Our good friends at the All Night Long Wrestling podcast recently interviewed IMPACT superstar and current Knockouts champion Deonna Purrazzo about a variety of subjects, including Purrazzo’s thoughts on the AEW and IMPACT relationship and her decision to leave WWE. Highlights are below.
On the AEW and Impact Wrestling partnership:
“This forbidden door, I want to be the first women through it. That can be me going to AEW, that can be Hikaru Shida coming to Impact Wrestling, that can be my best friend Britt Baker coming to Impact Wrestling, it can be Big Swole coming to Impact Wrestling…I think what Impact and AEW are doing is groundbreaking. This partnership had changed landscape of professional wrestling, and being a women’s wrestler, I went to advocate for women’s wrestling to be a part of it.”
The decision to leave WWE and join Impact Wrestling:
“The situation I was in and the feedback I was getting, or the lack there of, really just took its toll on me mentally, physically, emotionally. I was not in a good place emotionally. A lot of our knockouts are people that I went through the indies with and lost touch with, and to be back to who Deonna Purrazzo at her core is as a person and a wrestler means way more to me than what I was doing at the environment I was in.”
On how her time in Impact now is different from the previous:
“My first match in Impact was my eighth professional match ever. I don’t think many people know that. The girl we saw at Knockouts Knockdown 2014 was.. I was 18 or 19 years old, I was having my eighth professional match and I was so in over my head I didn’t know who I was as a human being, or let alone who this wrestler was going to be.. I was literally that shy little unsure girl. I came back to Impact in 2016 and I was more confident who I was as a wrestler but I was just a good wrestler. There was no meat or substance to it, but I could wrestle people and have a good match. And that was the critique, “Okay you’re a good wrestler but you need character traits. You need a personality. The Virtuosa we see on screen today is a complete transformation of Deonna Purrazzo the professional wrestler. From this 19 year old unsure girl to “I’m gonna get in the ring. I know exactly who I am. I know exactly what I do well. And I’m going to break your arm.”
Check out the full interview below. https://youtu.be/cFS88RI-c9M