Losing your job in Vince McMahon’s company in the sooner days of skilled wrestling could almost be a prerequisite for entering the WWE Hall of Fame. The stories behind the dramatic, sometimes abrupt, firings to the next rise of a star to the purpose they’re considered for induction are rarely boring, and such is the case of former WWF Women’s Champion Alundra Blayze, also generally known as Madusa. Blayze was released from the corporate while she was still champion, resulting in one of the vital iconic images of the Monday Night Wars when she took the title to “WCW Monday Nitro” and dumped it in a trash can.
Blayze made history early in her wrestling profession when she was the primary foreign wrestler to sign with All Japan Women’s Pro-Wrestling and continued to interrupt barriers in women’s wrestling throughout the approaching years. While she initially began working in WCW, she joined McMahon’s WWF in 1993 to assist revitalize its women’s division which had been dead for years, and quickly became certainly one of the corporate’s top stars. She first won the re-instated Women’s Championship in December 1993 after wrestling in a six-woman tournament when she defeated Heidi Lee Morgan. She asked WWF management to herald recent women for her to wrestle, which included Japanese wrestler Bull Nakano, who would join Blayze years later within the Hall of Fame.
The pair’s feud over the championship wowed American fans with their Japanese-style matches. It led to one of the vital iconic women’s matches in the corporate’s history at SummerSlam in 1994, the one time Nakano and Blayze would wrestle on pay-per-view. Blayze pinned Nakano on the event however the pair would go on to feud through 1995. Blayze continued to interrupt barriers in WWF until all of it got here crashing down round her with little notice by the top of the yr.
Blayze Fired After Revitalizing Division
Blayze was released from WWE in 1995 while she was still holding the WWF Women’s Championship, which caused the autumn of the ladies’s division in McMahon’s company once more. Her release was likely attributable to cost-cutting measures in the corporate, which was recovering from various scandals, including the steroid trial of 1992-1993. Blayze talked about her release years later in 2022 on “The A2theK Wrestling Show” and he or she said she knew her firing wasn’t deliberate. She explained on the podcast that she was on the brink of leave her home when FedEx showed up and handed her an envelope. She said if she opened it and received the letter then the corporate would not need her services.
“I used to be like, ‘What? What the hell? What? This can be a rib, right? This can be a joke.’ Nope. Called the office, that is what it was,” she explained. “Just let me go. I used to be still their champion. [Vince] wasn’t considering right … He wasn’t in his right mind and after I say that, I knew it wasn’t hurtful or deliberate.”
Blayze said she believed McMahon wasn’t “considering straight” because he was going through not only the steroid scandal, but personal things, all that required the necessity for the then-WWF to downsize to forestall it from closing its doors entirely. She said on her own podcast, “Full Throttle” that she was upset and “just a little p*****” about her release. Blayze explained that she hadn’t been gone from WWE for a full day when Eric Bischoff called her and asked if she’d join WCW. She said it was Bischoff who got here up with the plan of dropping the WWF Women’s Championship within the trash on live TV.
Blayze in Wrestling Today
Blayze left the business voluntarily in 2001 due to how she felt women were getting used across the industry. Following the belt-trashing incident on “Nitro,” she was black-balled from WWF for just over 20 years. She became a successful monster truck driver and have become the second-longest tenured woman in the game and even drove a truck named Madusa. In March 2015 it was announced she can be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame under her Alundra Blayze name. She made an appearance the next day alongside the opposite inductees at WrestleMania 31.
She appeared in just a few documentaries for the WWE Network in the next years and entered the battle royal for a women’s championship opportunity at WWE’s first (and thus far only) all-women’s premium live event, Evolution, in October 2018, ending an 18-year hiatus from the ring. Most recently, Blayze inducted her fellow trailblazer in women’s wrestling, in addition to her history-making rival, Bull Nakano, into the WWE Hall of Fame ahead of WrestleMania 40 in April 2024.
