Johnny Impact spoke with Wrestlezone’s Kevin Kellam ahead of Impact Wrestling’s Bound For Glory pay-per-view this Sunday, where “The Mayor Of Slamtown” will challenge Austin Aries for the Impact World Championship. You can read a few transcribed highlights, and listen to the full interview below:
Where do you and Austin Aries compliment each other, and conflict with each other?
Stylistically, I’ve heard people say similar things about me. I’ve held championships in AAA, which is staright lucha libre, in the UK, in WWE , in Lucha Underground and all over the world. I’ve wrestled Rey Mysterio, I’ve wrestled Big Show and everybody in between; I think match-up wise both of us are capable of a myriad of styles of wrestling. The thing that’s really kind of stuck out to me—there’s a couple of things in this build—one, this is why I came to Impact to win the Impact World Championship. It feels like this is my… not my last shot, but last year I got beat at Bound For Glory. I got beat by Eli Drake who is a very solid competitor, solid wrestler. I got beat by Austin Aries not quite a year ago for the Impact World Championship and this is my second shot at Aries for the title.
Last time I was surprised—I’ve never doubted his talent in the ring—but last time I was surprised at how quick and how good and how aggressive he was. I know what to expect this time. As far as how I’m feeling going into the match, stylistically, physically in-ring, I’m ready. I’m more than ready for Sunday.
The piece of the puzzle that we haven’t touched on yet that we haven’t mentioned, why he would call me Johnny 205 and even bring up a company that he barely lasted six months at when I won multiple championships there? Why would it matter that I have more ring names than most people in the business? I don’t know why any of that stuff matters, why he would tweet that real bizarre Tweet in which she said if he were to bring up race or the ‘r word’—which I won’t even repeat—or my ‘gay’ look, or if he fat shamed my husky wife people would be outraged.
This is a piece of the puzzle that was missing in the build for Bound For Glory. The fact that he’s that desperate and that hell bent on not losing a war of words on Twitter. He’s burying himself and turning people against him, but more so than anything is he needs to change the attitude, and he needs to not say anything about people that aren’t involved.
Johnny talks about how personal Aries got, why he thinks it went down the way it did:
It’s hard to compare this to anything because it’s so public and it seems like so ludicrous and stupid for him to say what he said. I feel like he’s going to try to play this off as a strategic thing, like he was trying to get in my head. I’m sure he’ll say that, but in my opinion it was a response because he’s got these deep-seated insecurities about how tall he is. Really, that’s what it is. I made short joke and he fumed on it for a couple of hours, and then came out with this really mean-spirited tweet. I guess I shouldn’t have said, I don’t know, but I was in the spirit of joking and he didn’t really make a joke. I feel like he really set out to hurt people.
(Transcription credit to Bill Pritchard for Wrestlezone.com)
