Trish Stratus has a checklist she runs through before agreeing to any WWE return, and the first thing she rules out is anything that only benefits her.
Stratus explained it to John Pollock of POST Wrestling, and the phrase she keeps coming back to is that it has to give something back.
There’s many boxes that must be checked in order for me to do this, and it’s everything. I don’t want it to be self-serving. What’s the point in that? It has to give back.
Her 2023 run is the example she reached for, and her assessment of what she brought to it is unusually clear-eyed about the limits of a legend’s return.
When I went back and worked with Zoey Stark, I’m not doing much for Becky, so to speak, except for giving a neat storyline or something for fans to see that they hadn’t, a fantasy matchup or things like that. So we were giving that to the fans, but I’m not giving her the rub. She’s Becky Lynch for God’s sakes.
The person she could help was the one nobody was talking about.
When I got to bring Zoey on board, that was cool because I’m like, okay, and then teaching her promos. When I left, she’s like, okay, this is my problem. Like, alright, let’s work on it. We would still be working on the promos and stuff like that. So I love being able to do that. I love the opportunity to work with people like that.
That storyline ran through most of 2023, with Stark emerging from under the ring at Night of Champions to help Stratus beat Lynch, and the two working as a unit until Stark turned on her following the steel cage match at Payback in September. Stratus has said elsewhere that she and Paul Levesque discussed building the dynamic around his own feud with Batista, and that giving her some muscle to hide behind was a deliberate echo of her Tyson Tomko days.
Stark, who now works as Zoey Serrano, was released by WWE in April. She has said since that she spent a long time asking why the story never continued after Payback, and eventually stopped asking because she was never going to get an answer.
The second half of Stratus’ answer is about how far ahead she likes to work.
I want it to mean something. So last year was my 25th anniversary. We had the, it was very strategic. The Tiffy and Trish thing was started way back in Money in the Bank in Toronto. That seed planted was not a coincidence. It was like, let’s just plant that seed just so we have it. And that’s what I am about, long-term story planning.
The seed took roughly two years to grow. Stratus and Tiffany Stratton teamed at Elimination Chamber in Toronto in March 2025, beating Nia Jax and Candice LeRae in Stratus’ hometown, and the alliance came apart from there. Stratton picked her as her opponent for Evolution that July, defending the WWE Women’s Championship in Atlanta in a match Stratus lost but which drew a standing ovation.
Stratus was not entirely happy with how that one was set up. She said before Evolution that the whole card had come together quickly, that she wished there had been a bigger build, and that the segment which announced the match had not done much for her. Her position was that there was enough history between the two of them to carry it regardless.
She has now wrestled sporadically for over a decade since her first retirement in 2006, returning for one-off matches and short programmes rather than full runs. She is a seven-time Women’s Champion and was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013.
