Paige pulled back the curtain on Dusty Rhodes’ FCW promo class during a recent episode of What’s Your Story? With Steph McMahon, recounting a first lesson that involved an invisible letter, a screaming mentor, and a teenage student who had no idea what was happening.
The now one-half of the WWE Women’s Tag Team Champions, who returned at WrestleMania 42 alongside Brie Bella, called Rhodes the foundation of how she learned to work a microphone.
The Invisible Letter
Her very first promo in developmental was not a promo at all. It was Dusty handing her nothing and asking her to read it.
“I remember my first promo ever at FCW. We had a promo class, and Dusty gave me this invisible letter. He was like, ‘Read this letter.’ I was just reading it, and he stops me. He goes, ‘Stop. Why are you reading it like that? You’re reading it like a little girl. You’re reading it like you’re in your bedroom. This is a big deal! You’re in front of thousands of people.’ He was screaming at me. I was like, ‘I’m sorry, Dusty.’ He kept doing it, and I was getting so frustrated. I was like, ‘It’s a piece of paper! It’s an invisible piece of paper! What do you want from me?’”
The exercise was not about the letter. It was about forcing a young wrestler to find stakes and presence in a performance where nothing on the surface was real.
Singing Her Way Out Of The Box
Paige walked away from that first class determined to come back with something different. She went the opposite direction on purpose.
“I promised I’d deliver the next time. So the next promo I did, I went completely out of my comfort zone and I sang. I was like, ‘F it. I’m going to do something completely opposite to what he’s asking me,’ just so I could get more comfortable. I did this promo with Chavo Guerrero and we just sang together, and it went really well. He was like, ‘This is great. This is what I want to see.’ So then I started just doing promos where I would take scenes out of movies and just reenact them or do something a little different.”
The singing bit worked. The movie-scene re-enactments followed. Rhodes’ point landed: discomfort was the actual curriculum, and getting it wrong in class was how you stopped getting it wrong on television.
Paige’s Learning Tree
Rhodes passed away in June 2015, but the list of wrestlers who credit him as a formative voice keeps growing. Cody Rhodes has shared his own stories about his father’s booking style, and Paige is now another name in that line.
She is back in WWE television programming for the first time since 2017 and has already reunited with AJ Lee backstage at WrestleMania 42. The lessons she picked up in that FCW classroom, from a man who would scream at her over an invisible piece of paper, are the ones she is taking into the next chapter.