Willow Nightingale brings an infectious energy to the professional world, but she wanted to embody a different kind of spirit in her wrestling name.
Now signed with All Elite Wrestling, “The Babe With The Power” remains a joyous talent to the roster, often smiling. In addition, she performers under a pretty “cool” name according to referee Aubrey Edwards. In a recent edition of AEW Unrestricted, Nightingale explained the natural origins of her ring name.
“When I when I started wrestling, I think there was a bunch of names that appealed to me and I was like,’ All right, cool. I like this. I like this,’ but ultimately, I came down to a list of first names I like and last names. A lot of them were nature names. So, Willow is a tree, Nightingale is a bird. River was another one I really liked a lot. So I have a little sister. She’s come to AEW shows and she likes that, but she doesn’t really have any interest in wrestling outside of it. But I always joke if she were to become a wrestler, she’d be River Nightingale. Keep along with that like nature theme.”
A few years before joining AEW, Nightingale racked up an impressive resume on the independent circuit. Eventually, Women of Wrestling (WOW) took notice, and recruited Nightingale for their television programming. Nightingale continued on to explain how that opportunity came about, and the story behind her character name, Eye Candy, for the television show.
“So working for WOW was my first-time having TV exposure. It was very exciting at the time to work on something that also had like a storied past. WOW kind of came from GLOW. David McLean was the mind behind that, and he also started WOW, as kind of, I guess a reboot or like a modern version of that in the 90s and then rebooted that again in the 2010s or so. I got scouted for that out in California and I was wrestling this wrestler Zoey Skye. She was also known as Angel Dust and she’s a very small, small wrestler.”
“So, they saw me wrestling her and they thought I was a giant. They thought I was like six foot tall. They called me and they were like, ‘We want you on our show.’ I show up to the training facility. They’re like, ‘Oh, you’re like five, six. We thought you were like, Godzilla.’ [I said] ‘Hopefully you still want me for your show.’ They were like, ‘No, you got charisma, kid. We’re keeping you.’ And I was like, ‘Good. Oh, thank God,’ but I was worried for a second.”
“There were like a lot of women who had helped give me advice on working different cameras, not crumbling under the pressure that you put upon yourself, right? I was like, ‘Oh God, this is going to be on TV. I’m so nervous. I’m going to mess up.’ Jessicka Havok — I shared a room with her. She would give me advice at the hotel and at the building. So, it was just really nice to work in a locker room full of women who really were diverse. You saw all different body types, different races, different wrestling backgrounds. So to have that kind of diversity spotlighted was really awesome and it was really great.”
“Eye Candy was not my brainchild, but it is very close to me. It’s a character that has a lot of spirit and soul. I like to focus on the candy part of it and make it sweet, like I’m sweet like candy. But I think it was supposed to be like a spin on when you hear eye candy, I think there’s like a very conventionally attractive image that comes to mind. But this is also a new world and a new age that we live in. ‘Eye candy’ in that sense can really be so many different body types and so many figures. And I was like, ‘Hey, I’m hot still, so take that.’
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