Lasting only eight months and being fired in disgrace, Amy Zidian is a name you almost certainly do not remember in the WWE. Discovered in the ill-fated Diva Search Contest in 2006, her WWE career was as impressive as it was long.
Coming eighth in the contest that was eventually won by Layla (and also featured Maryse), she seemed to have a bright future in the WWE. Not as a wrestler, mind you – Amy Zidian only wrestled two matches in her career, and both of them came a year after he WWE release.
Zidian did not have any experience in wrestling prior to entering the Diva Search. She was a lingerie and fitness model, the prototypical female hiring that John Laurinitis made during his reign as the head of talent relations in the WWE. In fact, he hired her to a developmental deal with the WWE as soon as she was eliminated from the contest, based on little other than he looks.
She didn’t spend too long in developmental, as teaching her to wrestle was not the goal in mind. Amy Zidian made her debut in the WWE at an ECW house show in October 2006, competing against Kelly Kelly and Trinity in a bikini contest. The results of the competition are unknown, but we can agree that the real loser in the contest was women.
Yes, this was the level of the WWE then.
Soon after that, Zidian was partnered with fan-favorite high-flyer Jimmy Wang Yang. The cruiser weight cowboy wowed fans with his incredible moonsault finisher, which was showcased heavily in his tag team with Shannon Moore (still one of the best tag teams to never win the tag team championships).
Amy Zidian was made Wang Yang’s valet, accompanying him to the ring for a series of matches and watching gleefully at ringside. She had very little impact on anything he did, and was a rather superfluous addition to his character. Her debut alongside Jimmy Wang Yang came in the beginning of November, just a month before she was fired by the WWE.
While fans at home had very little to think about Zidian at all (she did literally nothing her entire career), backstage she was ruffling a lot of the wrong feathers. While she took time out of her day to criticize a number of WWE Divas, despite a lack of experience herself, she soon worked her way up the ladder and annoyed some of the top brass in the company.
Rumors of why she was fired vary. Some claim she was let go for being rude to Vickie Guerrero and Stephanie McMahon, not knowing who the pair were. This was particularly egregious, as Guerrero had been on TV for years, while McMahon was a higher-up in the company and the daughter of Vince McMahon – then-chairman of the WWE.
However, Jimmy Wang Yang refuted this claim. Rather than being rude, Amy Zidian was fired just for not knowing who the two women were. Speaking on the “House of Hardcore” podcast, Jimmy Wang Yang revealed:
“The second week we were introducing her again. I’m standing there ready to do the pretape. Stephanie walks by and Amy reaches over and says, ‘hey, I’m Amy, who are you?’ I left. She didn’t know who Stephanie McMahon was.”
“Stephanie blew it off because she was a Diva Search girl so they don’t know wrestling. I thought it got swept under a rug. I wasn’t there for the second story but I heard she was in the locker room with Vickie Guerrero. They are having their girl talk and she asked Vickie, ‘so how did you get in the business?'”
“I think that’s the one that blew up. I think it got around that she didn’t know who Stephanie was. She didn’t know who Vickie was. Ok, this girl definitely doesn’t belong in this business.”.
In 2015, she reemerged into the public eye with an attempt to return to the wrestling business. Amy Zidian sent a video in to the WWE to sign up for the upcoming “Tough Enough” reality show. The program searched for the next WWE star, and had wrestlers like MJF and Aaron Solo apply to join the company.
Unfortunately, the video she posted has now been deleted, so we cannot look at the content of her Tough Enough application. This was the last wrestling-related business Amy Zidian has been a part of, as she stayed out of the business following a failed comeback in 2007 for the Women’s Extreme Wrestling promotion.
It has been claimed that she suffered two car crashes during her time in the WWE, leading her to suffer from post-concussion syndrome. However, I am unable to find any reliable source on this fact, so will be treating it as false until any evidence is provided otherwise.