Purrazzo shares that she feels validated after the conversations she’s been able to have.
Dating back to 2020, Deonna Purrazzo has been a part of IMPACT Wrestling and throughout that stretch, she’s captured the Knockouts World Title three times, held the Knockouts World Tag Team Titles and won AAA’s Reina de Reinas Title along with the ROH Women’s World Championship.
It was first reported by Fightful in February that Purrazzo’s deal with IMPACT is set to expire at the end of 2023. Purrazzo addressed her upcoming free agency on the latest episode of Gabby AF. She said she’s chosen not to say too much about it. Purrazzo has had talks with a lot of people in the industry and feels validated coming out of those conversations.
She spoke about changing the perception of herself following her time in NXT. She was looked at as being difficult and cocky. Purrazzo said changing that perception has opened a lot of doors but no matter what, it’ll be a hard decision because of how she feels about IMPACT. She called the people in the company her family.
I wish that I knew anything or don’t (Purrazzo responded when asked about reports of her future). The last couple of weeks have been really interesting because obviously we’ve seen tons of stuff about my contract status come out on social media and I’ve not really addressed it too much because I don’t really have anything to say yet and I’ve been able to have some really great conversations with people all across the board and you know, the only thing I can say is I feel validated and I feel like the work that I’ve been able to put in-in IMPACT has really changed the entire trajectory of my career and the perception of me. Going into IMPACT, you know, I think my time in NXT deemed me a little bit difficult, a little bit outspoken, a little bit maybe cocky or overconfident and I think that I’ve been able to rehab that image of myself and show people, no, I’m a team player and I want — yes, of course I wanna be the champion and I wanna be at the top but I can also be a champion and handle all the responsibilities that come with that and it’s opened a lot of doors for me going into this free agency and I don’t have an answer. I don’t have any details or anything, because I just don’t know yet and there’s a lot of pros and cons to every place that I could go, and also too, I wanna say, my heart is so full for IMPACT that whether I stay or go or whatever the case is gonna be, it’s not going to be an easy decision no matter what my decision is because to stay is to be with my family and obviously my husband’s there and I’ve just had the time of my life and the career moments of my life there but also, I have to weigh is it time to maybe try to do that somewhere else? So, it’s very difficult.
The host mentioned that she’d like to see Purrazzo in the Royal Rumble and if she were in it, who would she want to face coming out of it. Purrazzo decided between WWE Women’s World Champion Rhea Ripley and WWE Women’s Champion IYO SKY.
She feels the better story is with IYO because they were in the same Performance Center class and SKY went on to find success in WWE while Purrazzo had to leave, redeem herself and she’d now be coming back for IYO’s title.
Rhea (Ripley) or IYO (SKY)? God, I wish I could choose both (to face)… So I wrestled Rhea a ton of times just on the NXT house show loops, Coconut shows. We wrestled for the NXT U.K. Championship in the main event of an NXT U.K., where Rhea defeated me. So I feel like there’s that of we know each other very well but then there’s also IYO who I’ve wrestled in Japan a ton. We actually we’re in the same P.C. class at the same time, July of 2018, so we came in together and I feel like that would be a really cool story to tell too of like, look what you’ve gone on to do while you stayed in WWE and I had to leave and redeem myself a little bit and now I’m coming back for your championship I feel is a really cool story, so I feel like my answer is IYO. Yeah, I feel like it’s IYO.
Circling back to the upcoming free agency, Purrazzo shared that she’s talked with her husband, former IMPACT World Champion Steve Maclin, about what it could be like if they’re no longer working together.
She said it’s scary to think about and they’ve been in the groove of traveling together, hitting destinations while in town for shows and in general, just being around one another consistently.
We (Purrazzo & Steve Maclin) really weighed on, oh wow, we could potentially never work together again and what does that look like for us, and it’s been really fun with him coming into IMPACT of like, when we’re in Vegas, we’ll make sure we run a few days early and went to the Grand Canyon or the second time we went a few days early and he really wanted to go to Tombstone in Arizona and we try to make fun trips of these things because we’re getting paid to travel so we might as well take advantage of it and go places neither of us have seen or somewhere he wants to show me or somewhere that I’ve been that I know he’ll love and it’s really — especially this year just with all the mental health stuff that we’ve talked about that I’ve been going through. It’s been settling to know that I have my best friend and if I feel like I’m gonna panic or like I can’t handle a situation, he’s there to ground me and he’s my person. It’s scary to know we might not ever do this again and I might have to figure out how to do this without you. So yeah, I don’t know.
As of this writing, Purrazzo is not scheduled for TNA Hard To Kill on January 13th or the company’s post-pay-per-view television taping. The 29-year-old was most recently in action at Final Resolution.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit Gabby AF with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
