During an appearance on Chris Jericho’s podcast, Tessa Blanchard commented on her last name and how it has affected her:
“I broke my shoulder, or my collarbone, I shouldn’t say my shoulder, and I had surgery, six screws and a plate in here. I was wrestling a girl at Lucha Underground and the girl that did this to me told me, ‘Tessa, I didn’t have a last name in this business. I had to work for everything that I had.’ And that’s what she told me. Things like that would happen quite often where a girl in Japan told me, ‘Tessa, you’re only here because of your dad’. And that would happen to me left and right, left and right and one thing that I pride myself on is my mental strength.”
“I think that a lot of females can’t hold a candle to me when it comes to mental strength because that kind of shit doesn’t even go in one ear to go out the other. And I believe that if you have that mental strength, you can take any situation and change it into the way that you think about it and make it a positive thing, and I had to find that because those are the kind of things that would really eat you up and I feel like having a name sometimes is a little bit harder because I never wanted to disappoint my grandpa or my dad or my step-dad. I wanna carry on their legacy and do them proud but also create my own at the same time and that’s really a difficult thing, because there’s plenty of generational wrestlers who people say that about, ‘You’re only where you are because of this or because of this, not because of hard work’ and I was never gonna let that be the case. I wanted to go and I wanted to drive the miles for no pay, I wanted to set up the rings, I wanted to set up the chairs, I wanted to go to training six-seven days a week for hours upon hours and blow myself up to where I can only work on instinct. I wanted to sleep in my car. I wanted to do all of that.”
“No matter what it is, I wanna be great. I wanna be be the best at it. My last name, I’ve always said, it might get my foot in the door, it might get me in front of the right people, it might get an opportunity, but at the end of the day when I get in the ring it doesn’t do jack shit for me. It doesn’t take the bumps, it doesn’t drive the miles, it doesn’t do any of that.”
