Trish Stratus recently spoke with Forbes about her WWE Hall of Fame induction and more. Check out the highlights:
On her Hall of Fame induction: “It’s a huge honor. It’s the nod from your industry that you’ve achieved greatness. It’s something obviously you always strive for. You always want to be the best at what you do. Winning the championship for me was accomplishing what I wanted to go after in the industry. Now to be called into the Hall of Fame, it’s about all the hard work that I’ve been putting in over the years and it’s nice. I feel like if your industry gives you a nod, you know you made a difference within the industry.”
On what legacy she left in pro wrestling for future female wrestlers: “I’d like to think that we made a point of – we wanted to go and redefine how women’s wrestling was perceived. I think we really wanted to represent –to showcase a woman that could be strong and powerful. Being a female and making it in a male-dominated world was important for me to showcase that. I think we accomplished that. At the time, when we saw a lot of the female demographic it’s easy enough to see them come up and say, “We love what you do.” They were looking at us not just like, “Oh, you do this cool thing called wrestling on TV.” They were looking at us like, “You went after your goals and you tried, you showed us a different side of what women could do and you showed us a strong, powerful female.” Now that we’ve accomplished all that we wanted to, that’s what the women’s division in the WWE is all about.”
On the current Divas landscape: “The nice thing to see is there are a lot of women who are just completely capable in the ring. We have these great athletes I think what’s missing maybe is there’s a little bit of element of character development that’s missing right now. That’s something that I feel from my era isn’t really what you’re seeing in the current division. I was able to work with a handful of different women, but each match meant something different because we came in with a different story line and there was a real depth of character to each person that worked the matches. Now there’s a little bit of that lacking and hopefully there will be some time to develop that. There was a time when we were missing the athleticism from the women and now we’ve definitely got that side of things and they’re beautiful in the ring. I see nothing but great things with Kaitlyn as a champion. She represents a really relatable woman and someone that people can look up to and girls can look up to as a really great role model.”
On what separates WrestleMania from other shows: “Oh, just the grandeur of the event. It’s a spectacle. There is a kind of a build-up after the Royal Rumble around January and there’s just this hint of a feeling in every match and every story leading up to. Your great moments are made at WrestleMania because that’s what people remember. If you have a WrestleMania moment it’s going to be forever in history. It’s bigger than life and it’s at the MetLife Stadium. There’s going to be 80,000 people and there’s going to be entertainment and it’s going to be an entertaining evening and you’re just going to know that this is something special.”
On her favorite WrestleMania memory: “My last WrestleMania was WrestleMania 22 in Chicago. It embodied all of the work that we were working for at the time as women. We went in there and we have this character storyline which probably about six months of a storyline, which is a rare thing, especially for women. We had a real in-depth character development. There were twist and turns that got us to that point and you could just tell because the crowd was into every single move we made. That was probably the highlight of my career, just knowing that we had accomplished that as women. In my humble opinion on that card we contributed as much as any of the male matches as a whole. It was a real peak for women’s wrestling at that time.”
On the Superstar video game challenge at Axxess: “It’s awesome to see how the video games themselves have evolved. For kids watching and when they’re playing – I say kids, but I have the game and I play it. You play the game and it’s a real experience. I’ve seen it for years, how it just evolved and you see a true experience they get. You get the action, you get the excitement, you get the crowd feeling as well, so I think it’s a really cool experience.”
On playing herself in the games: “Oh, it’s awesome. I totally do that. They have your mannerisms down, they have your looks, like the way you walk. It’s quite fascinating. I remember when they first started making the action figures and they were making them so close to you, you literally could see your smirk that you made. And now the video games do that so to watch that today, it’s pretty awesome. I’m not going to lie.”
On who she would face if she could take on a male superstar in the ring: “I think I could take on John Cena. Just for like a straight-up baby face vs. baby face match, just cause.”
On her favorite Attitude Era memory: “I would say DX probably embodied the whole era. That’s why I think wrestling became so exciting again was that era. There was so much being offered. The feud between Stone Cold and Rock was probably what drew me every single week and I just remember watching DX and they were just so cool, it made wrestling cool. What everybody was doing made wrestling cool again and it just took it to a whole other level of mainstream popularity. We’ve never seen anything like it. It was a special time for sure and I came in just after that so I remember entering that era thinking, “Wow this is a special thing I’m doing right now.””
