Beth Phoenix stopped trying to emulate Trish but the Glamazon still propelled her into a new “stratusphere” in WWE.
The Stories with Brisco and Bradshaw podcast recently welcomed Beth Phoenix to the show, and the trio discussed her evolution as a wrestler. Beth made her WWE debut as a babyface that got involved in the Mickie James and Trish Stratus feud. Beth attacked Mickie, then a heel, for “ruining her life” and worked for several weeks with Trish in her corner. Phoenix broke her jaw in a match against Victoria on June 5, 2006, and she wouldn’t return to WWE television for more than a year.
When she came back in the summer of 2007, Beth Phoenix was now calling herself “The Glamazon”. She explained to Gerald Brisco and JBL how the name came about, as well as how she shifted her wrestling style.
“I was a babyface, and then I got injured. I broke my jaw like four or five weeks in, it was very early. Then they sent me back to OVW to heal and I was thinking to myself, ‘oh well, I’ll be back’ and I think they said something like it would be six to eight weeks on the jaw, and I’m thinking they’ll fast track me back. I didn’t know how it worked, I assumed my spot was there waiting for me. Well six to eight weeks went, three months went, six months went, and then nine months went and I started to panic,” Phoenix explained. “I went, ‘Oh no, they’re not going to bring me back?’ I was lost in the shuffle and that’s when I started having to cook up some schemes on how to get noticed again. I didn’t realize that it wouldn’t just be on a platter.”
Phoenix says the Glamazon name came about because she knew she needed something that would get her noticed. She heard the name on an episode of Sex And The City and knew she was onto something, but she ended up changing more than just her moniker. In hindsight, Phoenix believes that year rehabbing in OVW was the most valuable in her career because it allowed her time to find herself.
“I stopped trying to be something I wasn’t. I stopped trying to be like a clone of Trish Stratus, that’s something I was trying to be, the next Trish,” she explained, “and I’m not [her]. Nobody will ever fill those shoes and in that year, that’s what I did. I heard the word ‘glamazon’ on Sex And The City and I was like ‘oh man, that sounds like a wrestling name. That could be my wrestling name!’ And so I very crudely had our seamstress just sew ‘Glamazon’ on the butt of my pants, on my just plain-looking normal gear.
“Then I started wrestling different. I started doing more power moves and I started trying to wrestle like Umaga instead of like Trish. What happened was because of the landscape of the women at that time, even though I’m not a six-foot-tall woman,” Phoenix said, “I tried to wrestle like that and it created a dynamic in our matches that as a heel I can give the babyface more of a mountain to climb. So once I started telling that story in my matches, I found I really hit a groove.
Beth spoke about having a great dynamic with Candice Michelle and getting a huge push, noting it all stemmed from finding her character.
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