WWE Hall of Famer Trish Stratus recalls the incident between her and former WWE superstar John Morrison (now Johnny Impact) at WrestleMania 27, in which the former multi-time women’s champion teamed with Snooki and Morrison to take on Dolph Ziggler, Michelle McCool, and Layla.
Once the match-up was all said and done, many fans noticed that John Morrison intentionally dissed Trish Stratus by giving her the cold shoulder, with speculation stemming from the former Intercontinental champion not being pleased with Stratus taking Melina’s spot on the WrestleMania card.
Stratus gave her side of the story on the incident during Lilian Garcia’s ‘Chasing Glory’ podcast and made it clear that she never came back to take anyone’s spot on the WrestleMania card (transcript courtesy of Fightful.com):
“So there’s like an internet thing -- the famous John Morrison/Trish Stratus incident… it’s called the famous cold shoulder incident. It was from RAW actually. So we had the WrestleMania match with Snooki and LayCool and Dolph Ziggler, and I guess it was on RAW and we won the match, we were raising our hands and I went to go raise his hand and he like threw my hand off or gave me a brush and went on the other side of Snooki and I was like, ‘Okay, that was on live television’ and it was a big thing and we had a little conversation in the back.”
“Well it wasn’t a little conversation. We were passionately talking about it and [I said], ‘You just stole a moment from a performance. Whatever you feel about me -- maybe you feel like you’re not cool with me which is fine, I don’t mind but, we’re performing and tonight we’re partners and the crowd was excited about us as a team, as a partnership and you’ve taken that moment from the fans.' It’s like, for what? And you couldn’t just wait five seconds later?" Trish questioned,
"I’m gone tomorrow. I’m not even around, and then he went into this whole thing and said, ‘Well you’ve taken a spot from another superstar by being here’ and I was like, ‘Nope, I have not taken a spot from someone. I was assigned this, I’m on the show Tough Enough that airs after this and they brought me back for that.’”
The incident strained her relationship with Melina, with both women going the next five to six years without saying one word to one another. However, the two former women’s champion's reconnected after the unfortunate passing of Ashley Massaro:
“So it got a lot of big buzz and eventually he got released and everyone thought it was because of that accident but who knows, whatever, but a lot of it, there was this backstory that, they were mad because that was his girlfriend [Melina] and I was taking up his girlfriend's spot and she really had nothing to do about this."
"So we haven’t talked for years and we were fine before this incident and we would chat here and there and then we just didn’t talk and I never chatted with her, she never talked to me and it was just this quiet thing, life goes on and next thing you know, five years have gone by, six years have gone by and we reached out a couple times on Twitter, DM’d each other here and there and when this group thing came, we just said this is a chance for us to chat and we finally connected and we had a really wonderful conversation and in other words, the bottom line was, ‘Hey we’re cool right? Yeah, there was no heat ever’, and I was doing my best whenever someone was like, ‘Oh I love this underrated match between Trish and Melina’ and I’d be like, ‘I loved working with her, great girl’ because I wanted her to see that and know, I love her, I loved working with her.”
“I thought we had like a really small feud but, it was great. It was really, really good for what it was. Memorable and I loved working with her so, I love her as a friend, she came to my studio, came to my house before.”
Check out the
full interview where the WWE Hall of Famer talks about other moments throughout her career.