DISCLAIMER: There are no match spoilers in this article. You will have to wait until the episode airs or find spoilers elsewhere. This article is just about the debut for NXT television of two indie stars.
Broken by Twitter user Jacob Cohen less than an hour ago from Orlando, where NXT is filming it’s next set of tapings for television. While Shinsuke Nakamura vs. TJ Perkins and Bobby Roode vs. Kassius Ohno (Chris Hero) were advertised, two women debuting was not and proved to be the first big debuts of the impending wave of indie women into NXT.
Scoop #3: Heidi Lovelace is now Ruby Riot, she is facing Kimber Lee pic.twitter.com/RH7RAjPzap
— Jacob Cohen (@MrJacobCohen) February 23, 2017
Heidi Lovelace and Kimber Lee have a long and storied career together, primarily the past few years in CHIKARA, where they have been both friend and foe. Both have working NXT Live Events the past few weeks since signing with the WWE in January of this year. While Kimber Lee has seemingly kept her indie name, Heidi Lovelace has been renamed Ruby Riot. Personally, I think it’s a better fitting name for her character anyway – Heidi Lovelace sounded like a Romance author (or porn star), but Ruby Riot fits her punk rock bad-ass intensity. She sounds like she could have been a former member of The Runaways.
The good sign about this is that when WWE works in their new talent, they generally start as enhancement. In order to protect their future characters, the WWE normally sends them out under their real names (such as Crazy Mary Dobson as Sarah Bridges, Ember Moon as Adrienne Reese, or Nikki Cross as Nikki Glencross). But if Lovelace is coming out as Ruby Riot instead of Dori Prange, then they must have an angle in mind to start her off. On the flipside, Kimber Lee’s real name is Kimberly Frankele, so there is the chance that she was announced as such. But Kimber Lee did Instagram this hours before her debut tonight.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BQ0jjPolATY/
As of this writing, it had yet to be confirmed if the match was taped for a future episode of NXT or if it was a pre-taping dark match, but it’s clear both of these women are about to lead the new wave of women’s wrestling in NXT with a band of some of the indie scene’s fiercest women.
Main Photo: ChikaraPro.com
