Wrestling / Leilani Kai

Patty Seymour (born January 23, 1960) is a semi-retired American Professional Wrestler and trainer as Leilani Kai. She debuted in 1975 after training under The Fabulous Moolah and wrestled for various National Wrestling Alliance territories and WWE. Her biggest run was with WWE in The '80s. She defeated Wendi Richter for the WWE Women's Title and lost it back at the first WrestleMania. She and Judy Martin feuded with the Jumping Bomb Angels over the WWF Women's Tag Team Titles. She has wrestled all over the world for decades, including for All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling, WCW, SMW and many independents. She was inducted into the NWA Hall of Fame in 2006.

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"Glamorous Tropes"

• Alliterative Name: Her tag team name, the Glamour Girls.
• Always Someone Better
  • Madusa more than anyone else. Leilani Kai met her in the ring several times on WCW and WWF shows. It was a decisive Madusa victory every time.
  • Kai was this to Definitive Wrestling International's Women's Champion Chelsea Diamond. Diamond was never able to beat Kai and had to settle on a time limit draw to retain the belt.
• Arch-Enemy: Wendi Richter, with the exception of the Memphis CWA promotion, where they were an unsuccessful Student–Master Team. Then the Jumping Bomb Angels while tagging with Judy Martin. Kai already had inconclusive matches Noriyo Tateno and Itsuki Yamazaki but things escalated when The Jumping Bomb Angels came to the US and beat the Glamour Girls on their own turf.
• Badass Teacher: As a trainer, her students include Wendi Richter, Daffney Unger, Amber O'Neal, Christie Ricci and her own tag team partner Judy Martin.
• Create Your Own Hero: Kai temporarily turned Leah Von Dutch into a baby face by giving Thunderkitty an illegal advantage during their match. Legendary then gave The Kimber Bombs, one of whom is Dutch's trainer, a gang beating and that sealed the deal.
• Dark Action Girl: She worked Heel more often than not.
• Easily-Distracted Referee: Employed Steve Stasiak, Christie Ricci's other trainer as one, when Kai had to defend the PGWA Title belt against her. Kai and Stasiak said it was to teach the rookie humility but no one was fooled.
• Every Year They Fizzle Out
  • After coming up short against Tomi Aoyama in a match for the WWWA All-Pacific Title vacated by Maki Ueda, Leilani Kai spent seven years trying and failing to win the belt. Tag Team partner Judy Martin actually got a run before Kai by defeating Yukari Omori after Jumbo Hori vacated the belt. But Kai finally got a reign of her own by defeating Chigusa Nagayo of all people.
  • Eventually subverted, but it took Leilani Kai eleven years before she finally won the PGWA Title belt, another belt Judy Martin managed to win before her by defeating Susan Green where Kai failed to. But finally Kai defeated reigning champion Lexie Fyfe at BattleGround Branson.
• Evil Minion: Alternated between The Mouth Of The South and Queen Christopher Love with Judy Martin, while using Ronnie P. Gossett Jr with Pippa L'Vinn. Johnny Fairplay when wrestling solo.
• Evil Versus Evil
  • British Middleweight Champion Pippa L'Vinn's 2001 invasion of PGWA concluded with a match against Leilani Kai where they at first tried to out wrestle one another but ended up trying to out cheat each other. They managed a two year truce, but the allure of a shiny purple championship belt got them back at each other again.
  • Legendary vs Kimber Bombs and Legendary vs Leah Von Dutch were both initially this. The Kimber Bombs turned face after Kimber Lee was forced into the Necro Butcher position(all alone and surrounded by hostile factions), while LVD was largely on account of Kai being more unlikable.
  • When she tried to regain the PGWA Title against Nemesis. Nemesis can make most(including Tracy Taylor) look heroic, but Kai's reputation preceded herself.
• The Gimmick: She is from Florida, but Moolah thought she could pass for Hawaiian and had her billed as the Island's and archipelago's princess. In PGWA she had a successor of sorts in Tracy Taylor, a surfer who actually is Hawaiian. Perhaps most obviously in the fact the usually babyface Taylor was primarily a heel in PGWA.
• Hidden Depths: Like Moolah, Kai is known for relying on fowls first and foremost. Unlike Moolah, Kai is more than competent on the mat, was fairly acrobatic in her prime, and when it came to fowls, was adept with exotic weapons like nunchucks. Still, she'd rather just poke you in the eye or bite your arm.
• Inter Generational Friendship: Of the sort Miss Garrett tends to have with her elders, but while you'd be hard pressed to find Leilani Kai saying anything nice about Santana Garrett to her face, Kai has been one of the driving forces behind Garrett's rise in the ranks of the independent circuit and actively campaigned for Garrett's debut in World Wonder Ring ST★RDOM.
• Just Toying with Them: Usually PGWA shies away from putting its more one sided matches up for sell but made an extremely uncharacteristic exception for a "grudge match" between Leilani Kai and then rookie The Vixen(not that one) that lasted 31 minutes. Kai could have ended it in five but knowing PGWA gives wrestlers a 15 to 30 minute time allowance, decided to give The Vixen "chances" to fight back.
• Leotard of Power: It was The '80s, everybody wore them. Kai usually wore a lot on top of it before match time.
• Malicious Misnaming: Kai considers beating Chigusa Nagayo for the WWWA All Pacific Championship belt and keeping it for 250 days(when Nagayo won it back) to be the highlight of her career, but Kai won't let that good memory stop her from butchering Nagayo's name as "Chico Awagawa".
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Leilani Kai and Malia Hosaka taking out their frustrations with Leah Von Dutch on La Rosa Negra, who had nothing to do with Dutch or Legendary, inspired Ivelisse Vélez to start her own Power Stable. Las Sicarias proceeded to cripple every heel faction in Shine Wrestling, including Kai's own Legendary when Velez's tit for tat to Thunderkitty caused friction between Thunderkitty, Hosaka and Brandi Wine. Thunderkitty by no means liked La Rosa, but found Kai and Hosaka's actions excessive, didn't like that they were dragging her into a conflict where the enemy was mostly justified in her opinion and took note of the fact none of Legendary treated her as well as Las Sicarias did their own.
• Older Hero Versus Younger Villain: For a loose definition of "hero" vs La Amazona in Ring Warriors. Amazona was quite possibly the most popular woman in the company at the time and was probably cheered more than Kai at first. It was only after Amazona helped Melissa Coates beat down La Rosa Negra, the other contender for Ring Warriors' most popular woman, that Kai started getting unanimous cheers for opposing Amazona.
• Power Stable:
  • (in Memphis): The First Family, led by Jimmy Hart.
  • She was the manager of Legendary, with Malia Hosaka, Brandi Wine and Thunderkitty, in SHINE.
• Ring Oldies: Still wrestled at fifty, wrestled well at that
• Spear Counterpart: The Canadian Glamour Boys Sean and Shane in Puerto Rico
• Stone Wall: Later in her career, she mostly relied on wearing down the young ones, no more diving cross bodies.
• Student–Master Team: Debuted as the tag team partner of The Fabulous Moolah, her trainer, and later tagged with her own student Judy Martin. These two teams worked out well enough, the one with Wendi Richter not so much.
• Tag Team: With Judy Martin as part of the Glamour Girls. They were champions in WWF and LPWA, known as "The Queens Of Wrestling" in the latter with Christopher Love.
• The Artifact: Ring Warriors punished La Amazona by making Leilani Kai special guest referee for every challenge La Amazona made to La Rosa Negra's Battling Bombshell's Championship belt. In one such match where Angelina Love filled in for Amazona, Kai was kept but had very little to do during the contest since she had no grudge with Love and Love wasn't excessively brutal to Negra.
• The Last DJ: Leilani Kai is mostly a proponent of 1960s/70s era pro wrestling. In her early years her willingness to wrestle barefoot was considered bold, not that she did it often even then, but Kai was reactionary by the standards of the post territorial era, having a low tolerance for sexual gimmick matches and angles, plus a demand for well wrestled matches and concise promos. ECW was booked around "Sex Sells" after it left the NWA, its fan service models outnumbering its women wrestlers by a wide margin. The WWF dropped its women's division, put "diva" valets in bubble baths, then brought wrestlers back for eggnog and gravy bowls. Kai wasn't used much in WCW to begin with but even less after her own account of chewing out Vince Russo for suggesting she appear in a bikini, assuming that wasn't in reference to her refusal to return to TNA after seeing first hand how crass it was in its early years. From 1994 to 2010, the wrestling industry of the USA, even much of the independent circuit and Canada, was not for Kai. Still she hovered around, working how she wanted where she could, showing people how she felt women wrestlers were supposed to act. While the opportunities for wrestlers in the region did increase by a noticeable margin during the 2010s, Kai was now past her prime.
• The Rival
  • Her most frequently faced opponent throughout her career is Vicky Williams, who was already an established tag team specialist when Kai debuted. Most of Kai's early dues were paid in the form of Williams schooling her across three countries, although they did team up a few times, most frequently in the Japanese based International Wrestling Enterprise.
  • Not too far behind her is Joyce Grable, Williams's most frequent tag team partner. Grable teamed with Kai in the Mexican based LLI though.
  • Susan Green, who (unofficially) defeated Kai's first tag team partner and trainer, The Fabulous Moolah, for Moolah's World Women's Championship belt, and frequently held the PGWA Title belt Kai spent over a decade trying to win. It was a fairly one sided rivalry, but Kai never gave up on it.
  • She had a fairly long running feud with Strawberry Fields on the post territory circuit, especially in NWA Mid-Atlantic. Leilani Kai in fact viewed Fields as something of a Worthy Opponent in that she showed her a degree of respect when not wrestling, despite cheating like crazy when she was.
• Villain Team-Up: Kai at first tried to halt Pippa L'Vinn's invasion of PGWA, but then the two decided to join forces as a tag team. This made them more successful, but PGWA did not have a tag team division, so once Kai won the belt L'Vinn eventually challenged for and took it from her.
• Warts and All
  • Nikita didn't get her match with Riptide, thanks to Lexie Fyfe, and Lexie made her look like a rookie. Still, her trip to the US was letting her wrestle a legend, a WWF Women's champion. But Nikita was disappointed again, as she learned first hand Kai wasn't legendary for being a scientific wrestler but for being a dirty cheat. In their next match Nikita took less of a "wrestling" approach, mostly trying to pummel Kai into submission instead. But this lead her to respect Kai's toughness, if not her in ring style.
  • Sumie Sakai was another foreigner with a love for USA pro wrestling, another who had to be taught what Leilani Kai was all about the hard way. In PWS BLOW this time.
  • After Leilani Kai defeated the much larger, stronger and younger Shelby Beach at Real Survivors, PGWA Commissioner Penny Banner surprised her by personally handing Kai the very first "Spirit Of Excellence" award in recognition of her many years helping promote pro wrestling, her genuine mat wrestling skills, and inspiring young wrestlers, while continuing to disapprove of Kai's cheating antics. Later during that very same event Ronnie P. Gossett Jr, who was serving as the manager of Kai and Pippa L'Vinn, was temporarily banned from PGWA after he helped them beat Shelby Beach and Desiree Petersen in a tag team match.
• Worth It: Her attitude toward the Training from Hell she endured in the AJW dojo, saying that the skills she learned there continued what she learned under Moolah.
• Ur-Example: The first woman inducted into the NWA Hall of Fame, and until 2011 the only woman listed. This might have remained if PGWA had not complained to NWA about Mildred Burke, June Byers, Penny Banner, Nell Stewart, Ella Waldek and Debbie Combs not being included yet. The NWA responded by inducting PGWA's first champion, and longtime rival of Kai, Susan Green.