When Bayley steps inside the ring at SummerSlam on Saturday, Aug. 3 in Cleveland, the WWE Women’s Champion will be exactly where she’s always meant to be.
Bayley, as the 35-year-old Pamela Martinez goes by when in the ring, will defend her world championship against Nia Jax in one of the main events at WWE’s marquee summer event this weekend at Cleveland Browns Stadium. The four-time world champion spoke with PEOPLE ahead of the match against Jax, a second cousin of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, one of the former WWE stars she first looked up to when she began watching pro wrestling when she was 10 years old.
“Everything just really clicked for me about it,” Bayley says, thinking back to her childhood obsession with wrestling. “I’d watch wrestling, I’d write about it at school. There wasn’t a paper in English that I didn’t write about wrestling. I always found an excuse to make everything about wrestling. It wasn’t hard. It was always on my mind.”
Growing up playing youth basketball, the San Jose, Calif., native soon started putting more and more focus on the ring and found herself watching Monday Night RAW every week. The young WWE fan took to major stars like Johnson and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, but found a particular interest when the women stepped between the ropes.
WWE’s Bayley in June 2024.
WWE/Getty
“They were just the coolest,” Bayley says now, remembering late-1990s and early-2000s pros like Ivory, Gail Kim, Lita and Trish Stratus. “It was so much fun. The women back then were especially such badass athletes, you know? They were all so different. I think that’s what really drew me to it.”
At 18, a time when most teenagers are deciding what to do with the rest of their lives, Bayley chose wrestling and began training at a local gym in the Bay Area with hopes of one day being like the women she saw on TV. “My obsession for it just kept growing,” she says. “I was a little bit of a shy kid, and I just found wrestling as a way to show personality, or to be goofy or just be out of control sometimes, and it’d be okay. Everything just really clicked for me about it.”
Bayley traveled the country wrestling for small independent promotions, having her first matches in gymnasiums and bingo halls to crowds of no more than a couple dozen curious fans. By the time she turned 22, Bayley earned a tryout with WWE and soon made her in-ring debut with NXT, the pro wrestling company’s developmental program where producers and trainers work to develop future stars.
At first, she struggled to adjust to WWE’s character-driven style — a show where over-the-top, superhero-like stars such as Hulk Hogan and John Cena grew larger than life. “I wasn’t prepared to be a character,” she says. “In my mind, all I thought about was wrestling. And all these other things, you know, being a professional, looking the part, and making sure that you could be entertaining was all overwhelming for me. Like, I didn’t even factor those things in at first.”
With encouragement from mentors like the late Dusty Rhodes who worked with WWE up-and-comers in NXT, Bayley eventually unlocked the secret most successful pro wrestlers discover: “Be yourself.” And soon after, she began coming out to the ring as a character that was very much an exaggerated extension of herself: a WWE superfan, awestruck that she had made it to the big stage.
Her character looked to fellow WWE stars with wonder and amazement, just like she did when she was a kid. The crowd would laugh when she asked her competitors — friend and foe — for a hug when they stepped in the ring. Bayley’s finishing move even became an overexcited bear hug, tossing her arms around her opponent, slamming them to the mat and then laying on top of her opponent while still holding onto the hug as the referee called “1-2-3!”
It wasn’t long before fans latched onto the endearing humor behind the over-expressive character — especially Bayley’s commitment to the bit — and soon her career took off.
Meanwhile, women’s wrestling was going through a transformative time — spearheaded by highly touted matches she and fellow stars like Sasha Banks, Charlotte Flair and Becky Lynch put on during their early careers in NXT.
“It was right around 2014 when everything really started kicking in and we started making the whole world notice,” Bayley says. “[WWE Chief Content Officer Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque] gave us the opportunity, and there were so many women who now had the platform to show what we could do. We weren’t just really good in the ring, but we were really good characters that people were clinging to.”
In August 2016, Bayley finally made her debut on Monday Night RAW, the same weekly program she grew up watching. The now-WWE champion says her younger self would be “mind blown” at what she’s accomplished in her career: becoming the first woman in WWE history to become a “Grand Slam Champion,” having won the WWE Raw Women’s Championship, the WWE SmackDown Women’s Championship and the WWE Women’s Tag Team Championship, as well as the WWE’s NXT Women’s Championship.
Even more mind blowing for Bayley, a handful of WWE’s new stars like Roxanne Perez, Cora Jade, Indi Hartwell and more say they grew up watching her on Monday Night RAW, inspiring them to step in the ring. “And all of them are here, all of them are successful, and all of them are former champions,” Bayley points out. “And I was somebody they looked up to? I feel proud that now I can be somebody kids look up to and have success built off that. It’s beautiful.”
