When Trish Stratus began her friendship and eventual feud with Becky Lynch, it felt oddly familiar.
Sure, Stratus technically retired almost two decades ago, and has been a WWE Hall of Famer since before Rhea Ripley signed her NXT contract, but she's returned to her former employer from time to time ever since to shoot an angle, wrestle a few matches and ultimately take a loss on a Premium Live Event to put a full-time performer over, as fans most recently saw with Charlotte Flair in 2019.
Would Lynch and Stratus experience a similar fate, with the Hall of Famer putting her former friend through a series of obstacles before ultimately heading back to the Great White North for Canada's Got Talent and her other observations? It certainly felt that way, but now, maybe not so much, as, for the second time this August, Stratus has suggested that she's ready to move on from her current feud with Lynch so she can get a few more performers to say “Thank You, Trish” before she rides off into the sunset once more.
“I didn't expect to be sipping lemonade for six months straight. Me coming here, I'm gonna prove myself when I beat Becky Lynch, arguably the best of this generation. I kind of feel like I did that in May. I'm kind of like, if Becky wasn't so obsessed with me I feel like we could have cut this feud a long time ago and I could have gone on to do other things in this current women's division, which is so intriguing to me,” Trish Stratus told the New York Post.
“Not everyone has said, ‘Thank you Trish' yet, right? So I got some work to do.”
Now, for fans out of the know, Stratus shared a similar sentiment with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Monday in the lead-up to Payback, noting that she's ready to put her feud with Lynch in the past to focus on something new, which is as curious as it is intriguing.
With many of the women on the main roster having never wrestled a single match with Stratus, who knows, maybe the “Goat” really does see a world where her return to the WWE Universe – maybe even in NXT opposite Tiffany Stratton – could last a little longer then some fans might have initially expected?
Zoey Stark has nothing but nice things to say about Trish Stratus.
In the lead-up to SummerSlam, Sean Ross Sapp of Fightful asked Zoey Stark about her relationship with Trish Stratus and how the “Goat” has impacted her career and time on the main thus far.
Unsurprisingly, Stark is a big fan of Stratus even when the cameras aren't running, as she has done more than most could to help get the NXT standout on television weekly and put her into a feud with a true A-List talent the likes of which many of her fellow call-ups haven't been afforded.
“It makes me feel good about myself and tells me I'm doing something right,” Trish Strarus told Fightful. “Trish Stratus, I've said it, and I'll say it again, she's been absolutely amazing. She has been a mentor inside the ring and out. Becky Lynch, just with us as people outside of the ring and the story, Becky is absolutely amazing. She's a great human being. She's been so welcoming, and she's been helping me out along the way.”
Though she clearly isn't the featured performer in her current feud with Becky Lynch, being able to learn at the Stratus learning tree has been a fantastic experience.
“Right now, I'm sitting back and just watching how it goes if I have an idea, I go to Trish. So Trish and I will talk it out, and then I just kind of follow her lead to where if she likes the idea, she'll go and pitch it, but I'm standing right there with her to see, like okay, let me see how she handles this. Yeah, I'm just in the back watching right now.”
After failing to win the Women's Championship in NXT and barely being used on television in 2023 period after Shawn Michaels turned his attention to younger developmental prospects, Stark has found her greatest success as Stratus' heater, securing big wins over Lynch and getting to appear in the 2023 Money in the Bank Ladder match. While it's impossible to know what Stark would have been up to had Stratus simply pulled a Lita and left the promotion back in April, it's clear the biggest winner of this feud with its all said and done will be the proprietor of the Z-360.
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