Going to the mat
Emerging names in women’s wrestling have Houston ties
Briana Rae can’t help smiling. Her face always seems to form an ear-to-ear grin when she’s getting ready to kick someone’s face.
Call it one of the benefits of training to become a professional wrestler.
At one point early in her career, Rae considered becoming a masked wrestler, or luchadora, just to cover up the smile. “I’m technically a babyface; I smile too much,” she jokes.
Although Rae is from Chicago, Houston has become her second home since coming to wrestle and train under Booker T’s Reality of Wrestling school in Texas City.
Under the ring name Kylie Rae, this 24-year-old has become a star of the local independent wrestling scene and a regular on the “Reality of Wrestling” program, airing at midnight Saturdays on CW39. She’s part of a dedicated group of women who come to Houston to train and live out their superhero wrestling dreams.
It just so happens that this is a fine time to have such a dream.
Though the sport of Hulk Hogan and Stone Cold Steve Austin has been dominated by men through the decades, interest in women’s wrestling is at an all-time high following the well-received June debut of “GLOW,” a Netflix series about a collection of women who star in a wrestling program set in the ’80s. Rae says the show did a good job humanizing female wrestlers, as well as bringing them more into mainstream conversations.
It’s not the only burst of female wrestling in the pop-culture sphere. Over on Showtime, there’s a female lucha libre (Mexican wrestling) plotline on the hit show “Ray Donovan,” which is in the midst of its fifth season.
But bigger than both of those TV shows will be the WWE’s broadcast of the first Mae Young Wrestling tournament, airing at various times Sunday and Monday on the WWE Network. It’s a competition that will feature a bracket filled with women from all over the world, including wrestling hotbeds such as Mexico, Japan and New Zealand.
Houston’s entry will be Miranda Salinas, a 23-year-old who also trained with Booker T, a Hall of Famer professional wrestler and possible Houston mayoral candidate. Politics aside, Booker T gets a little giddy when he recalls the list of female wrestlers who, he said, were just as tough as the guys, including the namesake of this tournament who wrested in postwar America.
“You go back to the Mae Youngs of the world, she had some really hardcore matches. It wasn’t about how good Mae Young looked, it was about how good she could come out there and beat someone up,” says Booker T, who conducts co-ed training, teaching prospective wrestlers the basics in his school. “Sherri Martel, she was good-looking… but she was a brute in the ring. Medusa, she’s another one you know, who worked at a very, very high level. Medusa was like one of the guys; she was one of the boys.”
But, like a changing city, Booker T says women’s wrestling took a noticeable turn in the 1990s, when “more model-type girls” were being featured — wrestlers such as Sable.
Since the shift in the ’90s, female wrestlers have progressively taken on a bigger chunk of the spotlight in the WWE, most notably when the company created its Divas wrestling championship, with performers who mixed lethallooking blows with killer looks.
“When I was little, I always watched Trish Stratus, and when I first started wrestling that was my big inspiration,” says Salinas, a Houston native who started wrestling four years ago and was recently called up to the WWE, still the “big leagues” of the sport. “When I first started training, A.J. Lee really inspired me. I looked up to her like crazy, and I wanted to be as good as her. I wanted to accomplish the things that she did because she made all of that possible.”
Salinas, who went to Davis High School (now Northside High), is a personal trainer from the Heights who fell in love with wrestling when she was young. She jumped into the ring to train after she graduated high school and hasn’t slowed down since. She credits Reality of Wrestling with giving her the chops to perform at the highest level of the sport.
Following a February tryout for WWE, Salinas received an invitation to join more than 30 other women to participate in the Mae Young Classic. But because of the dangerous nature of pro wrestling, Salinas was initially worried she wouldn’t be able to perform.
“It was kind of, like, a hard time because I had gotten that call, and then two days later I had sprained my ankle,” she says. A performance at a lucha libre event in Houston left her on cruches for three weeks. “I was kind of freaking out because I didn’t know if I could be cleared in time and be able to perform.”
Salinas couldn’t talk about the results of her performance for the tournament, which was recorded for television. But she says she’s excited about her future in the WWE.
“I think wrestling in general is changing. I don’t think this is gonna be the last time you see a Mae Young Classic,” Booker T says. “Right now, women’s wrestling is hot all over the world because we have some really good ones,” he says, adding that only a very small percentage of people who train at his school get called to take the stage for WWE.
“The Kylie Raes and the Mirandas, that’s their dream, to make it to that level and work on that stage. It’s not as easy as it looks; it’s even harder to stay there.”
Fueled by her growing skill set and confidence, Salinas says she’s hoping to be part of the new wave of female wrestlers who have become household names. And if some recent rumors prove to be true, they could be competing in the ring with former MMA champ and movie star Ronda Rousey, who was once thought of as the baddest woman on the planet.
“I think she’s going to bring something different to the table, and everybody is going to have to step their game up because the bar is going to be set really, really high,” Salinas says, reacting to reports that Rousey is possibly training to become a pro wrestler.
And she says it would be another boon to a form of entertainment dominated by men, and maybe change some minds. “I think for a while, a lot of people looked at women wrestlers not really as women wrestlers but as eye candy.”
Not anymore.