Promoting the upcoming documentary in the UK about the Knight family, matriarch Saraya (real name Julia) talks about daughter Saraya-Jade (aka Britani Knight)’s transition to the US to work for WWE where she now competes as Paige in developmental territory, FCW.
Speaking about a scene in the documentary in which the Knights see Paige off at the airport as she is due to report to FCW in Tampa, Florida, Saraya says:
I haven’t seen it yet! I’ll probably end up crying all the way through it when I watch it. I remember howling like a banshee. Even talking about it now, my throat is constricting a bit. As a mum, I want to put her in a little box and wrap her up and protect her. But that wouldn’t allow her to be herself. This is her life now and I’ve done the hard bit. I’ve got her here safely and now it’s down to her to make her own mistakes. But I don’t think this is going to be a mistake. I think this is going to be the making of her.
Saraya also reveals that Paige was “unbelievably homesick” when she left for the US:
Oh she was unbelievably homesick. We were getting around 16 or 17 phone calls a day. And I remember saying to her that I’d send money over and she could buy a ticket home. But she had friends going over to see her and then I was going over, and then it was Wrestlemania. So as much as she was homesick and wanted to come home, she was defiant and stubborn enough to say, ‘No, I only get one shot and I’m not going to come home and sit there regretting it because of homesickness.’ Within a month, she was sending us emails about how happy she was. She sent a beautiful email the other day and the whole family sat and cried. She said that she can’t believe at 19, she’s living her dream, which we made possible for her.
Read more here.
The documentary on the Knights, The Wrestlers: Fighting with My Family, airs Wednesday at 10pm on Channel 4 in the UK.
