The latest episode of Booker T’s Hall Of Fame podcast has the two-time WWE Hall Of Famer giving his take on Tessa Blanchard winning the IMPACT World Championship against Sami Callihan at Hard To Kill. His c0-host Brad Gilmore wanted to withhold judgement until after he sees how the story played out, but right off the bat Booker is not for the booking decision at all. He says he admires Tessa and her work, but has some direct words as to what he thinks about the move.
“I’m not holding my judgement on it. I’m serious. Big ups to Tessa Blanchard because she’s good. She’s really good at what she does, but this is the worst idea that IMPACT Wrestling ever had in the history of their company. It really is. It’s really that bad. It’s worse than paying me $10,000 for a six-hour power commercial that never aired. I’m serious. That’s how ridiculous it is.”
Booker then goes on to state why this could be detrimental in the grand scheme of IMPACT Wrestling and wrestling in general:
“Now all the men in the company if they wrestle her, if she beat them, it diminishes every guy in the company. Who’s the top guy in the company now? I can not see ‘The Man’ Becky Lynch wrestling Samoa Joe or Brock Lesnar.”
“I mean this is the worst idea in the history of wrestling. It really is and to throw it out there like that, it’s the only way it can really be thrown out. It makes me question and wonder if somebody trying is trying to blow this thing up on purpose? It’s like somebody saying, ‘Man, let’s see how bad we can mess this up.’ You know what I’m saying? I’m serious.”
Booker continues:
“Well my thing is this, okay, if Tessa Blanchard goes back and wrestles the women, she should be able to beat all of them. Now the woman that beat her, she’d be able to go out and beat the men too. The crossover of intergender wrestling is something that’s for independent companies, okay? If they want to be looked at as an indy group, keep doing stuff like this.”
Booker T believes that using intergender wrestling as a means to empower women is a misguided tactic and further delves into his reasoning behind that:
“I don’t think this is what empowering women is what it really is meant to be, you know what I mean? I really don’t think so. Because I’m not saying that that Ronda Rousey is not a tough woman, but you put Ronda Rousey in there with Jon Jones and you watch what happens to her. You put her in there with the lower-level men and watch what happens to her. Or Amanda Nunez,” Booker said. “You don’t want to start want to playing and blurring those types of lines when it comes to performance especially when a man and a woman these days, you know, normally when a man hits a woman, he goes to jail. Okay? And I don’t want to see no man put a hand on my sisters, alright? Even as tough as my sisters are, I’m not fitting to have that and to actually see it play out and someone think that this is a good idea for television? For a man and a women to be fighting? It’s ridiculous.
(Transcription credit should go to @DominicDeAngelo of WrestleZone)
You can watch the entire clip of Booker T’s take below:
