WWE Mae Young Classic Competitor Profile: Mia Yim
WWE will air the second Mae Young Classic starting on Sept. 5 at 9 p.m. ET, and we want to get you excited for the tournament by profiling the women competing. Today, we’re talking about “The Blasian Baddie” Mia Yim.
Mia Yim is a survivor, in multiple senses of the word.
Yim first made a name for herself in Impact under the name Jade. She was a member of The Dollhouse along with Marti Belle. She was Queen of the Knockouts, a one time Knockouts Champion and even competed in matches with hardcore stipulations such as steel cages, a Last Knockout Standing match, and even a Monster’s Ball match with Rosemary, which had not been staged by women since Taylor Wilde and Daffney had done it eight years prior. Let’s face it, Yim is hardcore.
That doesn’t make Mia Yim a survivor though. Her status as a survivor was established outside of the ring when she came forward with her story of domestic abuse in the summer of 2016 and began working as a spokesperson for the domestic violence charity Safe Horizon in their #PutANailInIt campaign.
“After the abuse, I was timid. I was always walking on eggshells and didn’t want to act the wrong way,” Yim had said in a follow up interview with Huffington Post in 2017. “But the #PutTheNailinIt campaign gave me the strength I needed to speak out. Now, I don’t care what others think of me. I just want to help others.”
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Yim participated in the first Mae Young Classic, making it to the round of sixteen with a win over Sarah Logan before tapping out to eventual finalist (and her real life roommate) Shayna Baszler. Afterwards, she went back to wrestling in the indies, but it wasn’t long before her next bump in the road came.
During NOVA Pro’s 11th Dimension show back on November 24th, 2017, Yim ended up breaking her leg during the main event. She ended up in surgery and was out of commission until making her in-ring return during Mania weekend at Beyond and Shimmer events in New Orleans this year.
In an interview with TV Insider, she admitted that the hardest part of the recovery wasn’t physical, it was mental. “I’m so used to traveling every weekend. For the first time since I started wrestling, I’ve had this long length of time of not doing anything and being home while everyone else is traveling. It was depressing. It felt like I was forgotten.”
Next. The Mount Rushmore of Women's Wrestling. dark
Going into her second Mae Young Classic, Yim is not taking any easy routes to victory. Revamping herself as “the Blasian Baddie” with inspiration from Black Panther’s Killmonger during her recovery, her comeback has been stronger than ever with indie matches against Tessa Blanchard, Taya Valkyrie, Keith Lee and Matt Riddle in the time between her return from injury and her return to Full Sail University. She doesn’t just expect to survive the Mae Young Classic. She intends to win.