The Royal Rumble pay-per-view aired live from St. Louis last month and current Impact Knockouts Champion Mickie James made history when she walked through the forbidden door and entered the women’s Royal Rumble match.
It was certainly interesting to see an Impact Wrestling star on WWE programming, but it seems that there were still some restrictions put in place for Mickie’s return.
Will Washington discussed Mickie’s return at the Royal Rumble on the Fightful Grapsody podcast, and he noted that there several words the commentators were instructed not to use while talking about Mickie James.
“I talked to someone in WWE about the Mickie Stuff, and I was like it was really cool that they did all that, but they were like ‘yeah but there were caveats to literally everything that we had to do with Mickie James’. The first thing was ‘we were allowed to say IMPACT, but at no point were we allowed to say IMPACT Wrestling, it was a really important distinction; IMPACT Wrestling cannot be said, IMPACT Wrestling cannot be tagged on social media, you are not to say IMPACT Wrestling, solely IMPACT.
“The name of the company is IMPACT Wrestling, but it’s one of those ‘we (WWE) don’t say wrestling’, you don’t say wrestling, this company is not called IMPACT Wrestling’.
“The other thing was ‘we were told we do not use the term Knockout, we do not use the term World, even though the belt is called the IMPACT Knockouts World Championship, we do not use either of those words, and we were specifically on to refer to this belt as the IMPACT Women’s Championship’ despite the fact that that is not what it is called. So it wasn’t just free range that IMPACT gets this publicity, but that there was this specific nomenclature used.”
H/T Cultaholic
