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Former WWE star AJ Mendez-Brooks (aka the former AJ Lee) appeared earlier this week on NBC's Last Call with Carson Daily in a segment titled Last Call Spotlight to promote her new autobiography Crazy Is My Superpower: How I Triumphed by Breaking Bones, Breaking Hearts, and Breaking the Rules.
Daly noted that Brooks is now a retired professional wrestler and has a best-selling autobiography. In the piece, Mendez said she had been referred to as many things in her life, including nerdy, a tomboy, stubborn, ugly and loud. She said that she's been especially labeled crazy but now she's less likely throw things and put people through tables.
Mendez said her book is essentially about taking the things that society feels "are your greatest flaws and making them your greatest strengths." She talked about her first ten year life plan, which included making it to WWE. She wanted to get through developmental, to have an action figure with "exaggerating physical features" and joked about how tiny she was and to be champion. Growing up, she lives in a volatile family in dangerous neighborhoods and her parents had her siblings practice fighting with each other so they could defend themselves.
She talked about her injuries, including a scar created when her tooth cut through her own face and scratched the forehead of another woman she was wrestling. This led into how women's wrestling has changed with Mendez noting that when she came to WWE, many women were being scouted via modeling jobs and the thought process was that they could take any pretty woman and make them a wrestler. That was never going to be her way in, so she went and trained at a wrestling school and did independent wrestling for as long as she could. Her goal was to change the definition of what wrestling could be. The women had been used as props and background characters and bra and pantie matches.
Mendez told a story of being brought in to do a promo with no notice and her "flight or fight" response was to just be a total jerk and a "real douchebag" and insulted everyone in the room. After that, everyone paid attention to her during her WWE tryout. She described herself as having to be like a spider-monkey in the ring because she couldn't ever be that big physically imposing character.
Lee described pro wrestling as "Cirque du Soliel having a love child with SNL." She said there was a "strange dance" of acting as if you are murdering someone while protecting their life 30 times over the course of a match. Mendez said the pinnacle of the art-form is when management feels your skills and marketability are good enough to be their champion. She said she had 14 years of her life where she wanted to say she is the best, and when she got to hold the belt, it meant she was.
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