WWE’s first Arab woman trains hard, ready to rumble

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Shadia Bseiso, a Dubai-based TV host and voice artist, is a CrossFit aficionado and Jiu Jitsu blue belt holder.

Viewers in Dubai know her for hosting televised regional sporting events, but they’re about to see a new side.

Come January, she’ll join the incoming class of World Wrestling Entertainment hopefuls, ready to rumble as the Arab world’s first professional female wrestler.

Her enrollment at WWE’s Performance Center, the group’s official training school in Orlando, Fla., is the end of a journey that began in January, when Bseiso, 31, was invited to participate in auditions to be an announcer for the WWE’s first Arabic offering, Wal3ooha — a Latinized rendering of an Arabic word that means “light it up.”

Somewhere in her interview, Bseiso said she began to talk about much she enjoyed martial arts — “and that if I wasn’t a full-time (announcer) I would be a full-time athlete.”

That pushed Canyon Ceman, WWE’s senior vice president of international talent development, to offer her a spot in athlete tryouts held earlier this year in Dubai. Bseiso was the only one among 33 other competitors — seven of them women — who wasn’t a full-time athlete.

Over four days, Bseiso and others ran drills for hours, performed moves before a crowd and tested their performing chops in “promo” classes, where would-be wrestlers learn to hone their character.

“On the fourth day, just before we all went home, Matt Bloom (WWE’s head trainer) pulled me aside and said, ‘Are you ready to move to the U.S.?’ ”

At first, Bseiso told only her sister, Arifa.

“How (do you) tell your parents you want to be the next WWE superstar? You don’t tell them except in person,” Bseiso said.

She said they were “extremely supportive” when she did finally tell them.

Growing up in Jordan, Bseiso had only a passing knowledge of WWE, where she would occasionally see matches broadcast on television or on tapes from video rental stores.

But by the time the WWE tryout had come to Dubai, she had made a name for herself hosting major sporting events like “Desert Force,” a mixed martial arts tournament.

Part of her passion came from her parents, who treated the Bseiso children — three sisters and a brother — as equals and inculcated in them the discipline to excel.

Shadia isn’t the family’s first athlete. Arifa is a boxer who recently became one of Nike’s brand ambassadors in the Middle East.

Bseiso’s hiring comes at a time when WWE is mounting a full-scale expansion into markets outside the U.S. and Europe. In 2016, Ceman said, the focus was on China. In 2017, it was the Middle East.

“You see the metrics on social media, and you find we have something like 11 million Facebook followers in Egypt. That’s stuff that makes you go, ‘What? Really?’ ” said Ceman.

That global push has extended to WWE’s growing roster of athletes. One of the reasons for the tryout in the Middle East was to provide characters whom wrestling’s “surprisingly ethnically large and diverse audience … can identify with,” Ceman said.

“We’re looking for size, charisma, work ethic, diversity, language, country of origin … and we train them as sports entertainers from zero,” he said.

There’s no guarantee new recruits will ever make it to the WWE roster, Ceman said, but the grueling schedule compresses roughly 10 years of work experience into about a third of that time.

So far, Bseiso is reveling in the work.

“I spend the whole day in my gym when I’m on my day off. Now it’s my job. That’s something I love,” she said.