WWE Announcers Couldn't Say "IMPACT Wrestling" At Royal Rumble

The 2022 Royal Rumble was notable for several reasons, the biggest of which was IMPACT Wrestling Knockouts Champion Mickie James competing in the match, even coming to the ring with her title and IMPACT ‘Hardcore Country’ theme music playing.

However, it was also notable how WWE’s commentary team spoke about James, with Fightful Grapsody’s Will Washington saying how the team had to abide by WWE’s long established list of ‘banned terms’:

“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’.”

Washington also revealed that WWE refrained from using other terms when regarding James:

“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 used.”

If you use any of the quotes from this article credit Fightful Grapsody, and give an H/T to Cultaholic for the transcription with a link back to this article.