WWE Placed Multiple Caveats On Mickie James’ Rumble Appearance

WWE restricted things that could be said pertaining to IMPACT.

Back at the Royal Rumble, we saw Mickie James in the match and she came out to her “Hardcore Country” theme while wearing the IMPACT Knockouts Championship. Yet reportedly that title and the IMPACT name were an issue during the match.

According to Will Washington of Grapsody, Washington stated that he spoke to someone in WWE and there were a few caveats on James as far as how they are to reference IMPACT and the title. he stated that they could only say “IMPACT” and not “IMPACT Wrestling”. He also noted how they could not use the words “Knockouts” or “World” when mentioning the Knockouts Women’s Championship. In the end, they just called it the IMPACT Women’s Championship even though that is not the name of the title at all.

“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 that’s used here.”

As far as what Mickie thought about the match as a whole. She did talk about it on a recent episode of her GAW TV podcast with Lisa Marie Varon and So Cal Val.