In the carny world of professional wrestling, where personas are stitched together with glitter, grit, and just enough insanity to make Vince Russo blush, Brooke Tessmacher didn’t just play the game—she bent it into a bikini shape, slapped it with a smile, and gave it a high-impact makeover.
Born Brooke Nichole Adams in the steel-spined heart of St. Louis and raised in the sun-drenched chaos of Houston, she lived the kind of childhood that doesn’t get talked about on podcasts. There were no silver spoons or country club pool parties—just a Daytona hatchback, a single mom doing her damndest, and a little girl who’d eventually become a three-time Knockouts Champion and one of the last true crossovers in wrestling—a blend of beauty, brawn, and bulldog tenacity.
If Jim Cornette wrote a country song about a wrestler, it might start like this: “Mama drove a hatchback, baby girl dreamed of belts… ended up dancing in ECW while chasing The Miz like a soap opera on Red Bull.”
Let’s rewind.
Before wrestling, Adams was already crushing the competition—literally—in the world of bikini contests and fitness pageants. Miss Hawaiian Tropic. Miss Swimsuit USA. She looked like a pinup drawn by a teenage boy and moved like a gymnast on Red Bull. When one modeling agent told her she was “too ripped” for traditional modeling, it became clear: Brooke wasn’t built to be anyone’s background decoration.
So she turned toward wrestling. Naturally. Because where else do you go when you’re too fit for Hooters and too smart to just smile?
In 2006, WWE scooped her up despite her not making the final cut in the Diva Search—a classic Vince move. The Diva Era was running hot, and Brooke, along with Kelly Kelly and Layla, formed Extreme Exposé—a dance troupe in ECW that felt like Vince McMahon’s fever dream crossed with a strip mall variety hour.
She wasn’t there to wrestle—not yet. WWE gave her pom-poms and bad choreography and told her to flirt with The Miz. It was like casting Meryl Streep in a Taco Bell commercial. But she played along. She danced, she posed, and she tried to learn something between segments. Then they shipped her to developmental, like a glam version of the minor leagues, where she was trained in Deep South and Florida Championship Wrestling, making her in-ring debut with about as much fanfare as a parking lot brawl.
Then, in 2007, WWE released her. Just like that. One minute she’s hip-thrusting on Raw; the next she’s unemployed, wondering if that Hooters swimsuit gig was still open.
But Brooke didn’t pout. She pivoted.
In 2010, she resurfaced in TNA as Miss Tessmacher, the assistant to Eric Bischoff, complete with a pencil skirt and attitude. Named after Lex Luthor’s buxom secretary in Superman, she played the role with all the campy charm of a B-movie femme fatale. For a while, she wasn’t a wrestler—just a character in the background of other people’s stories. But then came the twist.
Bischoff fires her on TV. She’s humiliated. Her only way back into the spotlight? Learn to wrestle.
And that’s where the real Brooke Tessmacher was born.
She trained. She took bumps. She got her jaw broken. And she kept showing up. Week after week, she put in the work. She formed a tag team with Tara called TnT—two former WWE divas turned TNA stalwarts who somehow made glitter tights and real aggression coexist. In 2011, they won the Knockouts Tag Team Championship. Brooke, once laughed off as just another eye-candy dancer, was now a belt-carrying part of the TNA women’s division.
But the real magic came when she went solo.
Between 2012 and 2015, Brooke won the TNA Knockouts Championship three times. Let that sink in. Three. In a division that included Gail Kim, Madison Rayne, and Mickie James, she didn’t just hold her own—she led the pack. Her title win over Gail Kim at Slammiversary in 2012 was a genuine “Oh hell yeah” moment. She was no longer just a pretty face. She was a credible, legit, fight-your-face-off champion.
Her in-ring work improved tenfold. She had the timing, the charisma, and the crowd on her side. She was an athlete—make no mistake about it. Brooke sold like hell, bumped like a maniac, and knew how to turn it on when the red light was blinking. She made you believe.
But, like any wrestler with a long-enough timeline, the real world crept in.
She took a break. She tore an ACL. She showed up on The Amazing Race with then-boyfriend Robbie E, showing America that being a wrestler meant being a jack-of-all-trades—grueling flights, foreign food, and the occasional breakdown. She even popped up on Rattled, a TLC reality show about new moms, and again on social media with her growing family and a new name: mom.
She had two kids with her fiancé Weston Piper, and though she’s stepped away from the ring, she’s still very much in shape, in charge, and occasionally reminding the world that once upon a time, she was that chick in TNA—the one who took her critics and piledrove them into silence.
In 2017, she returned briefly to Impact, traded a few wins and losses, and then rode off into the kind of sunset that pro wrestlers rarely get: one without scandal, bitterness, or a broken-down body.
So where does Brooke Tessmacher fit in the history of women’s wrestling?
She’s not Trish. She’s not Lita. She’s not Gail. But she’s important.
She was a woman who came into wrestling during the tail-end of the diva era, when sex appeal was currency, and somehow morphed into a legit competitor right before the women’s evolution became a hashtag. She bridged the gap. She walked through the fire. And she did it in heels, with a title belt, and a smirk that said, “Told you so.”
Bobby Heenan would’ve said she was “the kind of woman who walks into a bar and suddenly everyone’s buying drinks for each other, just so they don’t look directly at her.” Cornette would’ve pointed out that she took chicken salad and made a damn good chicken sandwich.
Brooke Adams never needed to prove anything—but she proved it anyway. Over and over. In front of cameras, under the lights, and behind the curtain where it matters most.
And in the carnival of pro wrestling, that’s more than most ever get.
