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When Cathy Kelley signed with WWE in 2016, it was a pretty big leap from her previous gigs at Afterbuzz TV.
Now sure, technically the pride of Loyola University wasn't jumping off of the deep end without a parachute, as she'd been covering RAW and NXT as a member of AfterBuzz's recap shows, but there's a pretty stark difference between covering a show online and working on it in person, and the Mensa-certified journalist found that out first time on WrestleMania weekend, when she had some rocky on-screen appearances that reportedly haunted her first run in the company.
Fortunately, Kelley did find a few supporters early on in her WWE career, including none other than the pre-“American Nightmare” Cody Rhodes, who, alongside his wife Brandi, gave her some crucial advice that stuck with her to this day, as she explained on Out Of Character with Ryan Satin.
“There's also no other way to learn. You have to learn on the job. Obviously, you can set yourself up in a better way to do it but, it was super intimidating,”Cathy Kelley said via Post Wrestling. “We had that first week, I knew no one. So I went in, and I was told, ‘Don't go in as a fan' by Michael Cole. I was nervous of, you know how you're supposed to shake everyone's hand, you wanna be respectful. I wanted to do that, and I was second-guessing everything. I was just so in my head, and I remember Cody Rhodes and Brandi at the time, they kind of helped me in that capacity because one of my first assignments was with them, and they're like, ‘Hey, go in the locker room, shake everyone's hand. No one knows who you are, it's all good,' and that really stuck with me, especially in retrospect, knowing what they were going through personally that weekend. That was when they decided to leave.”
While Rhodes' words didn't immediately launch Kelley into the upper echelon of WWE stardom, as she ultimately left the company in 2020 because she didn't have the sort of career trajectory she was hoping for, it likely helped to ease her transition after a tough opening with the company and clearly has stuck with her seven years into the future.
Cathy Kelley reflects on her first exit from WWE.
Later in her interview with Ryan Satin, Cathy Kelley reflected on the end of her first run in WWE, which came to a close in 2020 after four years largely in NXT.
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Though Kelley was conflicted about leaving the promotion, internal struggles with self-doubt and anxiety ultimately led to her exit.
“It was really challenging (leaving WWE). I think at the time, I said it was for reasons of to pursue other things, and I still believe I could have pursued all of those things within WWE. But, I felt at the time, I really needed to step away. My mental health had really declined. I've struggled with depression and panic attacks, anxiety, basically from high school-on, on and off, and it was really tough. Like I said, I felt like the initial week of messing up on live TV kind of loomed over me for a while. But, I struggled to try to get to that place that I wanted to be at which is being the backstage interviewer on one of the main shows. I was told that I was too tall, I was told that I had brown hair, and they had too many girls with brown hair so I dyed my hair blonde. There were so many things that I tried to do, whether that was creating shows that were live for the digital aspect of things so I could prove that I could do live so it was this constant battle of trying to prove myself, and it felt like I had hit that point where it just wasn't gonna happen,” Kelley said.
“I remember having a conversation with Michael Cole who wasn't even my boss at the time. But after having done all these live hits with NXT being told that-that wasn't gonna happen, and it was really defeating. I remember the last few months, I was crying every single day. My close friends, my family knew that, and I smiled through it at work most of the time. I think there are like one or two times that I broke (she laughed), being in the locker room, but yeah, it felt like the dream that I had — and whether that was promised or not at the beginning — it wasn't gonna happen there so, I could have probably stayed, and I was told at the time that I would have a job there until I'm 87 if I wanted it. So I could have coasted in that doing a lot of the digital stuff and producing and creating content. But that ultimately wasn't my goal.
“It really is such a defeating thing of when you have this goal that you wanna accomplish, and I would be written into a script, and they would tell me that-that segment wasn't actually gonna happen on the pay-per-view or whatever it is, and then you would see someone else in that position and so it gets really discouraging after a while. I ended up burning myself out towards the end as well of I was trying to prove myself, prove that I was the right option to be in that position, and I was not just going to NXT, not just doing the in-studio stuff in Stamford, not just going to the main roster shows and the pay-per-views at the time but, coming up with other concepts and you end up burning out. That's really what it is.”
Fortunately for Kelley, her return to WWE appears to be off to a much better start, as she's on the main roster, has relationships with many of the top stars on both RAW and SmackDown, and appears to be far more confident in her abilities as both a journalist and a performer. In the end, that's all that matters.
