IMPACT Wrestling and Game Changer Wrestling referee Kris Levin recently sat down with Andrew Thompson to discuss a handful of topics, including the busy schedule of a referee, and how he feels about Tessa Blanchard possibly becoming the next IMPACT World Champion.
Check out some of the highlights below:
On the busy scheduling of a referee:
The last few weeks have been some of the busiest in my career, and sometimes you’ll look at your schedule and you’ll see, ‘Oh okay. These next few weeks are gonna be rough’ and that’s what I just came off of. The rest of my year has thankfully slowed down a little bit in comparison but we had an awesome pay-per-view in Chicago [Bound For Glory] and pay-per-views are always the most stressful thing. Then we had television tapings right after that in Windsor, Ontario, Canada then again in New York City and IMPACT’s been putting out bangers you know? And it’s really awesome when things are firing on all cylinders. With the women’s division, the Knockouts division, the X division, the tag team division, the world championship division. Like Sami Callihan’s the new World Champion. He’s doing stuff with Ken Shamrock in 2019. I love it because it’s so wild and so diverse. Ken Shamrock versus Joey Ryan is a match that happened. There’s no rules anymore. Anything can happen and I think that’s great.
On Tessa Blanchard possibly becoming IMPACT World Champion:
So, first of all, it’s always an honor to work in the main event of a pay-per-view for the IMPACT World Championship but it’s especially an honor to work with Tessa, who is… she’s just such a natural talent, and being in the ring with her is always a pleasure, it’s always a fun artistic challenge just like working with someone you jive with and Sami Callihan — one of my mentors so it’s always so special to be in the ring [with him], let alone when you think about the historical significance of a match like this because make no mistakes about it, this isn’t just a pro wrestling thing, this is… and I think some people might roll their eyes when I say this but I don’t care: It’s a civil rights thing, because there’s still places in the United States today where they’ll look at that and say, ‘That match is legally not allowed to happen’, based solely off of the gender of someone and I think that’s disgusting, and I applaud IMPACT so much for having such a forward-thinking mindset of, ‘It’s not male wrestlers and female wrestlers. It’s just wrestlers’, and it’s okay if you don’t subscribe to that mindset but it’s okay if you do and I think a lot of people look down upon intergender wrestling and say, ‘Oh, it’s not believable. It’s not this or that’ but like, since when has anything in pro wrestling been predominantly concerned about believability since the 70s you know?
