Wrestling fans have tuned in to WWE LFG on A&E these past three months and watched the journey of 16 Performance Center hopefuls as they battled it out to win a NXT contract.
With four legends in The Undertaker, Booker T, Bubba Ray Dudley and Mickie James at the helm as coaches, these recruits competed in the ring, on the microphone and as characters to gain points for their teams, while gaining the attention and showing their own personal improvement.
After the long, grueling process, two Future Greats emerged as the winners Sunday night in Team Undertaker’s Tyra Mae Steele and Team Booker T’s Jasper Troy.
“I’m so excited. It’s been a long time coming. I swear I’ve just been waiting for my moment to shine,” Tyra Mae Steele told The Takedown On SI. “I just feel elated. I just feel so, so freaking blessed.”
Steele, real name Tamyra Mensah-Stock, came into the first season of WWE LFG with the most impressive credentials and resumé of anyone in the entire series, being a 2020 Olympic Gold Medalist in women’s freestyle wrestling.
Jasper Troy, meantime, came in as one of the lesser known WWE PC recruits with a background in football, but he wound up standing head and shoulders above all the other male competitors. Both in stature and with his performances throughout the 15 episode run.
“I’m just excited I didn’t take my foot off the gas after winning,” Troy said. “If anything I was so looking forward to the end of the show and I was so wrapped up around ‘winning and winning and winning’ and then I just had a moment where I was like ‘this isn’t the end, and I don’t know why it feels like the end.'”
“This isn’t a movie where the movie ends and cuts to black. This is just the beginning… we won the show and I was excited and for a while, I was riding that wave, but then I had to get back to shore and realize, ‘is this the only time you want to be at the top?'”
Coming to the realization that this is a huge achievement for his career, Jasper admitted that he’s ready for what’s next in his journey in WWE.
“This is the first thing I ever won. I’ve never won a championship or a playoff, you know. So to me, this is like a Super Bowl moment. But I see how someone like DeVonta Smith or A.J. Brown will be like, ‘winning the Super Bowl was cool, but now it’s like what’s next?'”
To secure their victory in the season finale of WWE LFG, both Steele and Troy competed at Madison Square Garden for the first time. In the World’s Most Famous Arena, Tyra faced fellow finalist and Team Bubba standout Zena Sterling, while Jasper went one-on-one with Shiloh Hill of Team Undertaker.
The experience was once-in-a-lifetime for both stars who described how it felt to wrestle in front of the biggest audience of their careers to date.
“Man, when I first walked into The Garden, I was like, ‘ah oh okay not a lot of people, alright.’ The seats were empty though. Fast forward to my match, I looked back into that same stand, and I was like, ‘OH MY GOSH, this is crazy,” Steele recalled.
“Dude, I mean for me, MSG was like, ‘man, are they gonna care when I hit the curtain? Are they gonna care? How hard are we gonna work tonight to get them?’ That’s all I’m thinking about because I’m like it don’t matter what we speak on in the back,” Troy said.
“It’s all about when we get in the ring, are we getting reactions? This is what we dictate good matches off of, so for me, the moment I hit that ring and I faced the hard cam and then I looked back into that sea of people, I was just like, ‘oh my gosh, this isn’t the PC, we’re not in Orlando anymore (laughs).”
Steele described the feeling of being in front of the MSG crowd as something unlike anything she has ever experienced before, but she was still able to tune in with them.
“It is just absolutely incredible and the fact that I got to perform in front of them, like some people say they can’t hear the crowd when they’re wrestling, that’s never been me.”
“I have always been in tune with everything around me, but people think that I’m not in tune. But no, I am. I’m listening, I’m aware and I’m cognizant. And when I was in The Garden, I can hear them booing, I could even hear them saying ‘one more time.’ And I was like (laughs), ‘I can get used to this.'”
It took Jasper a little while longer into his match before he started to feel the energy of that Madison Square Garden audience, but once he did, everything was taken to the next level.
“Once I felt them, once I felt that roar, it was like, ‘okay we got them, that’s it.’ Now I’m locked in… it just got easy. I was just taken aback, because I’m not used to that, I’m used to having to work through the backend of my matches to have the crowd invested,” Troy said. “They were giving us energy and they wanted to see us perform, and for me, that was the most humbling thing.”
The biggest surprise for the WWE LFG male winner was the crowd responding to him and giving him a reaction, despite not being a regular star on NXT weekly television.
“Bro I’m a nobody. You don’t know me. You may have seen me on LFG, but I’m not like, you know, Trick Williams. I’m not like guys you see on NXT every Tuesday and you’re reacting for me? You’re booing me, you’re popping for me, and I’m like, I appreciate it, so let me hear you. Let me interact with you… that’s the one thing I love about wrestling is the crowd is an opponent, whether they’re with you or against you.”
“The Real Deal” Tyra Mae Steele felt validated in her belief in herself working in front of the sold-out house and feeling appreciated by the crowd.
“It honestly, it inflated my ego and it just made me feel that I was in the right place, that I was around the right people, and I know there’s gonna be haters and weird people, but for every one hater, for every one weird person, there’s 500 awesome people that love and appreciate me and I’m paying attention to those people. I love that the energy that they have and that they give me. I love it because I feel like I reciprocate that with ease.”
“I feel like my natural ability to have just a bright attitude, they see it and they welcome it and they receive it and they bring it back and I felt that at The Garden. It was so good.”
Each winner of WWE LFG had different journeys to get to the finals. While Tyra had the unbelievable accomplishment of an Olympic Gold Medal, Jasper did not have the same notoriety coming in.
In what became a turning point for his season, Troy stepped up to the plate when multi-time WWE Champion CM Punk came in for a guest appearance and gave the “Future Greats” their opportunity to cut a promo.
Booker T’s “Monster” grabbed the attention of the legends and the viewing audience when he delivered a superb speech about being a Punk fan who felt abandoned by his departure from WWE in 2014 and now he wanted to make him bend a knee when they met in the ring.
“I knew what it was and I wanted to be first. He was like, ‘who wants to go first?’ I got up, went to the front of the room, cut a promo and then after that, everyone was like, ‘okay I know who he is now.’ Like, follow that. And I just sat back down and I was like, ‘I mean this is what I do.’ This is something I’ve been waiting for. I have been waiting for a moment to get that microphone in my hands and express myself.”
When word got around that the self-proclaimed ‘Best in the World’ was coming to the PC to talk to the LFG recruits, Troy knew this was his first real opportunity to break out on the show. Even if there wasn’t going to be an open promo day, he was going to be ready for one.
“I was sitting there that morning and the moment they said we gotta sit on the floor, I got hot because I was like, ‘I ain’t about to sit on this floor for 60 minutes, I’m just not (laughs).’ That’s the reason Chris (Island) was catching so many strays is I was hot. I was like, ‘I’m grown man bro and you got me sitting crisscross apple sauce on this floor.’ And you know I’m not about to just sit here like I’m not. I’m telling you I was one of those kids in school who caused trouble.”
Wanting to break any preconceived notions about him due to his six foot, five inch and 251 pound size, “The Reaper” Jasper Troy took the opportunity to speak on the mic against Punk and didn’t look back.
“When I cut that promo man, it was a lot of passion, it was a lot of intensity and it was a lot of, I need to show people I’m not just intimidating force. I’m not just the big guy in the ring and this isn’t 2000’s wrestling where the big man is quiet and unspoken. It’s not that era anymore, we gotta electrify the audience in every way we can.”
“I think looking into CM Punk’s face is one of those things where I was like, ‘Have I earned this yet? Have I earned the right to sit here and cut this promo on CM Punk like me and him are about to main event SummerSlam?.’ And I just took it man. I just took it. I saw a moment and I just took it.”
For Tyra Mae, she faced some doubts from her legendary coaches due to not always progressing at the rate they expected her to progress. Her breakout moment happened in two parts.
First, Steele also took the chance to get on the microphone and cut an emotional promo about her journey in life, becoming vulnerable for the first time on WWE LFG. Second, it was in a heated viral confessional against one of the coaches, Bubba Ray Dudley.
“My promo was too long, so everything wasn’t put into LFG, but when I was finished Undertaker had told me, ‘That is the passion that I want to see. Hang on to that, bring all that passion, it was real to you and I felt it.'”
“I had people crying. What you guys saw on the show was only a snippet, and so I thought about what Taker said, and I said, ‘Hold this passion. What does that mean? That means I have to open myself up.’ I hate, I despise with a burning passion bringing people in. I hate, hate, hate, hate it.”
“I never heard her say she hates something, I like this (everyone laughs),” Jasper hilariously responded.
“It’s nothing against anyone, it’s just that I have a hard time trusting people, because I have been scarred so many times from people that I have trusted and so it takes a lot,” Steele continued. “I truly just opened my heart and I hated doing that, but when I got that validation from The Undertaker, when I was crying, I was like, ‘fudge, I freaking hate that I opened myself up,’ he was like, ‘that’s it.”
After Bubba Ray Dudley criticized her for smiling too much, Steele went off with a passionate speech during a confessional that got many fans talking about her determination coming off the screen.
“When Bubba told me that I smile too much, I went ‘this snooty little, he don’t even know me, he don’t know nothing about me, and he wants to put that characterization that I smile too much.’ I immediately went to Undertaker and I went, ‘oh I’m gonna respect him to his face, but when I get to that confessional, boy I’m going off, I’m going off and they can cut it if they don’t like it, but I’m gonna say what I need to say because ain’t nobody gonna be disrespectful to me.”
Describing that this side of herself was a bit of her mother, Steele further went into detail about how she honors her mom with the “Mae” part of her WWE ring name.
“They got a little bit of the ‘Mae.’ I had tweeted something and I said, ‘Hey, Tyra Mae Steele, that Mae in my name, that’s my momma.’ And my mom, I grew up with her. My mom, she would slap the taste out of my mouth if I said something as remotely as a batted eye when I was disrespectful, just anything if I was rude, (slap noise),” Tyra explained.
“And that is what I am embodying in the Tyra Mae Steele, so when Bubba was disrespectful, oh yeah he had already made his bed. It was done, it was done, done, done. Done! So, yeah that’s the little backstory behind that one, but I’m loving. Like we can love on each other, but the moment you stomp on my toe, oh I had permission to be myself, so I’m gonna do it.”
While Tyra has a very pleasant, kind and genuinely warm personality, the WWE gives her the chance to show the fierceness that made her a world champion and Olympic Gold Medalist before signing with the promotion.
“And that’s what so exciting about the WWE, people see that I’m bubbly and I have a bunch of expression, but they don’t see the Olympic Gold Medalist, the fierceness behind it and now I actually get to embody it with my voice, with my expression and I freaking love it.”
The final episode of Season One for WWE LFG aired on Sunday, May 18th on A&E Network. You can see the rest of this interview with LFG winners, Tyra Mae Steele and Jasper Troy at The Takedown On SI YouTube channel.
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