Jordynne Grace did her homework.
Slammiversary saw the first-ever Queen Of The Mountain take place, and Jordynne Grace defeated Tasha Steelz, Deonna Purrazzo, Mia Yim and Chelsea Green to win the Knockouts World Championship. The Knockouts division had another first in the Ultimate X match earlier this year, and Grace spoke about how she went about preparing for each respective match. Grace (and Tasha Steelz) pitched using the Ultimate X match since they got a chance to test it out first, but Queen Of The Mountain provided a new challenge since it’d been six years since the last one (as KOTM) took place.
“It was 100% a different kind of getting prepared. I had honestly completely forgot this match even existed. They haven’t done one [in years]. So the X-Division match is like one of IMPACT’s staples. This is just one of IMPACT’s kind of crazy ideas that they used to do. And so it was a completely different kind of getting ready with the kind of ‘how do we tell the story and make these rules make sense to the fans while also having an amazing match?’ So what I personally ended up doing was watching all 12 of the past King of the Mountain matches just to see how they structured everything, how they went about telling the story about the pins,” she explained. “And it was just a completely different kind of preparation than the Ultimate X match. The Ultimate X was just all about basically getting over my fear of heights, number one. And number two was getting strong enough to be able to hang from those ropes for an extended period of time.”
Had to make sure @SamoaJoe was @IMPACTWRESTLING in spirit.
Also me getting to the top and realizing there wasn’t a hook: ? pic.twitter.com/1Jq93S4RwM
— Jordynne Grace (@JordynneGrace) June 22, 2022
Grace was also asked about her tribute to Samoa Joe in the Queen of the Mountain match and how she went about making sure it worked in the match. Grace noted how Slammiversary was full of nods to TNA/IMPACT’s past, and this was pretty easy to get everyone involved on board with her idea.
“Well, that was one of the things that I specifically wanted to do was because it was 20th anniversary show, so everybody was doing callbacks to old school TNA stuff. And I know that Samoa Joe is one of my favorite wrestlers and he’s one of the guys I was watching in IMPACT growing up, in TNA growing up. I knew that that was one of the spots that I had to get in basically no matter what. I didn’t know that he was going to be there until the last second, so it also turned out to be pretty special because it was kind of like he was there in spirit,” she explained. “I guess I would say I didn’t specifically plan the match around that spot, it was just that was how the finishing sequence was going to go. So there wasn’t a lot of thought I had to put into that. That was just the idea I pitched and everybody agreed to it. And so we did it.”
Knockouts World Champion @JordynneGrace and @SavannahEvansNV collide this Thursday at 8/7c on #IMPACTonAXSTV!#IMPACTWRESTLING pic.twitter.com/2cOGcAlDLC
— IMPACT (@IMPACTWRESTLING) June 29, 2022
