Is Adelaide WWE superstar Rhea Ripley the Greatest Of All Time?
There’s little doubt left that Adelaide’s Rhea Ripley is the best in the world. Now even industry icons are asking if the 26-year-old is the greatest of all time.
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Professional wrestling isn’t fake. It’s hard and it hurts.
It’s not just that the ring is essentially barely padded, wooden planks upon which big, strong people throw and slam other big, strong people. It’s not the steel chairs either.
It’s also difficult to learn and a next-to-impossible way to make a living. Especially when you grew up in Adelaide, a world away from the epicentre of the business in the US.
However Adelaide’s Demi Bennett – better known to the world these days as WWE Women’s World Champion Rhea Ripley – has done both. And she has succeeded beyond even her own wildest dreams.
Rhea Ripley is a big deal in professional wrestling. A really big deal. In a profession where most don’t hit their stride until at least their early 30s, Demi Bennett already has a resume that’s almost unsurpassed. And she’s only 26.
Bennett has performed at WrestleMania, the biggest possible stage in the game, four times already. In April this year, she stole the show in Los Angeles in front of about 80,000 extremely dedicated fans.
To many, she’s not just the best in the world, she’s the greatest of all time. Already. This does not come as much of a surprise to her trainers and early supporters back home, even though Bennett says it’s hard to believe so much has happened so far.
“I remember doing my try outs and I remember my coach Matty (Basso) told us that our dreams for WWE probably won’t happen because they don’t really come to Australia and look at the talent that we have there,” Bennett says. “From that to now where it’s been my fourth WrestleMania … insanity.”
Performing at WrestleMania alone is the stuff of dreams for any kid who grew up watching the uniquely American art of “sports entertainment”. As Rhea Ripley, Bennett has already done it more times than some of the biggest names in the history of industry.
She’s also the first Australian woman to hold a WWE championship, she was the first NXT UK Women’s Champion, a former NXT Women’s Champion, a WWE Raw Women’s Champion, a SmackDown Women’s Champion and a tag team champion. She’s also won WWE’s famous Royal Rumble battle royal.
Few, if any, women to have ever worked in the business have as many titles to their names.
And just over a decade ago Bennett didn’t even know wrestling was an option for Australians.
“First I didn’t realise that there was wrestling in Australia and we took a trip to Queensland and there was a flyer on the wall,” she recalls.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, there’s wrestling in Australia. I wonder if it’s back in Adelaide as well.’ So we did our research, we found Riot City Wrestling (RCW) and I was like, ‘Oh my God, we have to go to the shows. I wanna do this.”
Bennett would spend the next two years as one of the fans in Adelaide’s niche local wrestling community. Even as a fan she made an impression. “I was the really loud child who screamed at the top of her lungs and was really annoying,” she says.
She would eventually try out successfully for RCW in 2012 when she reached the minimum age of 16 and would soon discover that there was nothing fake about hitting the ground.
It was hard, and it hurt.
“I’ve spent my entire life trying not to fall and you’re telling me to just throw myself at the floor, really, really hard? OK,” she laughs.
“I remember doing the first one by myself and yeah, it knocks the wind out of you. You’re not ready for it at all. After the try outs I remember waking up the next morning and thinking, ‘Wow, I can’t walk. I’m in so much pain it’s unbelievable.’ I was stiff for a week.”
The first real body slam in training came courtesy of either Chris or Matt Basso, the founders of RCW. “I’d do like 20 in a row and think ‘I need to stop’. But I think my drive to see how far I could go in the wrestling industry was just far stronger than the pain I was feeling,” Bennett says. “(Chris and Matt Basso) were my two main coaches. I love those boys. They were like my big brothers. They were there every training and they believed in me from the get go.
“They saw something special in me. I’m glad that they persevered with the child that I was and kept me in line, and wanting more and staying hungry. They definitely pushed me and they pushed me harder than they pushed anyone else. I remember Matty would make me do double the cardio that everyone else was doing. If they were doing squats, I’d be doing jumping squats. If they were doing push ups, I’d be doing push up claps.”
Bennett says she felt shy and scared during her first steps into the unique world of professional wrestling, but Chris Basso says her potential became immediately clear.
“I recall telling her dad after the session she had great potential and if she stuck with it she could end up wrestling overseas for a living. Funny that,” Basso says. “Fans instantly took to her and despite being super nervous before she walked through the curtain, she was a natural and commanded the attention of the arena.”
Adelaide podcast host and lifelong wrestling fan Dave McLennan says the same was clear to him and his family as they sat in the crowds in Adelaide during Bennett’s first appearances.
“We first saw her wrestle for RCW in her very early days and had trouble believing she was so new to wrestling as she carried herself with so much confidence and skill,” he says.
“The kids loved to meet her and get photos whenever they could because she was so down to earth.”
Basso says it wasn’t just luck or some natural X-factor that destined Bennett for the rocket to the moon upon which she was about to hitch a ride. “I put a lot of her success down to her core values of always being the hardest worker in the room. When she has her mind set on something, there is no stopping her,” he says.
“That is a testament to her upbringing from her supportive family, and her coaches during her formative years as a pro wrestler.
“It’s hard to pinpoint one thing that makes her so special. From a wrestling promoters’ perspective, she is the complete package – athletic, strong, agile and an absolutely amazing pro wrestler. But in terms of Demi the person, what makes her so special is her hard-working attitude, strong family values and even after everything she has already achieved, her ability to stay humble and be 100 per cent herself.”
Four years at Riot City Wrestling gave way to stints in Melbourne and Japan and, despite the early warning that there was a slim chance of being noticed by the biggest show in the game, American cultural juggernaut WWE, WWE noticed.
Aussie pro-wrestlers stampede into the US
The Advertiser’s chief court reporter, Sean Fewster, became friends with Bennett after attending and then commentating for RCW.
Assigned to cover the opening of WWE’s Performance Centre in Orlando, Florida, Fewster found himself chatting with one of the company’s main forces, Paul “Triple H” Levesque and his talent scouts. “When they learned I was from Adelaide, their first question was, ‘Do you know Demi Bennett?’” Fewster recalls. When Bennett received her first WWE contract, she asked Fewster to look over it for her before she signed.
“There was no promise of riches or even a spot on TV, just that she’d be trained by the best and given opportunities to make something of herself,” he says. “There’s a sign hanging up in the Performance Centre that reads, ‘You’re not here to fill a spot, you’re here to take a spot’, and the contract said much the same, just in legal jargon. A little while after that, I caught up with Demi and she played me a piece of music on her phone, it was her first WWE entrance theme, a song called Black Night.
“She told me she’d submitted a list of ring names for WWE to choose from and they’d picked her favourite, and that was the first time I heard the words Rhea Ripley.”
The dam had burst.
Matt Basso’s warning that WWE was unlikely to notice talent appeared to have been rapidly outdated. Bennett would be just one name among a wave of Aussies signed up to WWE’s developmental promotion, NXT, over the coming years.
Fellow South Australian Bronson Reed would also find himself training with the best in the business. The Gold Coast (via Auckland’s) Toni Storm, now a champion at a rival US promotion would also enter alongside Bennett. So would Bennett’s now real-life partner Buddy Matthews (formerly known as Buddy Murphy and working with Storm at the second largest promotion in the US, All Elite Wrestling), and his fellow Melburnian Indi Hartwell, as well as popular WWE tag team, The Iconics, Peyton Royce (now known as Cassie Lee) and Billie Kay (now performing under Jessica McKay).
Bennett would outstrip them all.
And fans in the US quickly came to expect just as much of her as those early audiences and trainers at Riot City Wrestling. There was only one problem facing the entire cohort, not that any of them saw it coming. It was 2019.
A storm was brewing that would savage the professional wrestling industry, a profession that takes as much from soap opera and pantomime as it does from loud and enthusiastic crowd reactions to drive the show forward, almost as much as stellar performers in the ring. And when the Covid-19 pandemic made it impossible to assemble any audience, the entire industry went on to life support.
That would have brutal repercussions for performers like Reed, who found himself without a contract and stranded in the US after Australia closed its borders. Toni Storm and Buddy Murphy would also find themselves in the wilderness in the fallout.
For Bennett, her job never appeared to be in doubt, but even she didn’t escape unscathed, she says in the lead-up to this year’s WrestleMania. “My first (WrestleMania) was the pandemic one,” she says.
She was due to compete with Charlotte Flair, another of the biggest female wrestling stars in history and heir to one of the business’s most famous names via her father Ric. But instead of tens of thousands of screaming fans, the Pandemic Era WrestleMania saw Bennett lose to Flair in a television studio set up in the same WWE Performance Centre where she’d been mastering her trade.
While the rest of the new wave of Aussie talent floundered, Bennett, too, found her momentum dwindling in the years that followed, even if fans did remain committed to the idea that there was more potential in this young South Australian than anyone had seen in years. But then 2023 arrived, and Bennett was again scheduled to face Flair at WrestleMania in April. This time there would be a crowd. A huge one. More than 80,000 people were estimated to have watched live at Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium with millions more glued to screens across the planet. And neither Bennett nor Flair was going to let the moment pass them by this time.
The pair stole the show, putting in a bruising performance that put any lingering doubts to rest. And the crowd went wild, in the US and at home. Bennett featured on the front page of The Advertiser. Her old school, Henley High, which she’d been lukewarm about due to a lack of support or belief in her early days, paid tribute, too, as did a surge of local media outlets.
It proved to be a bittersweet time. A month later she was back in Adelaide following the death of her beloved Nonna. “Nonna, I’m going to miss your strong, loving hugs and your little sassy cheeky attitude,” Bennett wrote. “It’s so hard saying goodbye, but being able to see you again in Feb was the highlight of my year. I miss you and I love you with all my heart.”
Rhea Ripley’s Wrestlemania moment
In the wake of what will likely be remembered as one of the high points in WrestleMania’s near 40-year history, the conversation has now changed around Demi Bennett. Fans and insiders have stopped asking if she’s the best in the world. The question now is, “Is she the greatest of all time?”
Legendary former WWE performer Shawn Michaels (a GOAT candidate in his own right) stirred debate last month when he claimed Bennett would soon become an even bigger deal than the late 90s/early 2000s icon known as Chyna. And one of her first trainers agrees.
“I truly believe that she has everything it takes to be the greatest and most successful female wrestler of all time,” Chris Basso says.
“She is still so young, has done so much and has so much more to achieve in her already accomplished career. I forgot to mention that everyone is just really proud of her.”
Rhea Ripley can be seen at WWE SummerSlam, streaming live on Binge & KAYO on Sunday, August 6, from 9am CST.
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