IMPACT’s Scott D’Amore Talks Mauro Ranallo At Rebellion

IMPACT EVP Scott D’Amore recently spoke with David Penzer on the Sitting Ringside podcast about IMPACT’s upcoming Rebellion pay-per-view on April 25.

With a monumental main event pitting IMPACT World Champion Rich Swann vs. AEW World Champion Kenny Omega in a winner takes all match, IMPACT have made the decision to bring in Mauro Ranallo to call the historic title match.

The move to bring Ranallo in - if only for one match - has excited wrestling fans the World over, and D’Amore himself is excited:

“I mean look, I think respectful to everybody else there, when you look at it, Mauro Ranallo is the greatest combat sports commentator of our generation because if you’re talking about boxing, he’s right there. You’re talking about MMA, he’s right there. You’re talking about pro wrestling, he’s right there. There is no other combat sports announcer that transcends three genres like that. So to have him come in and do this, especially after he stopped calling wrestling and it’s been a year-and-a-half, two years, whatever it’s been and for him to come back for this Sunday I think is huge and I’m — you talk about being a mark or a mark for this, David [Penzer], I marked out. I marked out listening to — Mauro was great in doing those ‘Five Ways To Win’ for each [Rich] Swann and Kenny Omega and as I listened to that first one, I just got chills and goosebumps kind of just listening to Mauro call IMPACT Wrestling action and break down and dissect something for an IMPACT Wrestling event. So I think it’s huge. 

“Mauro is a guy I’ve known for over two decades. He’s uber-passionate, you know he’s gonna come in super prepared, knowing every minute detail of everything around this and to get him, like honestly, it is one of those things when me and him first chatted, I didn’t even think it was really much of a possibility but as things kind of went, it was like hey, he’s excited about this and an excited, passionate Mauro Ranallo is the absolute best and there’s no question that he will provide a world class call to a historic event.”

With such a huge main event taking place, you’d think IMPACT would be champing at the bit to have a live audience witness history, but for D’Amore he’d rather be late to the party than early:

“I mean certainly, we all want to." said D'Amore "As much as we wanna stay safe and obviously that is the most important thing, we wanna get back out there in front of live audiences and that’s been something that has been an ongoing topic through the entire period here. I know we did our first adventuring in the empty studio world in April of last year so just about a year ago here and we were thinking at the time — that we might have people at Slammiversary, then it was like, ‘You know what? We might have people at Bound For Glory.’

“It’s been a constant adjustment and one of the things that we feel strongly about, both IMPACT and company-wide at Anthem [Sports & Entertainment] is let’s be extremely cautious with this so we’ll continue to monitor things, we’ll continue to adjust as we go, we’ll continue to look at opportunities to get back in front of people but we’d rather be a day late on that one than a day early, so we will continue to monitor and we’ll continue to think on — so I could say, ‘Hey, it’d be great if we were in front of a live audience for the Fall.’ But, I hope we would be but who knows? I have no ability to say when that is gonna happen. We’ll just monitor it and do our best in the meantime and then when we can safely and effectively get back out in front of live crowds, we’ll be there.”

H/T: POST Wrestling