‘Huggable One’ returns home to San Jose
Bayley will defend her ‘Raw’ women’s title at payper-view event Sunday
SAN JOSE — Bayley, the World Wrestling Entertainment superstar who has conquered pro-wrestling’s fan base with a barrage of signature hugs and flying elbows, returns this weekend to where it all began.
With her cuddly, fan-girl persona — she is promoted as The Huggable One — Bayley has introduced legions of young girls to a scene that didn’t always cater to them. In some ways, she could be dubbed the Taylor Swift of flying off the top rope.
All of which makes it a particularly poignant homecoming for the East San Jose native and Independence High School grad, as she returns as the Raw
women’s champion fresh off her Wrestlemania debut last month. She defends her belt — won in February — against Alexa Bliss at the pay-per-view “Payback” event at the SAP Center in downtown San Jose on Sunday evening.
“Thinking about how far I’ve come, it’s so crazy to me,” she said in an interview with this news organization. “Now coming back to San Jose, I’m staying at my mom’s house, and they’re all going to see my championship match and watch me on the big stage. It’s pretty cool.”
It has been both a steady and meteoric rise for the 27year-old Bayley, who grew up as Pamela Rose Martinez and was once the captain of the 76ers’ girls’ basketball team. But since she was a young child and especially as a preteen, pro wrestling has been her obsession.
Her memory is fuzzy, but she said it was probably a flying elbow by “Macho Man” Randy Savage she saw in a televised match that perked up her wrestling radar.
“I was just hooked by the sight of him, his natural charisma,” Bayley said. “And when I was 11, 12, then 13, I started realizing how obsessed I was.”
That obsession rose during what is known as the “Attitude” era of WWE, captained by stars like The Rock and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, and the highflying, danger-seeking Hardy Boyz tag team.
Bayley recently posted on Instagram a photo of herself as a young teen pointing to her eye with two fingers, a gesture alluding to the Hardy Boyz (her flying elbow finishing move is an homage to Savage). And after her showcased match in Orlando at Wrestlemania 33, the company website took a photo of her posing next to the Hardys backstage.
But her rise is no chance occurrence. She watched local shows by Fremontbased promoter Big Time Wrestling as soon as she could get in the door, and after high school, she was determined to pursue a career in the ring.
“When I turned 18, I figured my mom couldn’t tell me ‘no,’ ” she said.
She spent years learning the ropes. Very literally.
“When I first started to learn to run the ropes, that was really painful for me, it’s just cable wire wrapped in tape,” Bayley said. “It bruised my ribs so bad, it hurt to be hugged, it hurt to lay down.”
Her millions of fans would probably shudder now at the thought that The Huggable One was once unhuggable. But Bayley’s passion outpaced the pain.
“To have bruises all over and still train and not tell anyone about it, I knew I must really like this to keep doing it,” she said.
Bayley eventually caught the notice of NXT, the WWE’s developmental promotion, and came under the tutelage of Sara Amato, a Walnut Creek native who saw a kindred spirit in her fellow Bay Area brawler.
“She was such a hard worker, and it’s not the easiest being a woman in this,” Amato said. “Bayley from the get-go stood out. She was also humble. The coolest part of my job is to see people work their tails off and get treated fairly and succeed.”
Amato noticed how meticulous Bayley was about mastering her technical wrestling proficiency as much as the performance elements of the job.
The latter led to the creation of “Bayley,” in part a nod to her Bay Area roots and her youthful enthusiasm.
“When I started this character, it was me being 12 years old again,” she said. “We would have other wrestlers come to our promos, and I’d geek out over them, and show my excitement. I would just grab them and not let go.”
Amato said it was a fairly swift development from there. She recalled a routine session where wrestlers workshopped potential characters.
“One day she exposed herself and broke down, talking about how she was such a huge fan, and her fandom of WWE,” Amato said.
“It was something everyone could connect with. We said, ‘That’s it. That’s what you need to do.’”
The family-friendly persona has made Bayley accessible to wide swaths of fans — male and female alike — and plastered on replicas of her signature jacket, T-shirts, lunch boxes and other souvenirs. She has the distinction shared by no more than handful of San Jose natives — probably — of inspiring an action figure and being a videogame character.
“It’s hilarious to see guys wearing a headband with ‘I’m a Hugger’ on it,” she said.
Amato circles back to the way Bayley — and contemporaries such as in-ring ally Sasha Banks, Charlotte and Paige — have created avenues for young girls to find relatable heroes in what has long been a male domain.
“As a fan I never had that female role model that you could look at and think, ‘I could be her,’ ” Amato said. “Bayley has reached so many young girls in the audience. You see the changes at our live events in the fan base, it’s amazing to see.”
Meanwhile, Bayley is still letting everything sink in. Even after her big Wrestlemania performance — a four-way match, no less — she said she didn’t realize the magnitude of her ascent until the next day. She remembers it with the same fan intensity that inspired her character.
“It wasn’t until the next night on Raw, that I started getting emotional,” she said. “I thought, ‘Oh my god, I’m on the same tour with guys I was watching when I was 12 years old!’ ”
On Sunday, young wrestling fans will gather to watch Bayley in the SAP Center crowd, just as she once did. And Bayley likes to think that someone in that audience might one day be saying the same thing about her, perhaps in just a few years’ time.