This past Saturday, Impact Wrestling held its annual pay-per-view Slammiversary. The event featured debuts from several former WWE wrestlers as well as a couple of wrestlers making their return to the company.
Among those who debuted and returned were The Motor City Machine Guns (Alex Shelley and Chris Sabin), EC3, Eric Young, The Good Brothers (Karl Anderson and Doc Gallows), and Heath Miller. They also joined the recent addition of Deonna Purrazzo, who won the Impact Knockouts World Championship that night.
Out of the new additions I’m interested in seeing is Heath Miller, the former Heath Slater of WWE. While his debut was decent, he reminded me to a certain degree of Christian Cage’s TNA debut back in 2005. Miller can be a star in Impact Wrestling. I believe that fans will be in for a treat seeing what Miller can do without restrictions. While it took Christian Cage to win the TNA title in three months, I think Miller will win the title next year.
What’s interesting about these additions is that the criticisms the company got bringing these wrestlers in on social media. It seems like the standards that WWE set for them determined their fate. These wrestlers were jobbers. A jobber is a wrestler that gets into the ring already knowing he or she is going to lose.
These wrestlers could’ve been great in WWE if only they knew how to use them. For Deonna Purrazzo, she was barely used in NXT after WWE signed her in 2018 to keep her away from Cody Rhodes, and the Young Bucks produced show called All In.
These wrestlers made a name for themselves before they went to WWE. Take EC3, for example. He was known as Derek Bateman in NXT before being released in 2013. He went to Impact Wrestling as EC3, the nephew of Dixie Carter. He took the gimmick and made it work. He made a name for himself over time at Impact Wrestling.
After spending five years with Impact Wrestling, he left for the WWE. While he was used in NXT, he was severely mistreated on the main roster to the point he wanted out and was not the only one.
The Good Brothers were a successful tag team in New Japan before coming to WWE. For Doc Gallows, it was his second stint with the company. Fans may know him as Festus, who was in a tag team called the Dalton Boys, then rebranded as Luke Gallows with Straight Edge Society. After Gallows left WWE, he went to TNA to be part of the stable Aces & Eights.
He was there for a couple of years before leaving for New Japan to team up with Karl Anderson and join the Bullet Club. While in Japan, Anderson and Gallows were The IWGP Tag Team Champions five times. They left New Japan in 2016 with AJ Styles and Shinsuke Nakamura to join the WWE. Once there, they won the RAW tag team titles just once. The Good Brothers, like many other wrestlers, were released by WWE on April 15th of this year.
Except for Heath Miller and the Good Brothers, the rest of the wrestlers were in NXT. One of the problems WWE has is they don’t know how to use these wrestlers once they are up on the main roster. You can point out several wrestlers who were on fire in NXT before going to the main roster. Once they were there, WWE did not know what to do with them, and they became jobbers. For fans who only watch WWE, they miss out on the potential of these former WWE wrestlers at their new companies.
For these wrestlers to finally be able to go to other companies and show the fans what they have been missing out all along is fantastic. They can showcase their full talent to wrestling fans. If you like watching other wrestling companies like Impact Wrestling, you’re in for a treat.
