Brooke Tessmacher enjoyed a fruitful spell in Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (Impact Wrestling), winning the TNA Knockouts Championships on three separate occasions, as well as lifting the Knockouts Tag Team titles with Tara, formerly known as Victoria.
But her initial break into the business came with the WWE as part of the Diva Search competition.
Speaking as part of an Impact Knockouts roundtable, alongside the likes of Gail Kim, Velvet Sky and Christy Hemme, Brooke detailed the challenges of entering WWE via the Diva Search:
So when I got let go from WWE, and everybody knows I went in I was just a pretty face. I was the model. I came in through the Diva Search… When you come in in the Diva Search, it’s just like your tarnished. They’re just waiting for you to fail. It’s like you just get the short end of the stick and they think you’re not serious. Even when I was doing the audition, I remember being literally the only one in there that didn’t just travel around to auditions, teaching everybody who all the wrestlers were. I grew up as a fan. That’s what we did as a family. We were very poor and the only thing we did as a family was watch wrestling… I remember being back at the auditions and I was teaching Layla and The Bella Twins and Maryse and everybody who everybody was, and as we all know they went on to be big, big stars.
Although unsuccessful in the competition, Brooke was eventually hired by WWE and briefly assigned to their Deep South Wrestling training outlet.
Then going by ‘Brooke Adams’, she made her television debut on the ECW brand in 2007, as part of Extreme Expose, a dance troupe consisting Adams, Layla and Kelly Kelly.
Her WWE tenure would last just one year however, as the former Impact star would explain:
I didn’t make the cut at that point but got a job later on and it was pure hell to go through. I never got to actually wrestle besides like a few battle royales and things like that, always being the first thrown out or the second, maybe getting to throw one little punch. It was just so sad, and then I got let go.
She joined TNA in 2010, going by Brooke Tessmacher, where she flourished as both a wrestler and a character, and was involved in numerous high profile matches and angles prior to her eventual departure in 2017.