Why Kentucky Lost Televised WWE Events And How They Got Them Back

The Kentucky Athletic Commission put a rule in place years ago which restricted activity if a competitor in a match was busted open. Blue Grass fans haven’t had a WWE television taping in their state for many years, and haven’t seen a pay-per-view since Backlash in 2006 which saw Vince McMahon fight God himself.

The initial rule in place said if a talent drew color during a match, then there would just be a hefty fine for the occurrence. But, WWE worked their event as planned and simply paid the fines afterward.

However, Dave Meltzer says that independent promotions complained that there was a double standard of sorts because they were held to this ruling seeing that they couldn’t pay the fines because they didn’t have the deep pockets that McMahon does.

To remedy the issue of WWE skirting the new rule, the KY Athletic Commission altered their rule to call the match off entirely if there was color to stop WWE workers from blading anyway.

Even when WWE stopped their practices, they still didn’t want to run important shows in KY because if someone was busted open the hard-way, they didn’t want to lose the entire bout. Therefore, WWE stopped booking TV and PPVs in the entire state after this ruling was altered.

However, things have changed considerably since this ruling was put in place. Arenas in Kentucky lobbied to have this rule overturned stating that they were losing a lot of revenue from the fact that they weren’t getting the bigger television and pay-per-view gates because the whole state was relegated to simply getting house shows.

The Wrestling Observer Newsletter reports that WWE is set to have their first television taping in years on April 18th when Smackdown Live takes place from the KFC Yum! Center in Louisville because the ruling was recently overturned. Therefore if there is blood in the Blue Grass, the match can now continue.