Toni Storm Talks About Her Early Wrestling Fandom & Possibly Meeting Her Father After Almost A Decade
Photo Credit: Bill Pritchard
Toni Storm was the latest guest on Chasing Glory with Lilian Garcia. Storm and Lilian talked to the NXT UK star from New Zealand and the former Women’s Champion disclosed what made her become a wrestling fan.
“It was around the time when it would be like Mickie [James] and Trish [Status] and Lita and you of course. I just fell heavily in love with it. I’ll never forget the moment where my mum was disgusted with the idea of wrestling and she was just giving me crap one day and she was just like, ‘are you gonna be like one of those wrestlers?’ I was like, ‘….yes. I am actually.’ And then that was the moment that I was like, yes, I am going to just do this and then I was just John Cena obsessed, Jeff Hardy obsessed, Shawn Michaels obsessed.”
Toni then described the first time she ever attended a WWE show was at a RAW in 2007, and even though she was in the last row (with binoculars) she loved ever bit of it.
“Yeah the first show I went to was RAW 2007 in Brisbane so, yeah.”
“Wow, how crazy I might have been there,” realized Lilian.
“Yeah, you were.”
“I was? That’s insane!’
Lilian asked what drew Toni to wrestling and she herself can’t put her finger on it.
“I’ll never know. That’s the thing. I was a really strange kid. No one could figure me out. I was one of those kids. So like, wrestling still to me is just something so different and out there so I was just like, ‘Yeah, no, this is me.'”
Lilian followed up and asked why Toni considered herself a strange kid,
“I was a bit of an outcast. I was strange. I was a bit lonely,” Storm said. “My upbringing was a little different. It was my mom and my grandparents for a lot of it and then stepfathers in and out and yeah, then I moved to Australia when I was like four.”
Toni doesn’t want people to think that she had rough upbringing, however.
“Yeah, it wasn’t a tragic childhood or anything, but yeah I was definitely like very different like right from the start
When asked about her biological father, Toni had some serendipitous news to share.
“He’s made contact like, two days ago with my mom, not to me. So it’s funny we talk about this cause as it happens.” Encountering something like this, there’s certainly some confusion that comes with it for Storm, but knows her dad wasn’t a bad person from brief meetings when she was younger.
“For 24 years had to come with the fact that I simply won’t have a father in my life, but then he like popped back up and I’m like, ‘Oh, this is weird. Yeah,'” said Storm. “My mom and him never had any like, they didn’t hate each other or anything. He was never in my life and I never quite understood it.”
“Yeah, yeah. So I’m gonna meet him soon, I guess?”
“I figured I might as well. Life’s too short.”
(Transcription credit should go to @DominicDeAngelo of WrestleZone)
You can listen to the entire episode of Chasing Glory below:
Listen to “Toni Storm – Dealing with Betrayal, Anxiety and Depression” on Spreaker.