Follow-Up: Eli Drake Got Fired from Impact

He gone
Photo Credit: ImpactWrestling.com

Last week, I wrote about how Eli Drake of Impact Wrestling fame had a very public meltdown over intergender wrestling. As it turns out, the tweets were the smoke behind a behind-the-scenes fire that involved Drake getting into a tiff with management because they wanted him to wrestle Tessa Blanchard. The disagreement got so heated that Impact didn't even wait until Drake's contract let up at the end of next month to fire him. Drake is now a free agent, although given he had a meltdown in the past over Kevin Owens' push in NXT and WWE, he may not be welcome at the Performance Center. Maybe Ring of Honor will give him a shot. I mean, they signed the Beautiful People and the Enzo Amore/Colin Cassady tag team, so their standards have become abysmal.

One should always be careful in taking management's side in these sorts of things, because especially in non-union wrestling, the gradient of power is so off-kilter that most of the time (key phrase here, most of the time), confrontations like these that end in wrestler termination are incredibly unjust. That being said, am I obligated to go to bat for someone on the business end of a seemingly unjust firing when the reason he was mad at management was rooted in putrid sexism? Situations like these are where I just sit out, because while I'm not going to defend a company that has fired people for having cancer and had institutional sexual harassment as a feature not a bug over the years, I would rather cannonball into a vat of sulfuric acid than defend a dude who didn't wanna wrestle a woman because he thought it was beneath him.

Intergender wrestling is one of those things people need to get over in a big way, because all the talk about equality in wrestling is bullshit until women get the same opportunities as men. They're not coming to replace men. They only want to join them. The only way you should fear being "replaced" is if you suck anyway. Does Eli Drake suck? Honestly, I couldn't tell you because I haven't really watched him work since he was Shaun Ricker working on Championship Wrestling from Hollywood. That being said, maybe he's telling on himself and his own insecurities if he thinks that wrestling someone like Blanchard or Jordynne Grace would "expose" something. Hint, it wouldn't be the business.