Cora Jade reveals her two biggest inspirations to her pro wrestling career.
Many current day female performers around the world will name past stars like Lita, Trish Stratus, and Mickie James as their biggest inspiration to start a career in the squared circle. For Cora Jade, who is one of the youngest stars that WWE currently has to offer, her inspirations are a bit more recent.
In a new exclusive interview with Fightful, Jade revealed that she noticed the differences in treatment that the women's division suffered through when she first started watching the product.
"When I first started watching, I was eight-years-old, 2009sh, I look at Undertaker and Shawn Michaels at WrestleMania 25 as the match that got me into wrestling. At that time, I would go back and watch old women’s matches because I was so obsessed with it. I would be on my parent’s computer looking up old stuff. At that time, the women didn’t get a lot of time. Even as a young kid, I noticed that and noticed there were a lot of differences in the women versus how the men were presented. Even as a young kid, I knew I wanted to be here, but I wanted to be a pro wrestler and wanted to have matches like the guys got to have and wanted to do all the things they got to do. I didn’t want to do all these bra and panty matches I was seeing as a kid. Even then, I knew I wanted to be so much more than that."
Jade then went on to name AJ Lee and Saraya (formerly known as Paige) as the two women who first gave her the confidence to become a pro wrestler.
"Seeing somebody like AJ Lee come in and even Paige and women like that, everyone after her. She [AJ] are the first one I saw as a kid. She was the first woman to have all this merch and none of the other women got to have that at the time and she was the first person that started to make everybody see that women can do the same stuff. They can make the same sales in merch, do all this stuff. To see her do that, she instantly became my favorite. She was so relatable and I saw so much of myself in her. She was a fan as well. I feel we had a lot of similarities. To see her do all this, it made me be like, ‘I can do all this too.’ I remember there was an interview I saw of her, maybe it was the Slammys, she said, ‘I hope that what I leave is for the women who come after me.’ That always stuck in my head because I’m trying to be in that position myself and hopefully, a few years from now, there is someone who is like me as a kid who was watching AJ, that I kind of helped as well. That’s definitely a goal of mine. To be the AJ for other girls as she was to me."
Although AJ Lee retired back in 2015, Saraya recently made her debut with All Elite Wrestling. Two weeks after making her debut with the company, Saraya got physical inside of a wrestling ring for the first time since 2017. According to a recent report, Saraya has been cleared for in-ring competition in AEW as well.
Elsewhere in the interview, Cora Jade discussed working with Natalya earlier this year. To learn more, click here.
