Impact Wrestling will celebrate 20 years on Sunday, and Mickie James has played a big role in the success of the company. She might be known for her time in WWE, but James always came back to Impact because of what the company has created over the years. In an exclusive interview with PopCulture.com, James explains what it means for her to be part of Impact’s 20th-anniversary celebration.
“ECW was really fizzled, it’d gone out of business as well, so there really wasn’t a whole lot of… It was still kind of a thing, but it was on the downward… It was the rise of this baby company, out of obscurity, out of nowhere,” James exclusively told PopCulture about Impact’s beginnings. “I really think that it provided a lot of my friends, at the time, opportunities to be seen on television, and it really launched a lot of their careers. Some of them stayed around and were almost lifers and stuck around the whole time. Impact Wrestling was always ahead of the curve, like with the X Division and the Knockouts, especially.”
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James continued: “Obviously, I love women’s wrestling and I’m biased and that’s okay, but I will say that they’ve always been ahead of the curve with the women and how women are presented on television. I think that the Knockouts Division, as a whole, especially in that Gail [Kim], Awesome Kong, and the legitimacy of what the women were allowed to do, kicked down the door of opportunity in every other company of, Give Divas a chance, women’s wrestling matters, and all these other things. The fans started to realize like, ‘No, these women aren’t the popcorn matches or aren’t the campy entertainment filler. These women can go,’ and it’s been amazing.”
James got her start in Impact Wrestling in 2002 before heading to WWE. In 2021, James left WWE and returned to Impact to win the Knockouts Championship. James has enjoyed her multiple stints in WWE but understands how big Impact has been in her career.
“To be able to come back, after WWE, and rebrand myself and reinvent myself and become almost more authentic than I ever have, closer to me as a human, with Hardcore Country, Mickie James, and have such success there, as that,” James said. “It was almost like a whole new chapter of my career. I have a very different perspective because I was there, then I left, then I came back, and was able to do that. I left again and I was able to come back, this last year, which was completely unexpected, this last year has been a whirlwind, and do so much stuff that I couldn’t even fathom at the time.”
