The WWE women’s tag team champions Tamina and Natalya were the latest guests on Renee Paquette’s Oral Sessions podcast to discuss all things pro-wrestling, most notably how Natalya’s husband, former WWE wrestler turned producer Tyson Kidd, has become a huge advocate for the women’s division, and a true mastermind at laying out matchups. Highlights are below.
Natalya on how Kidd is a huge advocate for the division:
He’s a huge advocate for the girls and he cares so much for the girls. What I’ve started to realize, and I said this last night in the locker room, TJ takes on the women’s match as if they’re his own, because he can’t compete anymore. He actually told Vince the other day, they had a conversation, he said ‘I never realized that being a producer would be more fulfilling to me, working with the women, than it would ever be for me in my own wrestling career. That I’ve become so fulfilled in this role of seeing other people rise to the occasion, that it means so much more to me than anything I ever did in my career.’ Vince said ‘TJ that makes me so happy.’ And TJ was like ‘I just can’t even put it into words how much working with the girls and seeing them accomplish their dreams. It means so much to me. It’s like the biggest thing I’ve ever done in my career. In my twenty years of being a pro wrestler, this, this is my WrestleMania moment.”‘
Tamina says that Kidd is a mastermind at laying out matches, and she wouldn’t know what the division would do without him:
Eleven years ago when we first went up against them, I remember just the littlest things, TJ was already in that mind frame. He was wanting to make the matches mean something and blow them out of the water. I remember doing the first matches on the show. On the house show, the first match is going to build and blow everybody up. They would blow it out of the water. Or if they were the main even they’d blow it out of the water. That’s just TJ’s mind frame. You fast forward to him becoming a producer and doing all these things. You can’t even imagine. He gets a million text messages a day because we’re all picking his brain. This man is a mastermind behind everything we all due, and he gets every single girl. That’s what the difference is. He knows everyone’s moves, he knows how to protect, he knows how to make everything great and amazing. I really don’t know what we’d do without TJ. That’s the whole point to this whole thing. He is that mastermind behind it all and he executes everything and he gives us that confidence to come through with whatever it is we put together. That’s him and he’s like that. He is a strong ass man. He is a real man in that sense, but he loves and gives everything to us. Everything.
Natalya on how much Kidd enjoys producing after his in-ring career ended:
To see TJ go ‘I enjoy this role that I’m in more right now way more than I ever enjoyed my own career. To watch Tamina reach her dreams, to watch Sasha main event WrestleMania with Bianca. To watch Bianca discover something inside of herself that she didn’t even know she had. To see Ruby and Liv shine, Liv comes and trains with us. Liv just picks TJ’s brain and just has so much passion. TJ is so, so, so, so inspired by the women. And like, as hard as it is to say, I just feel like TJ’s injury, in some ways, was this blessing in disguise. That it helped him find something inside of himself, that he didn’t know he had, to inspire a generation of women to shoot with the stars. So that’s the happy ending of all of it. We are working with somebody that’s so incredible that’s challenging us to be the best, and to be our very best.
(H/T and transcribed by Wrestling Inc.)