Tammy Lynn Sytch, better known to wrestling fans as Sunny, was one of WWE’s most popular stars during the early years of the 1990s Attitude Era. As a manager and valet, her looks drew the gaze of the much-coveted male viewer. Her years outside the ring have been harsh, however. Sytch has been in jail countless times over the past decade and was recently arrested for her worst crime yet, having killed a man in a car accident in which she was allegedly intoxicated. How did this legend of women's wrestling fall so far?
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Sunny Rose To Fame Alongside Her Wrestler Boyfriend, Chris Candido
Sytch broke into the wrestling business by tagging along with her high school sweetheart, Chris Candido, in Smoky Mountain Wrestling. She found her place as a manager for their champion, Brian Lee, before becoming a valet for Candido, and then Lee and Candido both when they formed a tag team. Her blonde hair and good looks made her the ideal accompanying eye candy, but she proved to be more than that, cutting great heelish promos that always attracted heat from the crowd.
In 1994, Bruce Pritchard from WWE called, looking not for Candido, but for Sytch. She started in the company as Tamara Murphy, a host of Live Event News. Her job was to simply read a teleprompter and report to the viewing audience when and where WWE was going to be.
When Candido also joined the company shortly after, Sytch was paired with him and Tom Pritchard, now rechristened as Skip and Zip of The Bodydonnas, a duo of fitness enthusiasts who mocked their opponents and fans. Sytch was renamed Sunny and became their manager. It was another in a long string of odd mid-90s gimmicks, but it got over because of Sytch. She was one of only a handful of women in WWE at the time, which alone got her attention. What kept that attention on her was, yes, her looks, but mainly her ability to naturally rip everyone on the mic.
After leading The Bodydonnas to tag team gold at WrestleMania 12, Sunny would turn on the group, attaching herself to The Godwinns and later The Smoking Gunns. If Miss Elizabeth had been the wholesome, girl-next-door valet, Sunny was the bad girl. The portrayal led to her becoming 1996’s PWI Manager of the Year and AOL’s most downloaded woman. Her immense popularity became the catalyst for the highly sexualized way women were portrayed in the company for the next several years.
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Sunny’s Shine Started To Fade Post-WWE
By 1998, Sunny’s act began to grow a bit stale. Sable had come along, exaggerating everything that Sytch had done before. After no-showing several shows and becoming addicted to painkillers, Sunny was released. She went to ECW with Candido for a year, but again found herself fired for rumored drug use. The pair then moved on to WCW, but in 2000 the once top company was coming undone. Sytch and Candido failed to connect and were quickly out.
For the next two decades, Sytch would appear sporadically on the independent scene, falling back to managing Candido once more. After his shocking sudden death in 2005, Sytch continued on, but she was a nostalgia act, a reminder to now grown men whom they had a crush on when they were teenagers. She had been instrumental in ushering in the Diva movement, but her actions had seen her cast out of the larger wrestling community.
Still, Sunny was able to get her life under control enough to be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2011. She looked healthier than she’d been in a long time and many hoped that her life had turned a corner for the best. It hadn’t.
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Whatever Sunny Accomplished In The Ring Has Been Outdone By Her Actions Outside It
For the last several years, Sytch has consistently made headlines, but never for good reasons. There were numerous interviews where she outed all the wrestlers she’d slept with. There was her embarrassing turn to the porn world. Worst of all has been the mounting legal troubles.
In 2012, she was arrested five times in a month. In 2013, she spent nearly four months in jail for violating a protective order. In 2015, Sytch was locked up three times for DUI. There were two more DUIs in 2018, which along with her failure to abide by her probation rules, landed her in prison for seven more months. In 2019 and 2020 she once again landed in prison for offenses ranging from another DUI to domestic violence.
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Sytch’s self-destruction has continued into 2022. In January, she was arrested after threatening to kill her boyfriend with a pair of scissors. March saw her most heinous act. After being arrested at least six times for DUI over the years, Sytch was allegedly impaired behind the wheel once again, but this time it resulted in a crash where another person was killed. Her demons were not simply ruining her own life anymore. They had taken away someone else’s.
One can only hope that she is put back into prison for a long time, where she won’t be able to harm anyone and can just maybe finally turn her life around. It’s too late for her legacy, though. While we will remember her contributions to professional wrestling, her name will now forever be just another cautionary tale.
