Tommaso Ciampa On How His Wife Helped Him Find His Pro Wrestling Character

Tommaso Ciampa is quite comfortable being himself at this point, but there was a time in his career when that couldn’t happen. He was Thomas Penmanship instead, but as he told Lilian Garcia on Chasing Glory, his wife helped change that.

Ciampa’s wife Jessie Ward had already left the pro wrestling business, but she still provided Tommaso with some great support along the way.

“By the time we met she was already out of the business, but at this point, I am doing my thing but I am not successful. We meet and then it became like this big eye-opener. Her biggest thing on me was that I was spending a lot of time trying to make people look good you ever think about how you are going to look good yourself? I remember fighting it. We don’t fight at all after so many years we’ve been together I don’t know how many years now; we just don’t fight. But in my head, I’m saying that this woman is telling me how to wrestle and telling me what to do. I would keep it internal and would get frustrated and my mood would get sour. I thought to myself after a while that I would just try it.”

“I started to try some stuff, and it’s just a little stuff because she is good with backstage vignettes and stuff. She has a lot of strangely good ideas. It took me a while to open up to the idea that you don’t have to be a wrestler to have ideas. Jim Ross isn’t a wrestler and you will learn a lot from Jim Ross. I don’t know why it took me a bit but after a while, I started figuring it out and applying it. I realized that this stuff is actually working and I started to catch momentum and steamroll through the independents.”

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Ciampa experienced a lot on the indies even before coming to WWE. He was able to find himself, but there were a lot of taxing injuries along the way as well.

Tommaso Ciampa recently stated that he would rather retire than go to the WWE main roster. It sounds like he’s got things in perspective at this stage in his career.

Thanks to Wrestling Inc for the quote