The WWE Hall Of Famer Who Was Fired After A History-Making Run

Losing your job in Vince McMahon's company in the earlier days of professional wrestling could almost be a prerequisite for entering the WWE Hall of Fame. The stories behind the dramatic, sometimes abrupt, firings to the subsequent rise of a star to the point they're considered for induction are rarely boring, and such is the case of former WWF Women's Champion Alundra Blayze, also known as Madusa. Blayze was released from the company while she was still champion, leading to one of the most iconic images of the Monday Night Wars when she took the title to "WCW Monday Nitro" and dumped it in a trash can.

Blayze made history early in her wrestling career when she was the first foreign wrestler to sign with All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling and continued to break barriers in women's wrestling throughout the coming years. While she initially started working in WCW, she joined McMahon's WWF in 1993 to help revitalize its women's division which had been dead for years, and quickly became one of the company's top stars. She first won the re-instated Women's Championship in December 1993 after wrestling in a six-woman tournament when she defeated Heidi Lee Morgan. She asked WWF management to bring in new women for her to wrestle, which included Japanese wrestler Bull Nakano, who would join Blayze years later in the Hall of Fame.

The pair's feud over the championship wowed American fans with their Japanese-style matches. It led to one of the most iconic women's matches in the company's history at SummerSlam in 1994, the only time Nakano and Blayze would wrestle on pay-per-view. Blayze pinned Nakano at the event but the pair would go on to feud through 1995. Blayze continued to break barriers in WWF until it all came crashing down around her with little notice by the end of the year.

Blayze was released from WWE in 1995 while she was still holding the WWF Women's Championship, which caused the fall of the women's division in McMahon's company once again. Her release was likely due to cost-cutting measures in the company, which was recovering from various scandals, including the steroid trial of 1992-1993. Blayze talked about her release years later in 2022 on "The A2theK Wrestling Show" and she said she knew her firing wasn't deliberate. She explained on the podcast that she was getting ready to leave her home when FedEx showed up and handed her an envelope. She said if she opened it and received the letter then the company would no longer need her services.

"I was like, 'What? What the hell? What? This is a rib, right? This is a joke.' Nope. Called the office, that's what it was," she explained. "Just let me go. I was still their champion. [Vince] wasn't thinking right ... He wasn't in his right mind and when I say that, I knew it wasn't hurtful or deliberate."

Blayze said she believed McMahon wasn't "thinking straight" because he was going through not just the steroid scandal, but personal things, all that required the need for the then-WWF to downsize to prevent it from closing its doors entirely. She said on her own podcast, "Full Throttle" that she was disappointed and "a little p*****" about her release. Blayze explained that she hadn't been gone from WWE for a full day when Eric Bischoff called her and asked if she'd join WCW. She said it was Bischoff who came up with the plan of dropping the WWF Women's Championship in the trash on live TV.

Blayze left the business voluntarily in 2001 because of how she felt women were being used across the industry. Following the belt-trashing incident on "Nitro," she was black-balled from WWF for just over 20 years. She became a successful monster truck driver and became the second-longest tenured woman in the sport and even drove a truck named Madusa. In March 2015 it was announced she would be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame under her Alundra Blayze name. She made an appearance the following day alongside the other inductees at WrestleMania 31.

She appeared in a few documentaries for the WWE Network in the following years and entered the battle royal for a women's championship opportunity at WWE's first (and so far only) all-women's premium live event, Evolution, in October 2018, ending an 18-year hiatus from the ring. Most recently, Blayze inducted her fellow trailblazer in women's wrestling, as well as her history-making rival, Bull Nakano, into the WWE Hall of Fame ahead of WrestleMania 40 in April 2024.