Trish Stratus had to fight for permission before she could take one of the nastiest shots of her WWE career. Vince McMahon wanted no part of allowing a woman to get hit in the head with a steel chair, but Stratus and Victoria refused to let the idea die.
Speaking during a live interview with Chris Van Vliet in Toronto, Stratus looked back at the period when she and Victoria were pushing WWE’s women into more physical matches. According to Stratus, women were treated like they could not handle the same punishment as the men.
“They would never say that the girls could do that because that’s what the guys do, right? If a guy took a chair shot, it’s devastating, of course, but if a girl took one, certainly she would die, right?”
Stratus and Victoria believed the chair shot belonged in the story they were telling ahead of their hardcore match. Fit Finlay supported the idea, but getting McMahon to sign off became another battle entirely.
“Me and Victoria were doing this hardcore match. We were telling these amazing stories, and it was stuff that we hadn’t seen from women. It was continuous, and it was building.”
“It was actually Fit Finlay who kind of felt like, ‘You know what we need?’ We felt like that would be a fitting moment before we went for a hardcore match at the pay-per-view.”
McMahon’s first answer was a hard no. Stratus said everyone involved had to keep working on him and explain why the spot mattered instead of treating it like unnecessary violence.
“The amount of jockeying it took to get it approved—it was like, Vince was, ‘Absolutely not. It’s absolutely not happening.’”
“We had to pitch it. We had to talk about it. We had to convey how important we felt it would be to our storytelling. We got the chair shot, and it was awesome.”
The chair shot eventually happened, giving Stratus another moment where she proved WWE’s women could handle far more than the company was willing to give them at the time.
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