WWE Hall of Fame Class 2014: Lita
Lita
Lita (Amy Dumas) is set to be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2014, becoming one of the very few woman to do so. She is the third inductee of the 2014 class which includes the Ultimate Warrior, Jake the Snake Roberts and Paul Bearer.
Lita was an active WWE/F wrestler for a period of 7 years. In that period she certainly left her mark on the divas division. After briefly working on the independent circuit and in Extreme Championship Wrestling, Lita signed with World Wrestling Federation in 1999.
Originally, she was paired with Essa Rios, but she achieved her greatest push alongside Matt and Jeff Hardy as Team Xtreme. Shortly after that she won the woman’s championship for the first time. Throughout her career, she won the WWE Women’s Championship four times. During her tenure with the company she became arguably the most popular Diva in the company’s history. Her rivalry with Trish Stratus stands out in her career.
Last year Trish Stratus went in the hall of fame as part of the most loaded class to date, where she was joined by Mick Foley, Booker T, Bob Backlund, Bruno Sammartino and “celebrity wing” inductee Donald Trump. Stratus did not look out of place at all. Rather it felt as if she completely deserved that honor. The same goes true with athletic and gorgeous Lita.
Lita was unlike any other “WWE Diva” when she showed up.
She wasn’t a carbon-copy, model like blonde, instead had a completely different look. She immediately had appeal as an athlete and her selling point were her spots which included doing some insane high-flying moves. She was supposed to be a tomboy, especially once she became Matt and Jeff Hardy’s valet. The team Xtreme was truly one of the best upcoming talents on the roster back then.
She was still idealized, but in a way which was not like the way other divas at that time were seen. As a performer, there were a couple things that stand out in her career from various above average matches of which she were a part. The first is the feud she had with Stratus that spanned over their entire WWE careers, with two specific matches standing out of the series of matches they had.
The first was a 2004 Raw match, one of the few women’s matches to ever main event a WWE television show. Best known for Lita (who had already broken her neck a few years earlier when shooting an episode of the show “Dark Angel”) overshooting a move, which required her to jump from the top rope and fold over, and she landed head first, it was probably the best singles match of her career as well of Stratus’s career. The novelty of the match being the main event, proving to be worthy of the spot and Lita’s near-injury made it one of the most memorable women’s matches in WWE history.
The other famous match between the two was Stratus’s retirement match at the Unforgiven pay-per-view in 2006. The roles were reversed, with Stratus as a babyface winning the title from Lita, who was now a heel, and Lita also retired a couple months later.
Besides the Stratus series, there’s also her run as Edge‘s valet. Unfortunately, it’s colored by the real-life affair with Matt Hardy that led to WWE cashing in on the tabloid drama surrounding Edge, Lita and Matt Hardy, but she did a great and an incredibly underrated work.
WWE had been trying to get Edge to break through for years and it never quite worked until Lita was made over as his “trashy” valet and he adopted the “Rated-R Superstar” gimmick. She was vital to the act and did an incredible job as a character completely different from the one that made her a star.
That was the amount of influence that Lita had in WWE, and the value her work had. She had great skills in the ring and would be remembered as one of the most talented divas to stepped in the ring.