As the days have passed since the untimely passing of Bray Wyatt, more and more stories have come out about the man behind the spooky gimmick and just how many lives he touched during his professional wrestling career both inside and out of the ring.

Stopping by WrestlingNewsCo to talk about everything from the LWO, to her love of anime and video games, Zelina Vega touched on how Wyatt impacted her professional wrestling career, a topic that has become commonplace among the boys and girls in the back who enjoyed their interactions together.

While Vega didn't sign with WWE until 2017, her relationship with Wyatt dates all the way back to 2010, when she first tried out for FCW. Though she didn't ultimately make the cut then, Wyatt's words helped to inspire a half-decade on the indies and enough hard work to make her undeniable on the main roster.

“I tried out for WWE back in, this was FCW in 2010. Obviously, when you're getting there and people are just seeing you walking around, they're like, okay, there's another human, whatever. But when they see you in the ring, and they see you trying, or they see you cutting a promo right away, it was like, I had him on my side, and I was like, wow, that's so cool to have him actually backing me,” Zelina Vega said via TJR.

“It was just such a cool feeling and just hearing all of the advice that I would get from him was really cool. I tweeted this too, but probably the coolest thing for me is seeing how much he cared as a person-to-person level. Like, he knew how badly I wanted to be in WWE. I had been trying since 2010. I didn't get there until 2017.”

Did Wyatt have to be so kind to the future Zelina Vega in 2010? No but her efforts clearly meant a lot to the young superstar, as she recalls the story now over a decade later. Why did this interaction leave such an impact? Well, because Wyatt did something very memorable a few years later when she was still trying to find her footing in The Fed.

 

Zelina Vega will never forget this moment with Bray Wyatt from her FCW tryout.

Discussing her interactions with Bray Wyatt a few years later while working as one of Adam Rose' rosebuds, Zelina Vega passed along a humorous anecdote about the specifics of her tryout and one interaction the man formerly known as Husky Harris did that will stick with her forever.

“When I came in for tryouts, like, one of the scariest things to do as an extra is to have a tryout match before SmackDown started. So every week we'd have like, I was traveling with them as a Rosebud just trying to like, hopefully one time, they'd be like, you know what, let's just throw it in there. Like I just was hoping to get like, you know, a second look,” Vega said.

“I had a match, and I remember at that point, if you got the attention of the boys, like the boys being like everybody in the locker room, people surrounding the ring, because people are off talking about their matches, they're talking to producers, whatever, but the second I got in there, I remember Bray turning around and seeing me and sort of watching and he's kind of there, and he's watching.

“I see him out of the corner of my eyes watching, and he gets so into it that he started a Thea chant. Like he started cheering for me like during the match, and it was right as I was hitting my comeback, and like he was getting everybody else involved and everybody at that point was cheering for me. Then they started clapping after the match was done, and he led that, like he led that whole thing.”

Now, for fans out of the know, before working under the Zelina Vega moniker in WWE, the mouthpiece of LWO worked on the indies and in WWE as Thea Trinidad, which just so happens to be her shoot first and last names. Though she didn't sign with WWE in 2010, or after her run with Rose, Zega worked steadily on the indies until officially signing with the promotion in 2017, including a run in TNA as the “cousin” of Sarita from 2011-13 and runs in Shine, Stardom, and even Ring of Honor, where she managed Austin Aries for a time. Whether Wyatt's kind words helped to inspire Vega to keep going remains to be seen, but in the end, he played a part in her journey to a spot in the ring with Rhea Ripley in Puerto Rico, and that is something she will never forget.