10 Times Impact Wrestling Went Too Far
2. The Life & Death Of The Knockouts Division
In 1998, a nothing WWE programme between Goldust and Jeff Jarrett reached the point where both 'The Bizarre One' and Jarrett's manager Debra were "flashing" each other in order to try and cause distractions in key matches. It filled television time, it filled pay-per-view time, but only the sexual titillation served as any kind of financial/ratings draw, such was the appeal at the time.
Read the first words of that paragraph again. The lurid late-90s. Nothing programmes. All that sh*t.
When a 2014 Evening Gown "match" between former Knockouts Champions Madison Rayne (five times) and Angelina Love (six times) ended exactly the same way, it was a pathetic reminder that TNA and the rebranded Impact Wrestling had fatally flushed away years of good will with years of bad.
The Knockouts division was birthed in 2007 with a battle royal featuring several under-utilised future female stars, before eventually promoting Gail Kim and Awesome Kong in a main event programme. It acknowledged that mainstream companies weren't doing near-enough to represent women as athletes rather than the 'T&A' the sludgy original version of the company took its name from.
In that sense, it was probably an unrealistic impossibility that anything good could ever come from an organisation with misogyny embedded in the DNA, but the seven year slide from in-ring hits to out-of-the-ring t*ts was made more apparent by the fact that WWE was in the process of finally getting it's own sh*t together at the very same time.
Impact were the alternative yet again, but in keeping with a life lived as wrestling's punchline, they'd somehow found a way to be the greater of two evils. And this particular example wasn't even the worst of their atrocities...