Sunny - what a car crash life!

[Duke]

Can something be "quite literally an analogy"?

[westlondonmist]

9 hours ago, JLM said:

I don't dispute that she's done many bad things, but I think it's ludicrous to claim that the culture and people she found herself involved with from her early 20s onwards didn't do a ton of harm. You acknowledge yourself that Shawn Michaels was especially vile at that time, also powerful and influential politically. She cheated on Candido and took advantage of him being madly in love with her. That is shitty behaviour, but amongst the boys (many of whom slept around and cheated on their partners and bragged about it in their books) that makes her satan. 

See also: Paige being slut-shamed for her sex tape and fans revelling in her spiralling out of control, whereas a male wrestler with a tape of them shagging multiple women's wrestlers at once would be lauded as an absolute LEGEND MATE by the same people. 

A lot of the quotes from people who hate her read like this: 

SANDMAN: 

"There are so many stories I could tell you about how she disrespected Chris.

We were on the roof of a club in Miami where she was blowing Raven [while] she just had her hand out for pills.

[I was] walking into the boiler room to get high and f***in’ Sabu’s in there gettin’ a BJ from Tammy [in exchange for pills]…he doesn’t give her the Somas ’til she’s done the job.

[Another time] I walked into the bathroom, and she’s blowing him and jerkin’ Joey Matthews off, I think it was…[all the while] Chris is running around the bar looking for her…

The take away from seeing an addict staggering around a venue offering sex for pills is that it's "disrespectful" to her boyfriend. No criticism of the people accepting said sexual favours for drugs, naturally.  

 

The Godwinns: 

Paul Bearer and Henry Godwinn: 

Cheating on her partner repeatedly and displaying diva-ish/egotistical/narcissistic behaviour are the main charges I see levelled against her before she was an addict. So many of the male wrestlers of the time did that and far worse. I'm not trying to do whataboutism here. I'm not saying all of her bad behaviour is excused because men do it too, but  when a woman dares to be an arsehole or sleeps around in wrestling it's a hell of a different narrative from when a man does it. Maybe Sable and Tammy Sytch are two of the worst humans ever and deserved to have people shit in their bags and on their food. Or maybe when a woman is an arsehole in a thoroughly toxic boys club industry, they get less of a pass than men do. 

Her life derailed into addiction by her mid-20s and she was part of a horrible industry that treated women like shit before that, so I'm not comfortable with the black and white writing off of a human being, particularly based on the testimony of people who gleefully told tales of people shitting in her food. 

The sexual stuff I don't judge Sytch on, I probably did at one point sadly. I've read a couple of wrestler books and they pretty much come across as unrepentant horrible. Bragging because they think they are lads. The people offering drugs to an addict for sex are grade a cunts. I'm also curious as to how the person who shit in the food gets away with things, the person who eats it sent home. 

[Snitsky's back acne]

3 hours ago, westlondonmist said:

 I'm also curious as to how the person who shit in the food gets away with things, the person who eats it sent home. 

It's pro wrestling. Normal rules don't apply. 

Tammy is a tough one. As has been highlighted, she was clearly treated horrifically in the wrestling business and was around a load of scummy people when she was very young. However, she has also never taken responsibility for anything she has done.
I have seen shoot interviews after her previous jail stints where she said 'All I did was drive a car!' and made light of her time inside. After the fatal crash she went on social media saying the man died of a heart attack and that she was not speeding etc.

I understand bluster and addicts denial etc but she clearly felt an entitlement to drive. In the aforementioned shoot she even said 'I know I wasn't allowed to drive but I'd just bought a new car so I HAD to give it a test run'.

We can feel bad for how she was treated by a scummy industry but also be glad that she has finally received some modicum of punishment for her clearly arrogant and reckless behaviour.

As the title of the thread says, what a car crash life!

Edited November 28, 2023 by Snitsky's back acne

[Carbomb]

Not exactly a good reason, but I missed most of the Attitude era, so all the usual stuff that did the rounds about her didn't bother me - yes, I had a bit of a shit double standard regarding it in the vein being discussed, but I reject that mindset utterly and unreservedly now; the narrative surrounding her "sin" doesn't wash with me. I absolutely agree that she was a victim, and deserves understanding for the direction her life took; none of us here can honestly say we would be mystified by anyone being fucked up by such a horrendous and warped business, especially a woman surrounded by some of the worst specimens of masculinity and humanity around, cheered on or applauded by a mostly-male fanbase with a mindset and attitude towards women that was equally stunted and abhorrent, bolstered by the likes of Howard Stern and all the proto-edgelord culture that entailed.

When you also move along a few years, you hear all sorts about how people like Jake Roberts et al finally turned things around by getting help, yet it was very rare to hear anything about anyone helping Tammy or Chyna when they crashed. There was still this acceptance that they'd somehow brought it on themselves, and that they had to dig themselves out, or wallow in the consequences of their damage.

My only reasons for disliking her are her seeming lack of contrition for needlessly causing someone's death via insistent, reckless DUI (which I would detest anyone for, and would call for them to be sentenced to a prison sentence), and the racist shit she spouted. If she could have turned it all around before it got to this, that's what I would've hoped for, for anyone. But it's sadly now probably too late.

Edited November 28, 2023 by Carbomb

[wandshogun09]

18 hours ago, SpanishFly said:

... from being a drug addict to molesting Damian Darlings house to this...

Hold up. What have I missed here? How do you molest a house? Flashbacks to Roddy Piper saying he was gonna “eat a garage” at SummerSlam 89 here. 

[Jazzy G]

I do wonder how much of it was her going even further off the rails after Candido passed away. Candido was probably the closest thing to a constant in her life, in spite of how she treated him. I wonder how she'll get on in prison. Will she even make it back out? She did bring this on herself, and it's a shame as when she went into the Hall Of Fame it looked like she had at the very least started to try and get things back on track.

[Chili]

The loss of Candido might have been her last shot. He got clean and got a TNA gig and then something nobody could predict happened. She'd been a bother before that but so had Candido with his vices, and I reckon they could have both turned it and lived healthier had Candido lived through to today.

But she's been horrific in her racist comments and getting arrested like four or five times in one week because she just doesn't seem to listen. There is a lot of arrogance but self denial and responsibility in her actions, and no idea tbh if anyone DID try and help and we don't know. Was it her and Scott Hall who had the rehab record with WWE? My view, I don't blame her for everything, but in the last decade she's just been a liability of denial and her reasonings after the fatal accident say a lot.

Edited November 28, 2023 by Chili

[JLM]

Yeah it’s hard to imagine her surviving a 17 year prison stretch, during which time drugs will be readily available to her. 
 

And yeah, that’s exactly it. She’s done and said all sorts of terrible shit and made things much worse for herself, but I mostly feel sad rather than vitriolic towards her. The family of the person she killed obviously deserve some kind of justice but it’s a shame things got to this point when it was very well known what sort of state she was in. Her ongoing spiral into delusion and addiction was well documented, revelled in and financially exploited by wrestling promoters and porn producers, and then everyone hand wrings and condemns her when it inevitably ends in tragedy. With Chyna the tragedy was her own death, for Sunny it was someone else’s. 

[Loki]

I'm very much in the "sad" camp.

Just looking at a couple of Reddit threads about it, and almost every comment is about how she looks - how old, how ugly and so on.  She's been getting that her whole life - judged purely on her looks, used purely for her sex appeal.  I can't imagine what that does to your psyche even before all the addictions.

And she was worth a lot more to them than just a pair of tits - she was a great manager, a great talker and she could take a bump.  She'd have been looked after and utilised properly in the modern era rather than treated like shit in the locker room and then dumped onto the indies with an addiction.

It sometimes feels like wrestling fans, particularly those old enough to have knocked one out to her back in the 90s, would have preferred it if she'd died along with so many of her era.  It's a bit of an inconvenient reminder of the venal recent past of the industry that she's still around, still suffering and now spending most of the rest of her life in jail.

 

[Vamp]

To be honest, everyone who took advantage of her and contributed towards her issues should shoulder some of the guilt for what's happened. That includes HBK, Raven, Sabu and all the rest. 

[Snitsky's back acne]

9 minutes ago, Vamp said:

To be honest, everyone who took advantage of her and contributed towards her issues should shoulder some of the guilt for what's happened. That includes HBK, Raven, Sabu and all the rest. 

They didn't make her repeatedly get behind the wheel of a car while drunk, however. 

I agree that she was enabled by a lot of people during her time in the industry but her actions over the past 10 years or so are hers alone. Many people are addicts and/or have mental health issues but don't repeatedly drive while drunk, nor do they laugh about it/dismiss it after coming out of jail for doing so.
 

[air_raid]

1 hour ago, Loki said:

I'm very much in the "sad" camp.

And she was worth a lot more to them than just a pair of tits - she was a great manager, a great talker and she could take a bump.  She'd have been looked after and utilised properly in the modern era rather than treated like shit in the locker room and then dumped onto the indies with an addiction.

This is exactly how I feel. It's still mental looking back that the office was (listening to Prichard talk, anyway) acutely aware of how she was treated by "the boys" and had so little interest in doing more to look after the welfare of someone who was 100% a bankable commodity.

[BomberPat]

Wasn't she repeatedly turned down for WWE-sponsored rehab, even during the "we'll pay for it all for the PR" era?

Edited November 28, 2023 by BomberPat

[Hugh Thesz]

22 hours ago, The King Of Swing said:

One thing I'm happy we never imported from the US, is televised trials/sentencing. 

We have cameras facing the judge in Scotland.

[Cousin Jim Bob]

59 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

Wasn't she repeatedly turned down for WWE-sponsored rehab, even during the "we'll pay for it all for the PR" era?

 

I remember seeing a shoot from her not long after her HOF entry where she mentioned the WWE paying for multiple rehab stays. I don't know if they stopped at some point but she was getting support for a time.