The Smurphy

1. Sam was born in Toronto, Canada, and was raised in the area. When she moved to the US at eighteen, she wasted no time in getting dual citizenship. 

2. Her father was a professional hockey player, he was a center for the Montreal Canadiens. (Fictional, of course.) It instilled a love of hockey in her ever since she can remember. As a child and pre-teen she played hockey in a girls’ league, but got kicked out for being too rough. There’s no checking in girls’ hockey, but apparently Sam missed that section of the rule book. :)

3. She has an older brother, Scott - he was in the NHL for a little while but has since left the league to pass his skills on to the younger generation.   They’re still somewhat close, they talk on the phone regularly.

4. Sami also developed a love for professional wrestling (think WWF) from a young age. When she was sixteen she met a few guys who were training in a gym near her hometown, and she forged her father’s signature to join and train. She worked at Tim Horton’s to pay for the training. 

4. After she moved to the US, she traveled around and continued learning, wrestling in independent shows wherever she could find work. It’s much more difficult for a woman, and so she started wrestling in more physically-taxing “hardcore” matches to get promoters to hire her. 

5. Once she became known among the small-time promoters, she was given the opportunity to wrestle in Japan. The matches there were way more intense than anything she had done before, and it was there where the injury that would end her budding career occurred. It involved a bad fall and some C4, and to this day she still suffers from damaged hearing, dizzy spells, and a bad knee. 

6. As a result of these matches, Samantha has several scars that she doesn’t like to show. Two are large lacerations along her mid-section from a barbed wire bat, the others a burn scar and several gouges from the C4 in Japan. There are others that are less noticeable, but those are the most prominent. 

7. Due to all of the trauma she put her body through, between extensive hockey and wrestling training, as well as a history of infertility in her family, she has been told by doctors that she’d never bear children. It’s something that, to her, is a blessing and a curse. She isn’t completely sure that she wants to be a mother, but at the same time, she knows she might have at least wanted the option. 

8. Her biggest wrestling influence is Shawn Michaels, and with the exception of her hardcore matches, many in the business compared her style to his. It made her early retirement even that more traumatic for her. 

9. Sami has always been pretty good with her money, and so she gets by without having to do too much work, having built up a savings on the meager pay she’d received as a wrestler. Her old promoters do call her now and then to make appearances, though. She can only do limited work in the ring, but she loves the business too much to walk away completely. 

10. She absolutely hates being called Samantha, much preferring Sam or Sami. The nicknames “Smurphy” and “Smurphette” were given to her by her old wrestling friends, coming from the S in her first name and her last name, Murphy.