Written by Angela Rairden
Trish Stratus is widely regarded as one of the greatest female professional wrestlers in the history of sports entertainment. A seven-time WWE Women’s Champion and one-time Hardcore Champion, Stratus was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013.
Hailing from Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Stratus began her career as a fitness model before signing with WWE (then WWF) in November of 1999. She would make her TV debut in 2000 as a valet for tag team T & A as a heel, which would soon lead to her in-ring debut in a mixed tag match where she teamed with T & A against the Hardy Boyz and Lita. Stratus and T & A would win that match, and it would also spark a career-long storyline for Stratus with Lita as the two would alternate between feuding and teaming up during Stratus’ time in WWE. This would result in some of the greatest women’s matches in WWE history, and also form a real-life friendship between the two women.
Stratus would go on to win her first WWE Woman’s Championship in November of 2001, a championship that she would win a record-setting seven times and retire as a champion on September 18th, 2006.
In 2013, Stratus was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, only the second woman ever to receive that honor. Despite being officially retired from WWE, Stratus would still make a few sporadic appearances, most recently in 2018 when she entered the first-ever all woman’s Royal Rumble match as number 30, the final spot. That year, she also teamed with Lita to win in a tag match against Mickie James and Alicia Fox at Evolution, WWE’s first and only all-female pay-per-view event. Finally, in July of 2018, she was defeated in a singles match against Charlotte Flair at Summer Slam in her hometown of Toronto.
Proving that she’s not done being awesome, Stratus was inducted into the Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame Dan Gable Museum just this past week as part of the 2022 class and received the Lou Thesz Award as the first woman to ever do so. On an Instagram post where Stratus announced this honor, she wrote appropriately: “It’s a dream of breaking glass ceilings instead of wearing glass slippers kinda moment and I’m here for it!”.
Although her match against Charlotte was billed as Stratus’ “final match”, fans can only hope that the barrier-breaking and record-setting Trish Stratus will grace us with at least one more match sometime in the future.
I was lucky enough to catch up with Stratus at Washington State Summer Con on June 18th of this year in Puyallup, Washington (which is about an hour south of Seattle, for those of you not familiar with WA state) and be granted an interview with the legend herself. When I arrived at the con that day, I had no idea that I would be interviewing Trish Stratus. However, sometimes you ask for things and you just get lucky, because I presented my credentials, such as a they are, as a blogger for Frankie’s Comics and was granted a quick, five minute interview with Trish Stratus.
Although I’m sure that it wasn’t the most professional interview that she’s ever done (and only the second one that I’ve ever conducted [the first the I’ve conducted while in a cosplay!]), Stratus was friendly, amiable, and personable. She even insisted that I take a photo with her afterwards.
On a personal note, I have to say that it’s so incredibly rewarding to meet one of your heroes and find them to be just as amazing as you’d always imagined that they would be, and this is something that I’ve found to be true of every WWE superstar that I’ve met. Stratus, however, exceeded all of my hopes and expectations by even allowing this last-minute interview in the first place, little yet feeling as though I was chatting with an old friend rather than a WWE legend.
Without further ado, here’s my interview with the wonderful Trish Stratus herself:
Angela “LaLa” Rairden is an avid fan of comic books, Star Wars, and most things nerdy. A cosplayer, she loves to attend comic cons dressed as her favorite fictional characters, particularly Harley Quinn. Although her day job is at a grocery store, writing has always been her true calling. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she is currently writing her first novel.