The Undertaker has spent nearly three decades explaining what wrestling costs a body. Now he’s bracing for his daughter to find out for herself.
Sitting down with Chris Van Vliet at Fanatics Fest in New York City for Insight with Chris Van Vliet, the WWE Hall of Famer was asked the question every fan has been building toward since 13-year-old Kaia Calaway started showing up in training videos: is she headed for a WWE career? His answer didn’t leave much room for doubt.
“Unfortunately, probably yes,” he said.
Where the Hesitation Comes From
It’s not that The Undertaker doubts his daughter. It’s that he knows exactly what she’d be signing up for. Now years removed from full-time competition, he still starts every day taking inventory of what a career in the ring left behind. “I wake up every morning and I do a little body assessment, like what’s working today, what isn’t working,” he explained, per WrestleTalk.
That’s the tension running through the whole answer: a father who built his legend on outworking pain, not wanting his kid to inherit the bill for it. But he’s not standing in the way, either.
“If It’s In Her Heart”
“If it’s in her heart and that’s what she wants to do, then obviously I will do everything in my means to make sure that she does it right,” The Undertaker said. That’s the same wrestler who spent 30 years perfecting a character built on precision and preparation, and it shows in how he talks about her training. He’s already sizing up her style, and it sounds like she skipped the deadman routine entirely in favor of something flashier. “She’s kind of stuck on that flippy-do stuff,” he said. “Now she’s taken my rope walking and added a flip to it.”
The Tape Backs It Up
The “flippy-do stuff” isn’t just a proud dad’s exaggeration. Michelle McCool, herself a former WWE Women’s Champion, has posted training clips from the WWE Performance Center showing Kaia landing a moonsault off the top rope, working her father’s signature rope walk, and finishing with a 450 splash onto the padding. McCool has said Kaia has loved wrestling since she was four years old, and on the couple’s own podcast, Six Feet Under with Mark Calaway, Undertaker has described her as simply “obsessed.”
A Family Business, Whether He Loves the Idea or Not
Kaia is the first child of The Undertaker and Michelle McCool, born in 2012, and she’s growing up around two Hall of Famers who know the business from every angle, in-ring legend and locker room, gorilla position and green room. If she does end up walking through the curtain someday, she won’t be short on people who can show her how it’s done right. Her dad already sounds resigned to that future. He just wants it to be on his terms, not the business’s.
