Who inspired current NXT Women's Champion Tiffany Stratton to become a WWE Superstar?

Was it Trish Stratus, a performer with a very similar moniker? Or maybe the Divas era of WWE, where performers leaned much more into the sort of character she portrays on WWE television?

Well, as it turns out, the answer is none other than the “Queen” herself, Charlotte Flair, as, after stumbling onto an episode of SmackDown earlier in her life, Stratton settled on WWE Superstar as her desired career path, as she explained to Ryan Satin on Out of Character.

“So I would say I was flipping through the channels a random Friday Night, and I saw that she was blonde, she was buff, she could flip, she could talk some crap, and I was like, ‘That is literally everything that I can do’ so immediately I wanted to figure out how I could get into wrestling, and my mom helped me a lot, she kind of like reached out to some people and tried to figure out if there was a professional wrestling gym around me and there was, there was one in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, it’s actually Mr. Kennedy, his pro wrestling gym where he trains, and I went there, my mom went with me because it was such a sketchy area… I think I had just turned 20, so I went there and I kind of just observed my first day and just to see if I kind of like would like it and I watched a class and like I think it was the following week that I decided to sign up and take my first bump and yeah, the rest is history.”

While the rest, as they say, might be history, in practice, Stratus actually took a very long, laborious journey to WWE as a certain once-in-a-century pandemic halted her path to NXT dominance.

Tiffany Stratton reveals how COVID halted her WWE journey.

Asked by Ryan Satin about how she got her tryout with WWE, Tiffany Stratton explained how getting trained by Mr. Kennedy helped to connect her with Verne Gagne's son and how that eventually lead to a tryout.

“He was, but then I got in contact with a guy named Greg Gagne, and he did everything for me when it came to the WWE,” Stratton said. “I submitted my application to WWE so many times, and they would not look at me. I was persistent about it too, like I would submit it every week and nobody would take a look at me, nobody would email me, and I finally got in contact with this guy named Greg Gagne, and I got on the phone with him and talked to him for a little bit, and he’s like, ‘Okay, I will come down to Mr. Kennedy’s gym, and I will see like how you look in the ring and how you can bump around and how you can, like, run the ropes and so we kind of did our own little training session, and he saw me take my first bump and he was like, ‘Okay, like you have something in you,’ and he agreed to train me for weeks leading up to my tryout… The tryout was in March of 2021, and then COVID hit, and they actually flew us all to the performance center and then had to fly us all back home because they had to host RAW and SmackDown there when COVID hit.”

Asked what she did during her COVID-inspired holding pattern, Stratton reveals her goal of getting “super jacked.”

“So that was when I went into my CrossFit bodybuilding phase, and I got super jacked, I got super shredded, so honestly, it worked out very well,” Stratton noted. “It was about a year and a half later, so I got invited back in May of 2022, I absolutely killed my tryout; I made sure that I was going to die before getting the job there. I killed my tryout, and then a week later, I got an email, and they decided to sign me, and they brought me to the performance center within a couple of months, and I started training, got on LVL UP within two or three months of training at the PC and then I debuted a couple of months later, and now we’re here, NXT Women’s Champion.”

Did it seem like Stratton escalated up the NXT ranks quickly? Most definitely, but behind every overnight success story is a ton of work, and that adage is true for Stratton, too.