11 Things You Didn't Know About WWE's Tatum Paxley
6. WWE Emailed Her Within 10 Minutes
Tatum's wrestling exploration was going well, so much so that she'd asked that aforementioned (and unnamed!) friend where she’d to go train and learn how to wrestle. At that stage in proceedings, she genuinely wasn’t even thinking as lofty as WWE, but just thought it'd be fun to see if she could eventually break into the independent scene or something.
10 minutes later, an email dropped in her inbox from WWE asking if she'd be willing to attend a tryout in Las Vegas within 2 weeks. Unsurprisingly, Paxley wasn’t expecting that at all. She'd gone from watching some matches on YouTube and taking notes on what she did and didn't like, to asking a friend if there was maybe some local Vegas training school that'd show her how to take bumps, to...being invited to tryout for the market leader.
That must've been a lot to take in. Tatum told Denise Salcedo that she got lucky with the whole deal. Her friend had some handy contacts inside the company, and had put her over as someone supremely athletic who also had a keen interest. The stars aligned, because WWE's chief scouts had been looking for former athletes who might fancy breaking in and learning the ropes (literally) without any bad habits they might've picked up elsewhere.
Paxley fit the bill. She was ready to be shaped and moulded into whatever the promotion wanted her to be. She'd still have to pay her dues and learn properly, but she'd potentially be doing that in a top class training facility owned by WWE - the Performance Center.
Tatum aced the tryout, clearly.