Gabbi Tuft is officially returning to the ring.
Gabbi Tuft took to Twitter to announce that she will be returning to the ring at the West Coast Pro Wrestling event on June 25. She wrote that everything was unfolding according to plan, and she encouraged everyone to stay faithful, as there was more to the plan than they knew.
Tuft noted that the match would air at a later date with West Coast Pro Wrestling and United Wrestling Network outlets, such as YouTube and Triller TV.
In December 2023, Tuft, who previously had a run in WWE as Tyler Reks from 2008-2012, announced that she was planning to return to the ring. Tuft had retired from wrestling shortly after her WWE departure. In February 2021, she came out as a trans woman.
Tuft previously started training in January 2024, which marked the first time she stepped back into a ring in over a decade.
Thanks, Trent!
Tuft spoke with WrestleZone Managing Editor Bill Pritchard about her in-ring career and plans for a return to the ring. When asked about her Burning Hammer finisher in WWE, Tuft told the story of how that happened.
“It was actually Trent Beretta,” Tuft revealed. “When we were in Florida Championship Wrestling in development, I was looking for a finisher, and he’s like, ‘why don’t you do a Burning Hammer?’ And I’m like, ‘What? We can’t. Somebody’s gonna die!’ And he goes, ‘Let’s do something different,’ and the whole thing was Trent’s idea. And he goes, ‘well, just sit-out DDT me.’ Okay, let’s try it.
“And so Trent, we had a crash pad out. We tried it, and we’re like, oh, that’s something. Then Doc Pritchard walks in, and he’s like, What are you guys doing? And he was like, that’s pretty cool. It just happened in five minutes. Fandango was there, and we were all just kind of goofin’. And they’re like, Yeah, you need to use that. Okay.
“So that’s how it came around to that. It’s not the original burning hammer, obviously, because when you drop people on their heads in WWE, they don’t like it. So we needed to modify it slightly. And that’s where the sit-out DDT came from. But yeah, there was little pride in that. And to know that nobody else was doing anything remotely close to that and might have been borrowed from one of the biggest international stars in the business.”
You can check our complete interview with Gabbi Tuft in the embedded video below.
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