Bianca Belair had quite the showing at last night’s NXT TakeOver Portland as she put up a fighting effort against Rhea Ripley for the NXT Championship. This past week she spoke with Lilian Garcia on Chasing Glory about her career and life trajectory so far.
Belair met her husband Montez Ford because of her leap into wrestling and she shared with Lilian how she immediately had an attraction to one half of the Street Profits.
“I had an immediate crush on him, but he got hurt for awhile and he disappeared for a little while, for a couple months when I first started, but it was kind of just – it was just an immediate connection and we kind have been inseparable ever since and we got married. It’s just crazy because we come from two completely different sides of the world. He was a marine, he was in the military and I was just living life and going to college and working in Atlanta. And if it hadn’t have been for WWE and coming into wrestling, like I found my husband through wrestling and wrestling has brought me so much joy and my husband and it brought me this career that I can’t imagine myself doing anything else and man, I’m just blessed.”
Ford certainly showcases his persona each and every week on Raw and Belair tells Lilian that Montez was a huge influence on her in-ring style, particularly her utilizing her long braid as a weapon.
“Yeah he definitely helped me come up with it. So I’m a huge Beyonce fan and she had a concert, she was on tour, she had this long braid and she was like dancing with it and it just caught my eye. And I’m like, ‘I want to do that,’ and if that catches my eye and wrestling’s about like standing out and like being able to catch people’s eye so I wanna do that braid. So I did that braid but I kinda did it as just a hairstyle just to fill it out and I was kind of going back and forth with, ‘Well I’d really like to wear my hair down and you know I see all the other girls wearing their hair down and they’re so pretty,’ and I kinda wanted to do that and he was the one who told me, ‘No, you have to keep that braid. Like it stands out and trust me. Just trust me. That’s gonna be a thing. Nobody else wears their hair like that. You’re gonna stand out it’s unique, I’ve never seen anything like that before, you have to keep it,’ and so I ended up keeping it and then he told me, ‘You know me you can probably start using, you can even like do stuff in the ring with it, you can use that. You can use it. Use that thing!’ And was like, ‘Oh, you’re right!’
“So he was kind of the mastermind behind keeping it and he sparked the thought process of like, ‘you can use it,’ and so he was a big influence on the braid.”
(Transcription credit should go to @DominicDeAngelo of WrestleZone)
Much more from this interview which you can see in it’s entirety below:
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