Female Wrestling Star Britt Baker Has an Unusual Side-Hustle

Athletes are known for their multifaceted careers. They not only participate in their sports, but they also slap their names on products, appear in ads, open restaurants, and design clothing lines, among many other ventures. But female wrestling star Britt Baker has a surprising side-hustle: she’s a dentist.

Yes, the former AEW Women’s World Champion is a bona fide Doctor of Dental Medicine. If you think about it, it makes sense. If there’s any sport where someone is prone to lose teeth, it’s inside of the ring. We bet the Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania native doesn’t even have to market herself. She probably just hits up her fellow competitors as she’s leaving the arena.

So what came first: the beat-down career or the penchant for dentistry? It sounds like they kind of happened simultaneously, with Baker stubbornly pursuing the art of fixing people’s teeth in part to prove a college advisor wrong. At the same time, she became fascinated by a different kind of artistry: tackling people to the ground.

“They don’t complement one another. It’s very much oil and vinegar. I was kind of an outcast in both worlds,” Dr. Britt Baker told Mel Magazine of her divergent interests. “When my fellow dental students found out that I was training to be a wrestler, I was automatically the outcast. I was the weirdo. Dental students don’t think it’s cool if you’re a wrestler; they think it’s cool if you get straight As and become an oral surgeon. That’s how you impress them. So it was a hard time socially because I was the clear weirdo in both worlds.”

Well, the joke’s on them because Baker continues to have a foot in each world, and she’s kicking ass in both of them. “I get to do my two dream careers,” she told Mel Magazine.

The trick now is to make sure she doesn’t get injured wrestling in a way that would prevent her from performing dental work – and to ensure she doesn’t get so burnt out with dentistry (a field with a very high suicide rate) that she can’t bring her A-game into the squared circle.

We trust she’ll figure it out. After all, wrestlers are nothing if not agile.

Cover Photo: Icon Sportswire / Contributor (Getty Images)