Wrestling helped me be comfortable with who I am
By day she is Kimberly Benson, but by night she’s Viper, the professional wrestler with attitude at the forefront of the revolution in the sport. Janet Christie meets the Ayrshire woman with all the right moves
I’m just gonna get myself comfy if that’s all right?” says Kimberly Benson, tucking one dainty foot under her and smoothing down her flippy purple dress. Sparkly pink nail varnish flashes as she flicks her long hair away from her glasses and it cascades around her shoulders in blonde waves. It’s not what you expect from someone who’s other name is Viper, The Vixen of Violence.
Benson is not just a bubbly, dogloving 27-year-old from Ayrshire who works in her family’s coach hire firm, she’s also one of the UK’S top professional wrestlers, the current Insane Championship Women’s Champion and recent winner of the Japanese Stardom’s SWA Championship, she’s part of a new wave of the sport that has seen more women in the ring, and in the audience too.
Fresh from making the TV documentary, Fight Like a Girl ,one of BBC 1’s Our Lives series, in which Benson allowed cameras to follow her training, fights and home life, she’s been doing a lot of press of late.
“I’ve got my answers... bing, bing, bing,” she says, announcing the start of our session like a ringside bell. Energetic and enthusiastic, Benson laughs a lot, a gurgling throaty laugh that makes you join in and puts you at ease.
When I tell her I had to watch the programme from behind a cushion as the punches rained and Benson and her opponents crashed and slammed at sickening angles in a carefully choreographed exhibition of violence, she says, “Yeah me too… I was oooh, eeeh, aaaah! Yeah I’m very sore ALL of the time.” Then she laughs, because she loves it.
She’s loved it from her first training session ten years ago at a wrestling school near her home in Ayrshire. “I found wrestling by luck,” she says. “One day I was watching it on TV with my nephew and my then boyfriend who said, ‘you know there’s a training school at Linwood’. So we went at the weekend and I got absolutely battered. I loved it. I remember lying in my bed the day after and I couldn’t get out of bed, my neck, my back, all of me just went ‘nope’, and I lay there for a few minutes and went, ‘this is great!’”
Benson was already a performer, playing the bagpipes in a pipe band and singing in her mother’s karaoke business. “I used to play the keyboard and sing too, but I was quite a tomboy as well and loved rough and tumble, sumo wrestling and play fighting with my dad. I have a half brother, half sister, two step sisters and a nephew from when I was nine, so there was always somebody to fight with! So wrestling was just a way of mashing those two bits of my life together.”
Benson puts the appeal of wrestling for fans down to its combination of live action soap opera, drama, action and humour, plus the sheer variety of the performers, especially now that women’s wrestling is on the up.
“The UK is an absolute hotbed for women’s wrestling,” says Benson. “We’re some of the best in the world and I think it’s because women are good at putting emotion into the fight. Women’s wrestling used to be very much treated like a sideshow but now it’s the main attraction for a lot of people. When I first started there were, maybe a handful of girls in the UK, and certainly none that looked like me.”
At 5ft 5in and 14½ stone Benson is not one of what she calls the “very cheerleader-esque girls” being used when she started, yet it’s her size that is part of her appeal. Confident and funny, she owns her larger than life persona of Viper and has developed it over the years.
“Wrestling helped me be comfortable with who I am. Originally it was difficult because I was very different but over time it helped me learn to love all the things that made me different.
“The thing about Viper was supposed to be the connotations, that I’m a venomous bitch!” She laughs. “When I first made Viper I was 16 and she was a little snotty brat you were hoping was going to get a skelp. Then as I grew up I got more confident and now I don’t really feel there’s a lot of difference between Kim and Viper any more. A lot of her just came about by being a big blonde badass, doing what she wants.
“Back then if you were big girl in wrestling, you had to be bad, angry and grumpy and wear dark colours. I went along with it for a while, then I was ‘absolutely not! I’m gonna have big, blonde curly hair and wear whatever I want’. I do have a black leotard, because well, that’s flattering, but I’ve also got a really nice bright blue one and a bright pink one. I like make-up too, there’s this greeny gold highlighter I love and I do big heavy eyes ‘cos you want them to go ‘oh, she looks nice’ from way over there – paint for the back row. I come out to heavy metal and go ‘hiya!’, ‘cos that’s just me. Everybody says that doesn’t go, but that’s the point. I’ll like