Trish Stratus points to Chelsea Green’s championship win as the way a title change should happen, and contrasts it with a night in Toronto when she was expected to win and did not.
Stratus was talking at a live Insight with Chris Van Vliet event in her home city about a Toronto show earlier in her career where the crowd assumed she was going over.
“I’m like, no, it wasn’t the right time. It’s like the Chelsea Green win. To me, I always say sometimes there’s just the right win. It’s an organic win. It was the right moment. It wasn’t positioned like, oh, she’s the hometown girl, let’s let her win. And I think that’s what makes those really special.”
“And so that wasn’t the moment. Eventually, it was my moment.”
Green won the Interim WWE Women’s Championship in a five-way ladder match at SummerSlam on August 2, beating Tiffany Stratton, Charlotte Flair, Jade Cargill and Lash Legend. Stratton is billed from Minnesota, which is where the match took place, and Green has since said she went into it assuming it was Stratton’s night.
“This is Tiffany’s hometown, or Lash deserves this moment so much, or Jade and Charlotte, who we want to see standing at the top of that ladder fighting,” Green said afterwards. “So it was just all these things running through my head, and then there I was.”
Green has been through a long stretch of not being the one. She was released by WWE in 2021 during the pandemic cuts, returned at the 2023 Royal Rumble, and has said it has been almost exactly four years since she texted Triple H asking for her job back. She has described being told, on several occasions over 13 years, that it was not going to happen for her.
The title she won exists because Rhea Ripley has been out since June with a torn meniscus. Adam Pearce had said the interim champion would eventually meet Ripley to determine an undisputed one, which now leaves WWE with both women unavailable. WWE has leaned into the qualifier rather than away from it, producing merchandise with the word “interim” crossed out and replaced with “permanent”.
Stratus’ own first championship came in circumstances she describes as similarly unexpected. She won a six-pack challenge at Survivor Series in 2001 to restart a division that had lapsed entirely, and was told she was winning by Fit Finlay on the night, while the match was still being discussed.
The Green situation has since become complicated. She broke her right orbital bone on the August 7 SmackDown, five days after winning, and has given no timetable for a return. Rhea Ripley, the champion whose absence created the interim title, confirmed knee surgery the day before that.
Asked at the same event who she would want to face if she came back, Stratus threw the question to the room and warmed to Green’s name when it was suggested, partly for a reason that had nothing to do with wrestling.
“Eight-time champ. I time eight. This sounds good. I like that. Eight is my lucky number.”
Stratus is a seven-time Women’s Champion, which is what the joke turns on. She has held no title since her final reign in 2006.
Green went into SummerSlam thirteen years into a career in which she had repeatedly been told it was not going to happen for her, and came out of it holding a world championship for the first time. That is the shape of win Stratus is describing, and the reason she reached for it rather than for one of her own.
Green defends the interim title when she returns. WWE has not announced a date, and Ripley has not been given one either.
