Former WWE Divas Champion Kaitlyn, real name Celeste Bonin, experienced an unbelievably fast rise through the company’s developmental system compared to the timeframe today’s upstarts are used to. In the early days of “NXT,” when it functioned more as a competition show, Bonin got the call for season three after just two months of training. Bonin edged out Naomi to win the season.
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On “The A2theK Wrestling Show,” Bonin described her “spectrum of emotions” upon joining “NXT.”
“It was weeks that I had been there before I got that call,” Bonin recalled. “And so the first reaction that came out of me was tears. I cried when I got the phone call. It was just so much emotion, so much excitement. I was also terrified. I was just like, ‘I’m not ready. I don’t know the first thing about wrestling. I just got here.’ I never wrestled a match, didn’t even have a pair of wrestling boots. And so it was a lot all at once.”
Despite her trepidations, Bonin decided to seize the opportunity rather than argue with fate. She said up until that point, it was the biggest moment of her life, and processing its magnitude forced her to mature quickly.
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“The whole entire time I was in WWE, especially in the beginning, was incredibly defining for me as a person,” Bonin said. “I always attribute so much of who I am today to that very transformational timeframe.”
Bonin captured her first and only WWE gold when she won the Divas Championship on “Raw”‘s 20th Anniversary Show. Bonin walked away from WWE a year later, calling her departure a “retirement.” But after working off some ring rust on the indies, she returned to “WWE NXT” for the 2018 Mae Young Classic. Bonin advanced through the first round before losing to Mia Yim in the second.
