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Beth Phoenix On A Possible Return, Adam Copeland, Santino Marella, Taking An RKO, Hall Of Fame
Beth Phoenix (@TheBethPhoenix) is a professional wrestler and WWE Hall of Famer. She sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Asheville, NC to discuss how winning a coloring contest ignited her passion for WWE, the inspiration behind The Glamazon character, breaking her jaw in her first singles match, entering the Men's Royal Rumble and eliminating The Great Khali, getting hit with an RKO by Randy Orton and a con-chair-to by Rhea Ripley, Adam Copeland's recent cage dive at AEW Double or Nothing, not currently being signed to WWE, if there could be one more match and more!
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“So my secret weapon is I have gotten heavily into hot yoga. I love yoga for the mental aspect, the emotional aspect, it’s been just this wonderful journey for me. Also, it’s very physical, it requires so much strength. Initially, when I walked in there, I was concerned. I like being fit and strong and I was like, Is this gonna help me maintain? So yoga really, really opened a door up with a new style of fitness and I like where it’s been taking my physique. The craziest thing with yoga is there’s so much planking, tons and tons and tons of planking, which even with a yoga mat can get tough on your elbows. So with Adam and Jay creating Pure Plank and starting this new brand, this is something that I’ve leaned on quite a bit, and I use in my yoga practice too here at home, it’s a way to make things more challenging and also really correct your form, which was what I struggled with a lot. I like to call it the wrestler’s back, which I’m sure a lot of us in the business understand what that means, just from years of abuse and taking bumps, takes a toll. So it’s really helped me with my posture and being able to build my core strength, which just, even in daily life and mobility as we get older, it’s a huge, huge thing. So I love Pure Plank, it’s part of my routine and it’s really helped me a lot with my yoga routine, too.”
“I barely talked to Adam that day and I assumed, you know, any sort of gimmick match like that there’s a lot of inner workings going on. So I didn’t assume I would talk to him with any length of detail before the match. We happened to have my family with us and my family was like, Oh, we want to watch Adam’s match. This might not be the one to show the kids because I knew there was a level of violence and barbed wire and all those things. I just didn’t want to traumatise them any more than we do with watching wrestling. But there was a brief opportunity. I think it aired at 11:30 at night or whatever, I had it on my little cell phone and I was watching it while the kids were asleep kind of in bed quietly. When he began climbing up to the top of the cage, which I wasn’t aware was going to happen, I had kind of pit in my stomach and dread which I do with all high-risk things. I’m his wife, wife first wrestler second. So everything was set up to go well, I could see everybody was in their place and it was just one of those things, unpredictable. Sometimes things happen in wrestling and no matter how well-trained we are, how well we try to minimize risk and minimize injury, crap happens. So when he landed, I was pretty sure something was up just from the way he landed. I was like, I don’t think that’s kind of how he wanted it to go. Then the rest of the match I could see he was a little heavy-footed on that left foot so I was like, oh, something’s up. We always text after the match and he texted me and said, I think I tweaked my ankle and I was like, okay, and I just kind of was like, we’ll see what happens. He had to go to the hospital to get looked at so I got more information. Then we were wrapping our minds around, okay, it’s tough news to get that MRI or that X-ray back and show, okay, I’m injured. I’m not just hurt and I can’t work through it, I’m injured. So like I said, it was a bit life-changing in that way, especially having an injury this late in the game in his career. What does that recovery look like? It’s entirely different. We’re finding this out, all brand new one step at a time. Because we’ve never wrestled at these ages before. So when things come up, this is a learning curve. So yeah, I had a lot of mixed emotions watching that live. It was a tough thing to see.”
“There’s only two things in life I ever wanted to be, and that was a pro wrestler and a mom. At this age, I’m 43 years old, I’ve been able to do both. I feel like with my whole heart and soul. When I was full-time wrestling, that was my life. That was everything to me, and nothing else mattered but my success in that and checking all my boxes. Then when I had my children, nothing mattered more to me than being a good mom and that meant putting wrestling on the back burner at times. I went back for a long run as a commentator for a couple years. I came back for a couple runs here and there with WWE and it was so fulfilling and so awesome, but it put a strain, especially when Adam started wrestling full-time, it put quite a strain on our kids. That was where I was like I gotta shuffle the deck here a little bit and reprioritize where I’m spending my time. Because the kids right now need me, they’re at a real age that’s very demanding. So I am so happy in life after wrestling. Although you know, I’ve heard we’re a little bit like Hotel California you can check out but you can never leave, so once a wrestler always a wrestler. I love my career. I love my presence and the brand and my representation in wrestling, I loved it. I love everything about it, I’m still a fan. I still watch it as a fan. And I still have heated conversations with Adam about our opinions on stories and this and that, which is it’s a blessing and a curse to be married to a wrestler.”
“Always. That never leaves. I’ll be transparent about that. That at this age has been really tough for me to like, step back and step away because I truly get lit up when I see it. As much as I love all the things in my life, my job my family excluded, like nothing lights me up career-wise like wrestling. I’ve tried a variety of different things too, what’s the next chapter, what does this look like? I find wonderful things but nothing’s like performing in front of 1000s of people, being able to pull those emotional strings and connecting with people in today’s world where I feel like connection has a buffer right now of technology. Wrestling is a very primal connection with the audience and community and it still brings that. If you go to a local indie show, and you get your box of popcorn and you’re sitting with others, I guarantee at some point you’re going to hoot and holler and yell and scream, and you’re going to lose yourself in the story, just because it’s built in our emotional makeup.”
“I don’t know. It’s really hard to say you’re retired, when I left in 2012 that was the word I threw around a lot. I’m retired, I’m retired. Because I wanted to have a family and I knew for myself that wasn’t going to be in congruence to perform and to have kids, I needed to devote myself to the kids at that time. I give the age-old cliche answer that everybody hates, never say never. But it really just depends on the opportunities and what suits our family, that’s really it. We weigh out everything, Adam’s opportunities too. I remember when Percy Jackson came on the table, and he was full-time in WWE, and it was really, really hard to take that on. But we weighed out everything, we sat as a family, and we made that decision. We’re like, this is huge, this is like the biggest acting opportunity that’s come our way and you need to go do this, this is massive. We talked about saying no to that and we talk about everything that comes our way, as a family and does that serve us now? How does that affect the kids? How does it affect our marriage? That matters too.”
“I am not. I am currently a free agent, I have a great relationship with WWE. I treasured my time there. I feel like there’s more, there’s other opportunities that have presented themselves. I feel the motivation right now to kind of explore and explore what else is out there and explore myself. But my relationship with WWE hasn’t changed. I have so many friends there and I appreciate and enjoy the product as I always have. I love NXT I have a special place in my heart for NXT, of course, and just the system, and seeing young people come up and go through that excitement of developing themselves for the big time. I love WWE, I always will.”
“It was the wild and crazy dream that I had from the time I was little. But I think it was WrestleMania 10 seeing Bret versus Owen where I was like, I was just so stunned by the performance and the emotional aspect. It felt so real to me, these characters weren’t just characters to me. They literally are brothers and whatever magic they created in the ring together was a lightbulb moment for me that I gotta figure out how to do this. I don’t know anyone in the business. I live in a tiny little town, Elmira, New York, I have no access to anything. I’ve never been even out of my town, how am I going to do this? There’s no manual written on it. I had no contacts, but I just had to figure out little by little how that was done, it was a lightbulb.”
“It’s pretty much worst-case scenario, and I felt my whole world crumble all around me. I go in the ambulance and they did the X-ray, and they’re like, Oh my God, your jaw is shattered, you need surgery. I went to UPMC and Pittsburgh, where this was Monday night on Raw, and they couldn’t get me into surgery until Wednesday afternoon. So I had to sit in a hospital bed for essentially two full days just thinking about how my life is. I’ve ruined everything, I’ve sacrificed everything at that time, I really hadn’t had a chance to start making any money. I put my family second, everything my whole life, I had put all my eggs in the basket of wrestling and it blew up right in front of me. This was my moment. I’m standing beside Trish Stratus, I’m working with Mickie James and everything crashed. Two people called me in the hospital that I really, really remember so, so much. One was Stephanie McMahon to check on me and just extend her remorse for what happened and give me a pep talk that you can do this, you can come back from this. And the other was Howard Finkel, and Howard was so sweet. He recounted how he remembered me coming in as an extra and how this was my dream. He goes, I remember you wanting to do this for the last three years driving all over the place as an extra. He goes, Don’t give up, It feels terrible now [but] don’t give up. In that really dark moment for me, like I am so grateful that I got those two phone calls. Particularly Howard, who it was a very special call.”
“I had doubts. But I guess in my heart of hearts, I was like, I gotta figure this out. There was a crazy thing that happened to me. I thought initially, oh I’m on Raw, I’m officially on Raw. Once I get the clearance, because they told me [I’d be out for] about two months with the broken jaw. Once I got the clearance, I’m right back where I started and I thought it was gonna be plugged right back in and be off to the races. Well, those two months came and went, I got cleared and I’m back in the developmental system, I wasn’t plugged back in. The machine had moved on and they didn’t have room for me, and maybe they look at me like [I am] injury prone now. So I guess month after month started rolling and I was like, oh my God, I gotta get myself back over. The work, all the prior work I had done was kind of erased and now I’ve got to get myself back over. So that’s where I went back to the drawing board and I was like, I need to create a character. I can’t just be Beth Phoenix, blonde girl, I have to create something that they don’t have right now, and that’s where The Glamazon came from. So I was like, I’m going to start working, and I’m going to start presenting myself like I feel inside, like the person that I know I am, rather than trying to jam a square peg into a round hole of being, the next Stratus, which nobody can be the next Trish. Trish is Trish.”
“Well, and that’s what I learned too was I had to look at the landscape and be like, what do they not have? Well, they don’t have a powerhouse right now. I can do that stuff. I felt excited because that was stuff I was doing on the independents. But when I came to OVW, I felt like I really need to pull back on that because I needed to look and I needed to present myself more on brand of being like this, beautiful Diva and emphasize that, not my strength.”
“She felt horrible, and it was not her fault. It was literally that I had my mouth slightly open. It was my fault. When you take a hit to the face you’re supposed to clench your jaw so that it doesn’t happen. I was standing there probably because it was my first match and I was stunned and just pure ignorance I had my mouth slightly open and boom. And yeah, she felt terrible. She still feels terrible about it and she shouldn’t, I love her to death. She’s maybe one of the kindest women in the business.”
“So that was a private conversation between myself and Dean Malenko. He pulled me aside and at that time he was putting together the Men’s Royal Rumble. And again, Chyna was a huge influence of mine. Glamazon was pretty much Chyna 2.0. And that’s what I was modeling it after. I felt like we needed a new, strong woman in the group. So, to be able to be the successor to her in that particular moment was just mind-blowing because it was very sentimental to me and special to me because of her. But also it was this incredible gift that I kept so guarded because Dean had told me this about five or six weeks out. So I was given this secret and Dean said, Look, we pitch this, everybody likes it, it’s dependent on you keeping the secret. So if it had leaked before, they basically weren’t going to do it. I did not even tell my parents, I told no one, I did not tell Natty and I tell Natty everything. I was carrying around this golden goose. It was such a sigh of relief when I walked up to Gorilla and I got to, like, look around be like, okay, they know now. When they were on number five, or whatever and I was number six before they hit the music. But it was one of the most outstanding moments of my life to be able to be a part of that page in history, opening more doors for the women. And it was so much fun. It was so much fun. I’ve never experienced a crowd reaction like that.”
“Oh, yeah, they definitely set me up for success and put me in there with Khali. That moment of getting to stand toe to toe with him and be fearless, whereas inside I was just like, it was an out-of-body experience. That’s the only way I can ever describe that moment. It was just so intensely emotional that I felt like I was floating. It was a moment that I knew in wrestling, it’s a fleeting part of the history book we have. We’re only there so long. It moves on fast, and the next generations that come bring so much more to the table than we did. But I knew in that little moment I was like no matter what, nobody can take this special, special moment for me. It’s what I wanted to do here, I wanted to have these moments, I wanted to be a successor from the stars that I looked up to, and to me in that moment, I did it. If it all ended the following day, I would have been okay with that.”
“So I’ve kind of had my run as The Glamazon, the big dragon to be slayed. Then the dragon was slayed, I was beaten. And after the dragon gets beat the first time, you got to reinvent a little bit. I found myself in catering a lot and I found myself not really being used on television. I was like oh my God, they’re moving on from me, I’m done, my character is done, what now? So my thought was like, Okay, what have I not done? I was like I could be a valet or a manager, but that kind of doesn’t make sense for this like big, tough character I’ve created and Santino was just on the cusp of finding some comedic beats. He was no longer the Boris Alexiev tough guy. He was kind of doing the unibrow and finding some comedic beats. I had seen the Eddie Murphy movie Norbit, it’s vintage. The whole premise is this big mean girlfriend and this kind of wimpy, almost abused boyfriend. So I wrote up a one-page pitch, and I walked into Vince’s office and I said, Vince, I have this idea. I didn’t even tell Santino. So I was just kind of hoping and praying that he’d be okay with it. I handed him the paper and I said Vince, if you could just take a look at this, I made sure I was concise. The next week, Vince came up and found me, he goes, we’re going with your idea and it starts tonight. I was like, oh my god, it was that easy! It wasn’t that easy, it was a lot of stars aligning. But I found a place on the show that was independent of what was going on with the women’s title because really, that was the only spot for the girls to be on every week, or a valet. If I wasn’t the contender and I wasn’t the champ, what could I be doing? And so Santino and I kind of started building this little alliance and relationship and it ended up going off the rails. It was super special. I think I was very good at being the straight man and he was very good at just doing everything he could in his power to make me crack. Other than my wonderful time I got to spend with Natty as my tag partner and the Royal Rumbles, my time with Santino was by far my favorite memories from WWE.”
“Oh my gosh, it was just such a simple story, the “I Quit” match. There’s a crazy story behind the I Quit match, honestly. Of course, Percy Jackson filming was booked, it was butted right up to the pay-per-view, the “I Quit” match. That was in Philadelphia on Pay-Per-View. And so Adam had to fly all the way from Vancouver to Philadelphia overnight, basically not sleep, and then have a 40-minute match with Finn Balor which was an “I Quit” match, which is not always the easiest type of a match. So we were sitting and talking about that and he’s like, I don’t know, maybe I can’t do Percy Jackson. We were looking at it again, like weighing all the options. How do we do this? And I was like, you can use me if you want, it may be using myself as a part of this story in this moment could help alleviate some of the stress on how to book this finish. So the I Quit match was crazy. I flew his gear, everything that he needed for the match, I flew it from Asheville to Philadelphia and met him at 11 o’clock in the morning pay-per-view day after he had been filming Percy Jackson for like two weeks and charter flight straight to Philadelphia. Basically, he laid down in the hotel for about 30 minutes and then we had to go to the building and then put the spool thing together. There’s a lot of moving parts in this match, you had everybody, all of Judgment Day was out there. It was just chaos and fun and crazy. But I was super excited because I’d watched Rhea come up. I was just super excited, even if that was all we did. I just wanted the opportunity to kind of get in there with her and get to be face-to-face.”
“Again, they had never done that to a woman before. So we were like, are they gonna let us do this? It’s a violent, violent thing to see and it’s a violent thing to see a woman doing it to another woman. So there was just so much Shakespeare in that, in the ending of that match that it was just beautifully orchestrated, and everybody played their role perfectly. But there was something, there’s a couple of funny hitches. I was so nervous, I’m out of practice, and they’re all on their game, because they get so many reps, and they’re just doing wonderfully. Then my job was, of course, involving handcuffs, which anytime you have a prop, like the handcuffs can go wrong in so many ways. They don’t latch or they break or the key goes missing. So getting the key from Rhea was a portion of this finish, and then I had to unchain Adam from the handcuffs because he was handcuffed to the ropes. Well, of course, I’m so nervous. I grabbed the handcuffs and I’m trying to open the wrong handcuff for him that’s on the rope. And he’s just like, What are you doing? He’s like, grab the other handcuff on my wrist, free me, free me, free me. And I’m like, oh, yeah, I’m so sorry. It was chaos, but in the end, it was just so much fun. I remember coming to the back and we all just kind of were like reveling in the crowd reactions. The story we told is what we wanted to tell like that, that played out as beautifully and as perfectly as it could. And it was really fun. It was great bad guy work, great good guy work.”
“So when I had retired from wrestling the ring posts didn’t have those big digital LED wraps on them, they were a smaller post. So I had never been in the new rings with all the cool technology and all the upgrades. And I was in this was really early after I came in, I had a little interaction with everybody. And then we kind of settled in and I was working with Bianca a little bit. I was sitting on the top turnbuckle and Bianca and I were going back and forth or whatever. Then she gave me a punch to the face and I whipped my head back like that and the back of my head hit the LED post, which was a little bit wider than what I was used to. I feel like I just from not getting in the new ring and being rusty. I went, Whoa, hit my head right on the edge of that and I thought, Oh, that hurt. Bianca to her credit was like, are you okay? Are you okay? I’m like, I’m fine. Then I’m working with somebody else in the Rumble just doing my thing. I looked down to pick somebody up and I was like, it was Charlotte actually. I was like, Charlotte, you’re bleeding. And she was just like, No, it’s you, dude. And I’m like, what? Because it was all in the back and I didn’t see it. Then I looked down and I saw the blood dripping and I’m like, oh my God, I think I’m bleeding. I don’t even know from where. And then I touched the back of my head. And I was like, Oh, no. So I was in the Rumble a good long while and a part of the whole story. So I was talking to the doctors there and like, are you okay? Are you dizzy or anything? I’m like, Nope, I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. I was like, Please, can I stay? I was afraid they were going to pull me because of the injury. But they they let me stay. And so yeah, so I just stuck it out. And it made for this badass warrior looking performance that was just me misjudging the ring post, but it turned out it turned out great. Luckily, it was just a few staples in the back of the head. Everybody was so worried and here’s the crazy part. So, again, I was not even sure I should do the Royal Rumble because it was Adams’s return like I was there for his support, not to have my own performance. And then I get my head split open and he’s watching from the back about to have his return after nine years. And then he’s worried about me and I’m like, I’m so I’m sorry, I didn’t I just didn’t want to add stress to the day. I’m so sorry. But that’s the risks we take every time we get in the ring, you can’t predict things to go smoothly. Fortunately, our children weren’t there because I feel like that would have been [upsetting], and our littlest was like two or three. I would not want to want her to see that.”
“My family, my health and time.”
