AEW star Tay Melo recently appeared on the “Close Up with Renee Paquette” podcast and spoke about her close friendship with fellow AEW wrestler Marina Shafir, as well as the challenges of incorporating other combat sports disciplines into professional wrestling. Melo, who has a background in judo, explained how she and Shafir, who has an MMA background, often discuss ideas.
“I love Marina. Love Marina. Marina is one of my good friends, personal friends. I would love- I wrestled her before. We did. Yeah. We did some stuff. It’s pretty fun. We talk a lot about ideas and everything. She’s literally one of my favorites to talk about life and everything.”
She also detailed the difficulty of making techniques from sports like judo work in a wrestling context.
“I remember talking to her a while ago because we go way back to so and it’s like things that we think it would work. It just doesn’t translate. Then sometimes people like ‘hey put a little bit more of your background in here.’ Then (I say) ‘believe me, I’m trying.’ It’s just like, we gotta test it out a lot of things and a lot of the things that we do there, it doesn’t work here because you gotta think like, ‘okay, here I’m trying to, be the smartest, fastest and win this as quick as I can here. Here I’m trying to do it without people realizing what I’m doing. So like, it’s just like yeah it’s different, you gotta adjust.”
Melo also shared a story about receiving valuable advice from veteran Samoa Joe.
“Like I remember I was trying to do an armbar with some other girl and then (Samoa) Joe saw and he’s looking, I’m like, ‘I know something’s not right, but I don’t know how to fix it,’ and I’m thinking, and then he comes and he helps me. I’m like, of course, someone with experience that can see both sides and understand both sides. So it’s great that Marina has Jon (Moxley) to help, you know, because he’s seeing both sides and he knows how to help her there too. So it’s a great mentor to have. So like having this little help from Joe right there.”