Wrestler of the Week: Trish Stratus

Kimberly Schueler
Trish Stratus Victoria (source: WWE)

RondaRousey.com’s Wrestler of the Week series profiles significant wrestlers from the past and present. 


Trish Stratus was hired by WWE with no in-ring training to be an attractive manager for male wrestlers. However, Stratus soon started wrestling and got better every time she did it. Despite these nonviolent beginnings, she rose to become a seven-time Women’s Champion and one of the best and most popular female wrestlers of her era.

Trish Stratus, born Patricia Anne Stratigeas, was a fan of wrestling as a kid, but didn’t originally pursue a career in the squared circle. She found success as a fitness model and expressed her love for pro graps as a cohost on Live Audio Wrestling on Toronto Sports Radio. WWE (then WWF) took notice and hired her to play valet/manager roles in 1999.

Especially during her first year in the company, Stratus’s storylines were often sexually-themed. She debuted as the villainous manager of T & A (Test and Albert), managed porn star Val Venis, and had an affair angle with Mr. McMahon. When the latter relationship turned sour, Stratus was repeatedly degraded onscreen. Vince McMahon, Stephanie McMahon, and William Regal attacked and dumped slop on her at the No Way Out pay-per-view, and, on the following episode of RAW, Mr. McMahon called her a “toy” he had “grown tired of playing with” and infamously forced her to strip to her underwear and bark like a dog. All this suffering eventually played a role in Stratus becoming a hero: After she slapped Vince during his match with his son Shane at WrestleMania X-Seven, her career would never be the same.

Following her turn to fan favorite, Stratus started performing more as a wrestler. As she did so, she got better on the ring and the mic; while her model past and good looks were still a big part of her character, she wasn’t afraid to put her body at risk, going through tables, and wrestling a Hardcore match every once in a while, even briefly winning the WWE Hardcore Championship.

After she transitioned from mostly ringside character to in-ring competitor, Stratus was closely associated with the WWE Women’s Championship. She returned to the ring from an ankle injury at Survivor Series 2001 to win the then-vacant title for the first time in a six-pack challenge. She won it for the fourth time at WrestleMania XIX in a triple threat against Victoria and Jazz. During another championship reign in 2005, she couldn’t wrestle for four months due to a herniated disc and was not stripped of the title (despite the rule that WWE champions must defend their titles at least once every thirty days). Such was the stature of Trish Stratus after six years in World Wrestling Entertainment.

Stratus, no matter what side of the fence she was on, had many memorable and entertaining feuds throughout her career. One of these began in her last year of regular in-ring competition. After WrestleMania 21 in 2005, she met Mickie James, who introduced herself as Trish’s biggest fan. As the two competed in tag team matches together, James became more and more obsessed with Stratus, even going as far to kiss her under the mistletoe on the December 26 episode of RAW. In March 2006, James attacked Stratus, taking their relationship from a charged friendship to a full-on blood feud. At WrestleMania 22, James defeated Stratus in a Women’s Championship match—widely regarded as one of the best women’s matches in WWE history at that point—to end her 448-day reign. Though Stratus lost her rematch for the title at Backlash, she defeated James on her last match on RAW in September of that year.

But many of Stratus’ rivalries pit the former fitness model against a less traditionally feminine opponent, like her feuds with Molly Holly, Victoria, Jazz, and most notably, her arch-enemy (and sometimes tag partner) Lita.

The rivalry between Trish and Lita began long before they were the top competitors in the women’s division, going back in 1999 when they were plus-ones to T & A and Team XTreme, respectively. Their contrasting attitudes and personal styles made them a fun odd couple tag team for a while, but it added even more to the heat of their feud when it resumed. Stratus, as a villainous champion, verbally degraded Lita while she was pregnant with Kane’s hellspawn and couldn’t wrestle. And the tension built between these women for months until they faced off in a championship match in the main event of a 2004 episode of RAW. Lita defeated Stratus in an aggressive bout that showed off everything fans loved about this rivalry.

But this didn’t extinguish their hatred for each other in the slightest, and the women feuded on and off until Stratus’s retirement. She defeated Lita for the Women’s Championship at Unforgiven 2006 in her hometown of Toronto, submitting her with fellow-Canadian Bret Hart’s signature sharpshooter. In an industry in which so many careers have ended suddenly and/or painfully, Stratus got a rare happy ending.

But as any longtime wrestling fan knows, retirements in this business never seem to take. Trish Stratus continued to work with WWE as a trainer on Tough Enough and as a special guest participant in tag matches. She became a WWE Hall of Fame inductee in 2013, was honored at RAW 25, and was the surprise #30 entrant in the inaugural Women’s Royal Rumble match in January 2018. She recently returned to WWE programming to team up with her old frenemy Lita against Mickie James and Alexa Bliss at Evolution. A woman who was one of the highlights of women’s wrestling’s past continues to play a deserved role in shaping its future.

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