IMPACT Knockouts champion Jordynne Grace recently spoke with Sportskeeda to hype up the promotion’s Bound For Glory pay-per-view, where Grace will be defending the gold against Masha Slamovich.
During the interview Grace discusses a number of different topics, including her thoughts on intergender wrestling and how she felt about being Matt Cardona’s first intergender opponent. Highlights can be found below.
On wrestling Cardona and how much offense he gave her:
“I’ll use my matches with Matt Cardona as an example. I was his first-ever, and probably second and third-ever, intergender match, like his entire career. Going into it, I had no idea because he worked in WWE a long time, I had no idea how giving he was going to be in the match. It’s hard to know going in how guys are gonna react because some guys, really don’t like to wrestle girls, to be completely honest. They don’t think it’s necessary. They don’t really like intergender wrestling, but they’re doing it because it’s kind of a thing to do. I mean, it’s wrestling. So you kind of have to sometimes, but luckily, going into that match, he was incredible, and it was awesome.”
Talks the psychology of intergender matches:
“But there are some instances where you have maybe, not an ego, but a sense of a guy wanting to protect himself, protect his character, or, you know, ‘It doesn’t make sense for you to be stronger than me because I’m a man’, even if that’s my whole thing. They might have something against that. But that’s one of the things that I always go into a match, and that’s the first thing I’m thinking about, What are we going to be able to do? Is he going to let me throw him around?’ That’s a big thing that comes that goes into it. Another big thing, especially for people who don’t like intergender wrestling, I find that they are more willing to accept intergender wrestling if there’s a story. So you’re not just going in there and just immediately trading strikes right away, 50/50. I think people really like a story of — if let’s say 90% of the time, the woman is usually the underdog.”
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)
