This Diva Isn't So Delicate - Torrie Toughs It Out On WWE Circuit
By Paul Turenne

The following was posted on the Winnipeg Sun web site on 05-28-05.

It's hard to picture George (The Animal) Steele or Andre the Giant carrying around a little white puppy in a designer bag, but professional wrestlers have changed a lot over the last 20 years.

Torrie Wilson, the WWE diva who faces Michelle McCool at the MTS Centre at tonight's Smackdown! event, is a new breed of wrestling superstar.

She can handle herself in the ring and she can take being on the road for up to 300 days a year, but the former Playboy cover girl also injects some femininity into the male-dominated game.

'STIFF EACH OTHER GOOD'

"There are only six women in our locker room and the rest is mostly guys. It's kind of like being in a frat house sometimes, we're definitely in the minority," Wilson told The Sun yesterday. "So sometimes we really have to act like girls."

In the ring though, the Divas are anything but delicate.

"We kind of have to stiff each other good because the guys are so much bigger and what they do is so much better. To make it look somewhat good we really have to slam each other hard and kick each other hard," she said.

Wilson, 29, got into professional wrestling in 1998 when she met Kevin Nash at a WCW event in California and he asked her if she'd like to have a short role in his storyline.

"It was very exciting," she said. "They brought me in to lure David Flair into betraying his father Rick Flair."

Wilson spent two years with WCW and then joined WWE when it bought out WCW.

But before Wilson became a professional wrestling figure, she had never even watched it.

"I'd never dreamed that wrestling was going to be what I did for my career. But it's very exciting and very addicting and as soon as I started doing it I knew it was going to be my path," she said.

"I've definitely become a fan since I started working in this business. I can appreciate what the other guys put their bodies through every night."

Wilson lives in Tampa with her husband of two years, fellow WWE star Billy Kidman, and her nine-month-old Maltese puppy Chloe, but spends most of the year on the road travelling all across the globe.

The lifestyle hasn't gotten old for her yet.

"I'd like to have kids at some point but I'm still young so I'm not in a rush. As long as I'm having fun I still want to do it."