The following is from WWE.com:
Catching up with Ivory: Part 1
By: James Vermillion
Written: December 16, 2009
Becoming a three-time Women’s Champion in WWE is no easy feat. Therefore, to say that the six and a half-year career that Ivory – who also goes by the name Lisa Moretti — spent in WWE was a success would be an understatement. However, her time in WWE is but one chapter of a storied tale.
Though her WWE career wouldn’t start until more than a decade later, Moretti was just a college student when the bug to be an entertainer first bit. With some nudging from a friend, Lisa became “Tina Ferrari,” one of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (G.L.O.W.).
G.L.O.W. was a brand-new promotion based in Las Vegas that featured all women entertainers. Created by David McLane and Jackie Stallone, Sylvester Stallone’s mother, the organization was a product of Stallone’s all-women gym Barbarella’s and lasted four seasons from 1986-1992.
Despite having little experience, Moretti was ready to make the most of the opportunity, knowing that it wouldn’t be easy.
“It’s so hard to watch the footage because we were all so lame at what we did,” recalled the future Ivory. “We didn’t have any trainers. We pretty much figured it all out by watching men’s wrestling.
“We didn’t have anybody in Vegas. We just had videos and ring time — on a boxing mat mind you, not even a wrestling ring. The thing was stiffer than stiff, like wrestling in your living room or on plywood.”
Though the conditions were hardly ideal, Moretti, as well as the rest of the G.L.O.W. girls, looked to make the best of it, with Lisa becoming both a singles and tag team champion in her short time with the organization.
“We were all really young and had a lot of creative freedom, which was really cool. It was like it was our show,” Moretti explained of G.L.O.W.. “Let’s do this outright, put our costumes on, and really get this thing sold, bring people in.”
However, all good things must come to an end. Eventually, Moretti moved on from her success with G.L.O.W. to join the promotion’s original founder, David B. McLane, in his new organization, Powerful Women of Wrestling. After filming the first season with POWW, however, she realized that things weren’t going as she needed them.
“Jumping from G.L.O.W. to POWW, I told [McLane], ‘This is my job, and I have to make money from my job. The kind of money you’re paying is ridiculous.’”
Moretti recollected that even though she was under contract with McLane’s organization,“they just stopped paying after we were done shooting.” So when she was called to make a second season of POWW, she made the difficult decision that her young in-ring career would come to a close.
“They called and told me they were ready to make the second season,” Moretti said. “I said, ‘I think you owe me some back pay. I don’t want to quit on you, but it’s kind of silly if you can’t uphold your end of the deal.’
“It’s really hard to go put mascara on a lady in the mall, and people recognize you and ask you what you’re doing there, and all you can think of saying is, ‘I’m trying to make a living.’ It was time to move on, time for me to make a living.”
It would still be another 10 years until Moretti would join WWE and become Ivory, and the road leading her back to the ring was one that saw her wearing many different hats.
“I did just about everything under the sun. I was always trying to get commercial work and acting jobs of that sort,” Moretti explained “I did a little bit of everything – some Revlon work, make-up artistry. I taught classes at community colleges for a make-up course, teaching tennis, I was doing everything I knew how to do. I think one year I had as many as 10 W-2’s come in.”
Over that time, Ivory gained much life experience, but her desire to entertain had never really left her. So she landed a stunt job at Universal Studios in Hollywood.
“I tried to convince myself I didn’t need it,” she said, “but it’s just who I am. You just know that you’re a performer and that’s that.”
That is most certainly true for Moretti, and her returning to entertainment soon would also include her return to the ring on the biggest stage – World Wrestling Entertainment.
