PREVIOUS POST - MY VISION FOR WRESTLING
Amanda Juaréz-Montgomery was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1986 to the unmarried couple of Puerto Rican hospital worker Dariel Juaréz and American university tutor Gail Montgomery, who raised Amanda as a single mother after Dariel died in a car accident, 1989. Since her father died before she reached age 3, Amanda's mother was the only parent she knew.
By Amanda's 5th birthday in 1991, she had moved with Gail to Green Bay, Wisconsin USA. Within weeks of moving to Green Bay, Amanda was watching WF1 on Sunday mornings and becoming an avid wrestling fan. Her favourite wrestlers were Bert "The Sniper" Hearth and "The Break-Up Boy" Shane Mackles.
By 1994, after three years of slamming cushions into the sofa when her mother wasn't looking, Amanda, age 8, decided to pursue wrestling seriously. Gail was taking self-defence classes at a gym and took Amanda with her to the kid's classes. Amanda made as much use of the mats and punching bags as she could, asking her instructors about what she'd need to do to grow up healthy and strong. It pleased Gail to start seeing her daughter rigidly stick to eating fruit and drinking milk.
Before long, Amanda was offering to help do odd jobs at the gym while waiting for her mother's class to end. In return for her help, she would be granted twenty minutes use of the crash mats and trampolines, which she took completely seriously, learning to do precise dives and flips the way she saw wrestlers do on TV, trying to match the neatness and precision of her hero, Bert Hearth. Gail never saw her daughter do anything dangerous since she was in her own class. This routine continued for two years and Amanda essentially taught herself the basics of wrestling.
The teenage son of Gail's self-defence tutor, himself a wrestling fan who caught Amanda doing the Shane Mackles elbow drop onto a crash mat one evening, pulled Amanda aside and clued her in to the fact that wrestling was a performance. Amanda had sort-of guessed this by now, but wasn't sure how she was supposed to be thrown onto the floor without being hurt.
After borrowing the magazine where the tutor's son read about the secret tricks of wrestling, Amanda, if anything MORE enthusiastic about wrestling now that she knew it "didn't actually hurt," tried to master those secret tricks, observing the crisp technique with which Bert Hearth executed those tricks on TV and trying to mimic them on a crash mat as closely as she could, before stepping up her game and trying on a regular mat. By 1996, age 10, Amanda could essentially wrestle a gripping match with an invisible opponent. She knew though that she needed legitimate wrestling training as soon as possible.
At this point, Gail finally got to see Amanda show off her self-developed skill. Gail was disappointed that Amanda had been practising such dangerous moves behind her back for so long, but was happy to see Amanda take her health and her fitness so seriously, admitting that Amanda was good, VERY good in fact at moving like a wrestler. She wasn't convinced however that wrestling was a job that the grown-up Amanda would have enough respect for, wrestling was surely just some silly thing that she would like as a child, then grow out of.
Amanda responded to this by showing Gail the newest WF1 video of the time, the special event WrestleFrenzy 12, and one particularly good match, the 60-minute world-championship fight between Bert Hearth and Shane Mackles. Gail enjoyed the match, seeing wrestling's potential as an extraordinary medium: a sport performed like a dance to amplify the drama and minimise the injury, all the exciting aspects of a sport, none of the boring aspects. If this is what Amanda wanted to pursue, she was committed to it and she had the exceptional promise she was showing her mother, Gail was only too happy to support her.
From age 10 onward, Amanda worked any job she could to save up the money to train professionally, washing cars door-to-door, delivering papers, working the counter of a corner shop on Saturdays and so on. She worked with militant efficiency at school to keep teachers off her back and spent the rest of her time developing whatever wrestling skills she could on her own. Gail meanwhile carried out as much research as she could on wrestling's inner-workings, keeping Amanda on top of what skills she needed to develop and judging Amanda's ability to perform with incisive honesty. All the while, the two searched for the ideal place for Amanda to train.
In 1998, at age 12, Amanda went with Gail to Minneapolis Minnesota, four-hours drive away from Green Bay, to meet a top trainer by the name of Edmund Pikey. Amanda made a first impression by running into the ring at Pikey's training school, climbing onto the corner post and delivering a passionate, trash-talking rant about her desire to be trained, her rigorous self-development and her sacrifices to devote herself to wrestling. She ended her rant with a flawless corkscrew somersault from the corner post into the ring, landing on her feet. "I'm Amanda Juaréz-Montgomery, your next prodigy" she stated, before taking an invisible kick to the face and comedically falling on her back, in a perfect flat-back fall that wrestlers had to be able to pull off precisely and safely numerous times a match.
Pikey was so impressed with Amanda's first impression that, in spite of her living four hours away and being much younger than his other students, all of which were male, he gave Amanda admission to his training school in an instant. For the next three years, Gail would drive Amanda to Minneapolis and back every weekend, supervising her daughter's training with formidable care, watching as the future wrestling legend Ariel Montgomery rapidly developed in front of her eyes.
By 1998 though, wrestling had changed drastically. WF1's increasing financial failure prompted the company to abandon it's family-friendly image, broadcasting edgier, more adult-based content. Wrestlers were no longer colorful heroes of virtue, they were violent, amoral wrongdoers. Women were only showcased in the ring as blatantly sexualised props for men to use and abuse. This stark change of tone brought WF1 great commercial success, but left worrying implications about the use of women in wrestling's future.
The most notable change for Amanda was that her favourite wrestler Bert Hearth left WF1 in 1997 after a controversial ending to a Montreal wrestling show. Hearth had been scripted to defeat Shane Mackles and retain the world championship in his native Canada, but WF1 owner Lazarus Hill, in a thoroughly disrespectful display, had the match ending changed on-air without Hearth knowing, making Mackles look like he had beaten Hearth with his own signature submission hold. Lazarus Hill had his major Canadian star and family-friendly icon leave his company utterly disgraced. This event was infamously dubbed "The Great Canadian Screwery." For Amanda, the event was the darkest hour in her wrestling childhood.
As Gail watched wrestling's on-screen treatment of women deteriorate, she began to inform her daughter, now shifting into puberty, of what it means when women are presented on TV the way WF1 has started to present them, teaching Amanda the difference between women taking ownership of their sexuality and men taking that ownership. Amanda is warned about the dangers of impressionable men like the young viewers of WF1 having their perceptions of women formed by perverted, but powerful men in broadcasting like Lazarus Hill (Amanda's least favourite person at this time, due to the Great Canadian Screwery) and how Amanda has a responsibility to not simply play into men like Hill's distorted, profit-driven philosophies about women.
Teenage Amanda enjoyed presenting herself in a glamourous, flirty way, wanting to tap into what made the flamboyant Break-Up Boy Shane Mackles so fun to watch. In light of her mother's advice, Amanda made it clear to herself that companies like WF1 will only get to showcase the brand of sexiness SHE brings to the company, not a brand the company defines for her. She wanted as a wrestler to be fun for girls like herself to watch, just as Bert Hearth and Shane Mackles were for her. Watching the edgier new WF1, she saw when and why the women stopped being fun to watch, when the company made them striptease in front of crowds or be assaulted by men while pretending to be pregnant for shock ratings, and she vowed never to let a company use her for ends like that.
By 2001, age 15, Amanda, nicknamed "Ariel" by her mother due to her skill at springing high off the top rope to hit diving attacks, was ready to wrestle professionally after her meteoric development under Edmund Pikey. Though her dream job was about to become a reality, 2001 would be the most devastating and tragic year of Amanda's life. In April 2001, Gail Montgomery was lost to breast cancer.
Seeing how indomitable her mother was in her final days, Amanda would not allow herself to be defeated by grief, no matter how immense. Gail stuck with Amanda through everything she worked so hard for. She was Amanda's one friend, her life partner and guardian angel. No-one in her life would ever be so supportive of her ever again. Amanda knew now that she had to be more than just an entertaining wrestler, for how hard her mother backed her, Amanda had to become the absolute greatest wrestler of all time, and justify in the biggest way imaginable her mother's faith in her.
As an eternal tribute and love letter to her mother, Amanda would now only respond to Gail's pet-name for her, "Ariel." In December 2001, Ariel began her fifteen-year career as a professional wrestler.
