Chris Van Vliet did a recent interview with Deonna Purrazzo on Insight With Chris Van Vliet. Here are some of the highlights:
On wrestling Jordynne Grace in a 30-minute Iron Woman match:
“Well, we were supposed to do a No Disqualification match at first. So at the time, what was great about Impact was we were taping every two weeks in Nashville. It was still the pandemic, so it was a closed studio and we would get creative ahead of time. So what Jordynne and I were told we were doing was we were going to have our Slammiversary match, and then the next day at the next set of tapings two weeks down the road we would do a No Disqualification match. So leading into that we planned for a hardcore [match], what are cool, intricate, different things we could do with weapons? It wasn’t until the match at Slammiversary happened and it went over so well, the internet loved it, just the entire reaction was so good to it from a company standpoint and from a social media standpoint, that they were like, we need to do something bigger than a 10 minute No Disqualification match. We’re gonna do a first-ever Iron Woman match. And when they told Jordynne and I that literally at the beginning of the next day at like 9 am we were both like what the f*ck? We were so beat up that we had 17 or 18 minutes on the pay-per-view, beat that crap out of each other, and now you want us to do it again, but for like, double the time? Jordynne Grace is one of the hardest-hitting people I’ve ever been in the ring with, physically and emotionally, she just brings out such a different animal in every one of her opponents. You need to be 100% to be in the ring with Jordynne Grace. So neither of us were 100% at that time and going in we were just like how do we even reframe and reset our mind to do what we did again, but 30 minutes.”
On Mickie James:
“Oh my gosh. That whole entire feud was career-defining for me. After I worked with Jordynne, I kind of went into a phase of working pay-per-view to pay-per-view programs with a lot of the girls on the Impact roster. When Mickie came in, it was Slammiversary and she was making a return after being released from WWE. I think it was just the exact opponent I needed, an organic babyface with a history at this company who’s also like, at that point, she has nothing else to prove. She’s just here because she wants to be here, she wants to continue wrestling, she wants to continue to better and change women’s wrestling. My character at that time was ‘I’m the best, who are you?’ Just arrogant and so like this is my championship and my company and my title, and just the chemistry we had organically was just everything I needed in those moments to really sink my teeth in and define who The Virtuosa was.”
