Josh Alexander got “goosebumps” when Jordynne Grace made an appearance at the 2024 WWE Royal Rumble pay-per-view event last month.
Speaking to Sports Illustrated, Alexander said, “I watched it live, and the second her music hit, I got goosebumps. When she locked up with Trin[ity] Fatu], who I’ve been lucky enough to build a relationship with over the past year, I literally welled up.”
He continued, “Seeing that moment for my friend Jordynne Grace, someone who tirelessly puts in work, she deserved that fanfare. It’s great for TNA, it’s great for her, and it’s great for our locker room. I thought she had the best performance of anyone in the Royal Rumble, and that is a testament to the talent that she is.”
The Gates of Agony’s Toa Liona trained at Rikishi’s KnokX Pro Wrestling Academy in California as he got his start in the wrestling business, and he recently appeared on the “Talk Is Jericho” podcast to discuss his experience of learning there.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On how he started at the school: “Man, it was awesome. My thought process when I first started going to wrestling, I was like, ‘Alright, who can teach me to be the best wrestler I can?’ I was looking at San Diego and Rikishi’s school is in LA. I was like, ‘Man, no better person to teach me to be a Samoan wrestler than a Samoan Hall of Famer.’”
On the experience: “Training under him, it was three times a week, he really took a lot of time out of training to work with me after class or before class because he saw that I was really invested in it. Me and my whole family man, coming into post-football, I got hurt, I was into power lifting stuff and I know that if I benched 100 pounds, it’s not gonna put a million dollars in my bank account. So I needed to make a lateral move here because I don’t know what to do. My wife suggested wrestling so that’s when I looked it up and once I decided to do that, we just put all of our eggs into this one basket, whether it’s us moving to the Bay Area during the pandemic to live with family so I can still drive to LA for training, or whether it was us driving to LA to fully commit to training and hopefully get an opportunity, those were the things. I was happy he was able to take us in.”
