Culture

Inside The Glittery Spandex World Of Women’s Wrestling

by Claire Keenan  4 October 2022

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Born and raised in Adelaide to humble sporting beginnings, at just 25-year-olds Rhea Ripley is a professional WWE wrestler, former RAW champion, Tag Team Champion and NXT and NXT UK Champion.

“If you really wanna do something, hustle until you get there,” Rhea told Junkee.

“You can use the doubters and [the] people that look down on you. You can use that sort of energy that they try to throw at you and use it against them. Help it light that fire in you to get to the point that you want to get too. Because that’s exactly what I did.”

As a kid, Rhea was extremely sporty and did every kind of sport humanly possible that could get her out of other classes.

“I played netball for six years. I did karate swimming, calisthenics, cross country, I did everything…everything you could think of. But I loved wrestling.”

Rhea started at Riot City Wrestling, an Australian professional wrestling promotion in Adelaide, at just 16 years old. Looking back, she described the early experiences as a “whole bunch of late twenties and early 30-year-old men” versus “just little, little me”.

And then she got signed with the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) at just 20 years old, “which [was] absolutely wild, especially coming from Australia”.

“But I loved wrestling.”

WWE is the American professional wrestling promotion, arguably the most known across the world. Rhea joins a long lineage of badass professional female wrestlers, who have performed under WWE too.

There was the legendary WWE Hall of Famer Mildred Burke, a pioneer of women’s wrestling, who broke onto the scene in the 1930s. Burke took on male wrestlers and almost always defeated them, which made space for other women wrestlers to persevere in a sport that was dominated by muscled men.

ProWrestling

Ethel Johnson, Babs Wingo, Kathleen Wimbley, Mary Horton and Marva Scott are hailed as the first professional Black women wrestlers who changed the pro-wrestling and sporting landscape forever.

All the way to professional wrestler Lita, who is considered one of the greatest women’s performers today, to Aja Kong, one of the most respected female wrestlers in Japanese wrestling history.

For Rhea, the wrestler she really looked up to in WWE was Beth Phoenix, a former WWE Divas Champion and a three-time WWE Women’s Champion.

“Especially growing up at the time it was like the divas era, so everyone [was] all like real pretty and thin and just like so perfect looking.

And I was like man, I’m built so different. Beth was too and she’s so beautiful in a different way, but like she stood out to me because she had muscle, she was a bigger built, she was like a powerhouse.

Growing up I always got picked on for looking like a man. Which is something that I still get today. And I think it’s absolute crap,” Rhea said.

2012 WWE, Inc.

It would be remiss to forget Sensational Sherri with her dazzling 80s vibes or Wendi Richter, a key figure in WWE’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Wrestling era also in the mid-80s.

It was the same decade that the Netflix Show Glow is loosely based on. The show where Actor Alison Brie stars as Ruth Wilder, a struggling actress living in Los Angeles in the 80s who finds herself in an unexpected job full of glittery spandex: women’s wrestling.

What Glow doesn’t encapsulate though, is just how much was at stake for the real women’s wrestlers.

“All the women that came before me and the women before them, they really hustled and they persevered and they pushed through all the crap that they were given and they took every single little opportunity that they could to shine and show everyone that women can do everything that the men can do,” Rhea said.

“If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t have the women’s vision that we have today, which I think is so incredible.”

​​Catch Rhea Ripley and the year-round WWE action on Foxtel and on BINGE.