Toni Storm Talks Wanting More Women's Matches At WrestleMania, Training At The Age Of 13
Toni Storm spoke with ESPN on the upcoming Evolution PPV, starting her wrestling career at 13, and WrestleMania involving more women's matches. Here are some of the highlights:
Beginning her wrestling career at 13:
"I was a fan when I was about 10, to begin with. I found a [wrestling] school that let you start training at 12. When I was 13, I found it and I begged my mom for ages to let me go, and she wasn't letting me go and it was expensive to train and everything but then eventually she let me do it. She would pay my fee by selling hot dogs at the shows that they would run. I wrestled in a little shed. I wrestled in front of moms and dads. It was borderline 'backyarding,' but it was still a company. I got started then, and it was ridiculous and a silly age to start, but I'm glad I did it because now I have all of this experience and that helps."
WrestleMania eventually featuring a women's main event:
"Eventually the way I want to see it is it's half men's matches and half women's matches, not just one or two women's matches. It's been a long time coming. I don't think [women's wrestling] has gotten better — women have always been good, we've just never had the opportunity to shine. Now there's more demand than ever because people are like, 'Hang on a second, we should have half of the card here.' Eventually I think it's going to work its way up to that. You only need to look at the indies to realize there's a lot of cards that are just half girls. That's how it should be, because there's no reason why it shouldn't be mixed completely."
WWE Evolution and the camaraderie among women wrestlers:
"October is going to be massive. We've got our first women's pay-per-view [Evolution]. We didn't think that was going to happen five years ago, it was not even a question. But now it's actually happening and I still don't believe it until I've seen it. It's so good, there are so many opportunities for girls now. We've always deserved it but we've all worked hard and pushed forward even when there's been a lot of dark times. There's a lot of competition for spots in the women's division, but there also has to be a lot of camaraderie because everyone wants to see the women's division succeed.
A helluva lot [of camaraderie] among the women. It's very competitive, but you'd think it would be a bit of a nasty atmosphere where they are all trying to get past each other to get to the top, but it's very supportive. I'm around the NXT U.K. girls a lot and we all just take care of each other. It's good because we're all very competitive, of course, but at the same time we've all got to work together to launch this and that's what we've done so far, and it's starting to work. So if we all stick together as a team, we could have an all-women's WrestleMania. We've all gotten to this point — we might as well keep going!"
Storm also discussed traveling from Australia to England to train and working the WWE Mae Young Classic. You can check out the full interview by clicking here.