Image is Everything

It's a well known fact that in all parts of the world, image is everything, whether you are an actor, musician, politician, or a wrestler, and when one thinks of image, one thinks of Tammy Sytch.

After a stint in ECW, Tammy Sytch came to international prominence when she jumped ship, along with her boyfriend, Chris Candido, to the WWF in the mid-nineties. There, they were christened Sunny and Skip, the Body Donnas.

This gimmick didn't exactly set the world afire, at first. Although Candido was more than competent in the ring, his feud with perennial jobber Barry Horrowitz, and subsequent teaming with Dr. Tom Prichard as his "twin brother from another mother" didn't take him to the top of the tower, as it were. Instead, as time went by, more and more attention was paid to his manager at ringside.

Although her character was very annoying at first, nobody could argue that Sunny was a beautiful woman. Add to that her natural enthusiasm, charisma, and a love for the wrestling business she had nurtured since she was a child, and the WWF had a star in the making.

As three tag teams, the Body Donnas, the Godwins, and the Smoking Gunns, vied for the tag-team championship, Sunny vied for the affections of whoever held the title. When the Donnas lost the belts to the Godwins, she became their manager. When the Godwins lost the belts to the Gunns, she dumped the hillbillies and took up with the cowboys. She stayed by their side until Billy and Bart split up and feuded.

After a sting as Farooq's manager bombed drastically, Sunny didn't have much to do. So what did the WWF do with her? They marketed her most valuable asset - her looks. Long before the term "WWF Diva" was ever coined, Sunny truly became the first Diva of the so-called "Attitude" era. She could be seen everywhere, posing in the various WWF magazines wearing very little, taking part in bikini contests at WWF events, and refereeing midget matches on WWF television.

As another "Diva", Sable, came along, the WWF began to really push the envelope as far as adult entertainment was concerned. Sunny was fast becoming a favourite with the crowd, and it's rumoured that when Playboy first came calling to the WWF, Vince McMahon offered Sunny the chance to pose for old Uncle Hugh. Sunny turned the offer down.

But then, just as the Divas were about to storm the castle, Sunny left the WWF, apparently on bad terms. Some say that she really was becoming a Diva as far as her backstage attitude was concerned. But this wasn't her only problem.

With the Sunny character now behind her, Tammy returned to ECW, and later joined WCW for a while, once again teaming up with her boyfriend Chris Candido. However, Sunny's tenure in Atlanta didn't last that long. During a broadcast of Nitro, Tammy was apparently found unconscious in one of the locker rooms, with some suspicious looking pills found not that far away. It wasn't long before Tammy was given her marching orders. Candido wasn't long for the company either.

As the team plied their trade on the independent circuit, rumours of her persistent drug use continued to do the rounds. People began to compare photos taken during her WWF stint with more up-to-date photos, and it was obvious that the substance abuse was having a drastic effect on her appearance.

Around this time, Tammy teamed up with another well-known wrestling valet/maneger, Missy Hyatt. Missy had made her name in WCW about ten years previously, but, save for a stint in ECW, she hadn't really done much of note. Until Wrestling Vixxens came along.

With sex playing a more active part in the wrestling industry, and with various WWF Divas posing naked for Playboy, Tammy and Missy opened up an adults-only website which featured both of them posing in various states of undress, both together and in solo sets. Along with several other valets who made a living on the indy circuit, the website managed to get a great number of wrestling fans to hand over their credit card details in exchange for seeing these wrestling babes as naked as when they entered the world.

The problem was that both Tammy and Missy were no longer as attractive as they used to be. Looking at Missy made you see the effects of one face lift too many, and because of her past problems with drugs, Tammy's looks were no longer what they used to be.

The site ran for a couple of years, but a few months ago, the girls announced that the site was closing down.

A few weeks ago, I chanced upon a few photos of Tammy from a recent SSCW show. If you're reading this on one of the many sites I write for, chances are you're probably looking at one of those pictures right now. If you are, I want you to take a look at her, and then, if you've been following her career in pictures over the past couple of years or so, compare them to those pictures. You'll notice something immediately, something that Tammy hasn't been seen doing for quite a while. She's smiling.

When I first saw this photo, I also read many of the comments that accompanied them on various fan forums. It's a well documented fact that Tammy has had problems with drugs over the past few years, and that these substances have had an effect on her appearance. She has taken a right pasting during that time because of it. Yet there are a great deal of people who seem to forget that addiction is really just an illness, a different kind of illness, but an illness nonetheless.

Take another look at that photo. Look at the smile on the woman's face. Sure, she may not exactly be the lithe figure she was when she appeared on Monday Night Raw in a pink swimsuit telling us that viewer discretion is advised, but she looks happy. And surely, that's the most important thing in life. And surely, if someone is happy in life, it doesn't really matter what they look like.