Trish Stratus has been announced as the third inductee into the WWE Hall of Fame Class of 2013.
The announcement was made on the January 28 edition of WWE Monday Night RAW.
Stratus will become the youngest member of the Hall at the ripe age of 37, but frankly she well deserves the accolade.
Stratus joined the WWF in late 1999 after leaving University and doing years of work as a fitness model. She debuted on television in early 2000 as a manager with virtually no wrestling experience. Playing of her knockout looks she paired up the team of Test and (Prince) Albert to form T & A (get it?).
She quickly rose up to be a featured performer in the company within a year, including acting as Mr. McMahon’s mistress during his rivalry against the rest of the McMahon family in early 2001.
At Survivor Series ’01, she won her first WWF Women’s Championship. She never looked back. After winning that first Championship she improved a hundred as a competent in-ring performer. As the company transitioned into the brand expansion era in 2002, she became the face of a booming women’s division that boasted legitimate talent like Victoria, Molly Holly, Gail Kim, Jazz, Jacqueline, Mickie James and others.
She ended up winning the Women’s Championship a staggering seven times over the course of a five-year period.
In fact, Stratus is one of the very few wrestlers in WWE to proverbially go out on top. Her last match as a full-time performer was on September 17, 2006 in her hometown of Toronto, Ontario at the Unforgiven pay per view. On that night she defeated her long-time “frenemy” Lita to earn that seventh Women’s Championship. She made Lita tap out to Canada’s favorite maneuver – the Sharpshooter.
She retired as Champion.
Trish Stratus was partially responsible for ushering a new era of women’s wrestling in WWE. She was drop dead gorgeous, could talk on the microphone and worked her tail off to become incredibly talented inside the wrestling ring.
She is certainly in the pantheon of the top women wrestlers in North American pro wrestling history. Within in WWE she is easily a top five woman performer of all time and a company treasure.
Despite her still young age she is more than worthy of this honor and is a welcome addition to WWE’s version of a Hall of Fame.
No inductor has chosen yet but her sometime partner and greatest rival, Lita, seems like a logical choice. Or a myriad of any of her male “co-stars” would work as well, namely Christian or Chris Jericho.
She will join Bob Backlund and Mick Foley so far as the inductees into the 2013 Class of the WWE Hall of Fame.
This year’s Hall of Fame induction ceremony will be on Saturday, April 6, in New York, New York inside the famed Madison Square Garden, the night before WrestleMania XXIX.
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