Tay Melo Recalls Samoa Joe Offering Advice On Making Her Judo Look Better In Wrestling

Tay Melo discusses her friendship with The Death Riders’ Marina Shafir.

Marina and Tay share a similar background in combat sports, as both are skilled in the martial art of Judo. While both women have been active in AEW over the past few years, they also shared a locker room in WWE when they were both in NXT, where the two would face off in several matches together.

While speaking to Renee Paquette in the latest episode of Close-Up, Tay spoke about her friendship with Marina, noting that she ‘loves her’ and is one of her good friends.

“I love Marina. Love Marina. Marina is one of my good friends, personal friends. I would love- I wrestled her before.”

Renee would then ask if Tay ever trains Judo with Marina, with Melo noting that she does and they talk about ideas to bring Judo into wrestling.

“We did. Yeah. We did some stuff. It’s pretty fun. We talk a lot about ideas and everything. She’s literally one of my favorites to talk about life and everything.” 

Renee would then point out that it’s hard to merge other disciplines into the world of wrestling,

“I remember talking to her a while ago because we go way back to so and it’s like things that we think it would work. It just doesn’t translate. Then sometimes people like ‘hey put a little bit more of your background in here.’ Then (I say) ‘believe me, I’m trying.’ It’s just like, we gotta test it out a lot of things and a lot of the things that we do there, it doesn’t work here because you gotta think like, ‘okay, here I’m trying to, be the smartest, fastest and win this as quick as I can here. Here I’m trying to do it without people realizing what I’m doing. So like, it’s just like yeah it’s different, you gotta adjust. Like I remember I was trying to do an arm bar with some other girl and then (Samoa) Joe saw and he’s looking, I’m like, ‘I know something’s not right, but I don’t know how to fix it,’ and I’m thinking, and then he comes and he helps me. I’m like, of course, someone with experience that can see both sides and understand both sides. So it’s great that Marina has Jon (Moxley) to help, you know, because he’s seeing both sides and he knows how to help her there too. So it’s a great mentor to have. So like having this little help from Joe right there.”

Melo would return to All Elite Wrestling in June of this year at Fyter Fest. You can read more about that here.

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