Second-generation veteran Natalya is a natural in the ring, but she was discouraged from getting into professional wrestling by her two-time WWE Hall of Fame father Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart, as she herself revealed on “Growing Up Von Erich.”
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“My dad didn’t really want us being wrestlers,” Natalya recalled, referring to herself and her two sisters. “Back in the ’80s there wasn’t really that many women wrestlers. There was like Sensational Sherri [Martel], and Miss Elizabeth … it was more women like Luna Vachon, and there was valets, but it just was more of a man’s world.”
Neidhart’s sheltering of his daughters was not an arbitrary decision. Natalya remembered her dad didn’t even want his daughters to be around wrestling, to protect them from the business.
“As I became a teenager and women’s wrestling became more prevalent and we started seeing Trish Stratus, and Lita, and all these different women in WWE, then all of sudden I kind of got the itch,” Natalya said. “When I was sixteen, I was watching Trish and Lita, and I was like, ‘I wanna do this’ … So, I ended up going to The Dungeon which is where my grandfather — he would train people in The Dungeon, and I had one practice session in there and I was just hooked. I had so much fun, and I was like the only girl in our family to wrestle.”
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Natalya’s maternal grandfather, Stu Hart — patriarch of the legendary Hart wrestling family, to which Natalya belongs— wasn’t fully receptive to her ambition, either.
“No girls were allowed to wrestle,” she said. “He was very traditional, and he didn’t want the women in the family wrestling.”
If you use any quotes from this article, please credit “Growing Up Von Erich” with a H/T to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.
