Tay Melo Discusses Getting Advice From Samoa Joe

AEW wrestler Tay Melo recently chatted with Renee Paquette on Close Up to discuss her friendship with AEW wrestler Marina Shafir, incorporating other grappling disciplines into wrestling, getting advice from Samoa Joe, and more. Below are some highlights (via Fightful):

Melo on her friendship with Marina Shafir: “I love Marina. Love Marina. Marina is one of my good friends, personal friends. I would love- I wrestled her before.”

On training Judo with Shafir: “We did. Yeah. We did some stuff. It’s pretty fun. We talk a lot about ideas and everything. She’s literally one of my favorites to talk about life and everything.”

On how it can be difficult to incorporate other disciplines into wrestling: “I remember talking to her a while ago because we go way back to so and it’s like things that we think it would work. It just doesn’t translate. Then sometimes people like ‘hey put a little bit more of your background in here.’ Then (I say) ‘believe me, I’m trying.’ It’s just like, we gotta test it out a lot of things and a lot of the things that we do there, it doesn’t work here because you gotta think like, ‘okay, here I’m trying to, be the smartest, fastest and win this as quick as I can here. Here I’m trying to do it without people realizing what I’m doing. So like, it’s just like yeah it’s different, you gotta adjust.”

Tay Melo on getting advice from Samoa Joe: “Like I remember I was trying to do an armbar with some other girl and then (Samoa) Joe saw and he’s looking, I’m like, ‘I know something’s not right, but I don’t know how to fix it,’ and I’m thinking, and then he comes and he helps me. I’m like, of course, someone with experience that can see both sides and understand both sides. So it’s great that Marina has Jon (Moxley) to help, you know, because he’s seeing both sides and he knows how to help her there too. So it’s a great mentor to have. So like having this little help from Joe right there.”