As noted, Nita Strauss, the female guitar player who performed Shinsuke Nakamura’s ring entrance at WrestleMania 34 earlier this year, recently spoke with Raj Giri of Wrestling INC for an interview. Featured below are some of the highlights.
On getting into pro wrestling because of her current boyfriend: “I started watching when I started dating my boyfriend, Josh, maybe three years ago. He works in the [pro] wrestling industry and he works with a lot of wrestlers and indie promotions, so a few months after we started dating, he said, ‘I want to watch WrestleMania.’ And I was like, ‘WrestleMania?’ I didn’t know anything about it. I thought it was for kids. Like, people who don’t understand wrestling don’t understand its reach and how cool it is, so we watched it. We got the [WWE] Network and we watched it. When the show was over, I asked him, ‘what do you like about this?’ You’re dating someone new and you want to understand their interests, so I was like, ‘tell me what you like about this. What is cool about this? Why do you like this so much?’ So he put on the Monday Night Wars, the series the Network did about the Monday Night Wars, and that got me hooked. The story, the way it all happened with WCW and WWE or WWF at the time, it just got me completely hooked and from that moment forward, I’ve always been on the Network, just watching stuff myself and got super into it. We got to indies shows. We go to PCW ULTRA all the time. It’s just a fun community to be a part of.”
On if she likes today’s product or the “Attitude Era” style better: “It’s different, right? That’s like saying, ‘would you rather listen to Led Zeppelin or Avenged Sevenfold?’ It’s apples and oranges, I think. I think the old stuff has better storylines and the new stuff has maybe better technique. In wrestling, they’re doing crazier tricks that the older wrestlers weren’t doing, so it’s different. I like both.”
On Ronda Rousey’s WrestleMania debut being great and proving doubters wrong: “Yes, actually, we’re going over to Ronda’s today to barbecue. Yeah, she’s so awesome and I’ve been a fan of hers from her MMA days, so it’s so cool to see her transition so well. And that was the other [WrestleMania] match I was really excited for. She absolutely killed it. It really was [a great debut]. I know a lot of people were skeptical that she wouldn’t be able to transition from MMA to [pro] wrestling and not be awkward and she did it so well. I haven’t heard a single person say that she didn’t perform well that day.”
Check out more from the Nita Strauss interview at WrestlingInc.com.
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