for a while that I’ve been unhappy and I’ve been wanting to cut it short. But throughout that whole thing I broke my ankle which didn’t help matters…. After coming back those two times I tried to give it my all with whatever I had left for Lucha Underground and once that was over, Season 4 was coming to an end and the airing. I went ahead and contacted them in hopes that there was some interest… so then they came about where they changed their mind, once they said they would, and let me go and that’s when the whole fiasco happened and it got so much more complicated…
It still blows my mind, I never in my life thought ever would have imagined that I would be in a situation like that nonetheless the Lucha Underground started out so promising because we were started it straight off so promising with great energy everyone was communicative and trusting and everything and it’s really unfortunate that it just happened that way. Regardless, it’s finally resolved and I jumped on it right away. I feel like to come back home that’s how it feels for me when I stepped in the performance center, hoping I could stay home.”
On Her Relationship With Lucha Underground: “I really enjoyed all of the work that I did with Lucha Underground. It was a very big merge from a completely different world to another completely different world of pro wrestling. Even though it’s entertainment it’s still two completely, utterly different systems… The number one is them trying to have a hold over the talent as if they were a wrestling company because they are not a wrestling company. They are a wrestling niche show. To expect that type of exclusivity from a professional wrestler is just unrealistic, completely unrealistic.
It’s just that was really really the number one problem from the very beginning. And we all did what we could, from each side from the wrestlers and their part to try to fix it. It wasn’t really about money – too much of a dark time in between and the places that they were doing partnerships with like TNA, stuff like that, the politics side weren’t helping me personally and my situation personally was not working for me.
I had no other options, so I was just completely stuck and being in the dark that long and also just having broken my ankle, and me personally, it didn’t help me at all. It all added up… and another thing too that played a part that I wasn’t 100% on the same page of what I wanted out of my work with Lucha underground with the writers, not knocking the work on their work they did for others, personally for my work we weren’t always on the same page, but regardless we did what we could to find a happy medium. More so than anything it was just down to that there was no way to make up for that, like those long dark times without knowing.”
