|
Cheryl Rusa
Born in 1961, in Southern California, Cheryl Rusa has always been a tomboy growing up. She was always good at sports, often outperforming boys her own age. Although she was always quite diminutive, she had so much energy she needed to find a way to channel it into something useful. She got into body building, and when she saw an episode of GLOW on TV, it dawned on her that ladies professional wrestling was something she could and wanted to do. She sent in a fake resume to GLOW and in a few months time she found herself added to the roster. She wrestled in GLOW as Lightning and also as Party Animal. Her wrestling career truly got going in the LPWA though. There, she wrestled as herself and as Little Mo, teaming up with Reggie Bennett forming the tag team Locomotion. She also teamed with Sindy Paradise in the tag team “The Mighty Mites”. Results-wise, her time in the LPWA wasn’t particularly rewarding. Due to her size (she was 5’1 and weighed in at 100 lbs) most of the other women were able to physically dominate her in the ring. The fact that she was a stuntwoman meant that she could take tremendous amounts of punishment too, and all that contributed to her becoming the ultimate jobber. She would finish almost every one of her singles matches on her back or submitting, and she was the weak link in Locomotion too, where opponents would routinely trap her in the ring, to go to town on her and eventually pin her or force her to submit while Big Mo could only watch from the sidelines.
Her wrestling skills ever sharper, Rusa traveled all over the world and wrestled in a whole bunch of different countries, including Japan, where she teamed with the likes of Cuty Suzuki against an assortment of local bad girls. The pace of action in Japan would often have US lady wrestlers struggling to keep up, but Rusa’s natural abilities and talent served her well.
|
