Various: Matt Cardona Makes Surprise TNA Return at 8/1 Impact Show, Marigold Announces Full Field for Dream Star Grand Prix 2024, Indies

Aug 2, 2024

Matt Cardona Makes Surprise Return on Thursday’s TNA Impact Show

Thursday’s Impact! show for TNA Wrestling featured Matt Cardona making his surprise return to the company.

During the main event of PCO’s wedding to Steph De Lander, FIR$T CLA$$’s AJ Francis and Rich Swann were the first to interrupt and in a mocking tone stated that they were only hear to be witnesses to the “freak show” and have no intentions of spoiling the party. After some words by wedding official Santino Marella, PCO and De Lander were about to kiss to seal their wedding only for Cardona’s music to play interrupting the ceremony again. Cardona came out and made his way to the ring holding a wrapped gift he said it was for them. Cardona then hit PCO and laid him out with the gift, which was revealed to be a cinder block. Cardona then laid out Marella and continued his attack on PCO before trying to get De Lander to leave with him to no avail. An upset and sad De Lander responded back berating Cardona for what he did leading on her special day and continued until he left the ring empty handed. As he made his way to the back, Cardona yelled back asking “What are you doing? You’re with me! It’s not supposed to be this way!” while De Lander was crying in the ring and PCO managed to get back up on his feet.

.@TheMattCardona CRASHED @PCOisNotHuman and @stephdelander's Wedding!

Watch #TNAiMPACT NOW on TNA+: https://t.co/ZoOeNdpoUi pic.twitter.com/z4BJj1oFjO
— TNA Wrestling (@ThisIsTNA) August 2, 2024

This was Cardona’s first appearance in TNA since this past April due to a torn pectoral injury.

Marigold Announces Full Field for Their First Ever Dream Star Grand Prix

Marigold recently announced the full field for their upcoming first ever Dream Star Grand Prix tournament,

Full field of Marigold Dream Star Grand Prix 2024:

Utami Hayashishita
Miku Aono
MIRAI
Nanae Takahashi
Natsumi Showzuki
Mai Sakurai
Kouki Amarei
Misa Matsui
CHIAKI
Bozilla
Sareee
Nagisa Nozaki
Winner of Dream Star Entry Match 1 – Chika Goto vs. Nao Ishikawa
Winner of Dream Star Entry Match 2 – Victoria Yuzuki vs. Myla Grace
Winner of Dream Star Entry Match 3 – Kizuna Tanaka vs. Zayda Steel
One wrestler from another promotion

16 entrants in the Dream Star GP 2024!
Utami
Miku Aono
MIRAI
Nanae
N. Showzuki
Mai Sakurai
Kouki
Misa Matsui
CHIAKI
Bozilla
Sareee
N. Nozaki
Winner of Dream Star Entry Match 1
Winner of Dream Star Entry Match 2
Winner of Dream Star Entry Match 3
1 wrestler from another promotion pic.twitter.com/Yn6NuvYFJS
— Marigold Joshi (@Marigold_Joshi) July 30, 2024

Misc. Wrestling News & Notes

Thursday’s Against The World event for Absolute Intense Wrestling in Cleveland, Ohio featured WWE’s DIY, Tommaso Ciampa & Johnny Gargano, making a surprise appearance. This was Gargano’s first appearance since 2016 and Ciampa’s first appearance since 2015 for AIW.

As noted before, Leyla Hirsch suffered a potential arm and shoulder injury at this past Friday’s Death Before Dishonor 2024 event for Ring of Honor in Arlington, Texas. During Thursday’s ROH TV show, ROH announcer Ian Riccaboni provided an update stating that Hirsch had suffered a dislocated elbow injury. No other details were given regarding if Hirsch will be missing any time due to her injury situation.

TNA Wrestling announced that this year’s Emergence event on August 30th in Louisville, Kentucky will be featuring an Ultimate X match. No other details nor competitors were given.

As noted before, this past July’s TNA Slammiversary 2024 event featured Nic Nemeth being crowned the new TNA World Champion. Fightful Select’s Sean Ross Sapp reported that his sources stated that TNA officials original plans was for Josh Alexander to win the Six-way Elimination match for the TNA World title. Sapp reported that while the exact reason for why the plans were changed to Nemeth being the winner instead, those spoken to within the company hinted that it was due to TNA officials wanting Alexander and Hendry to continue their feud without the title being involved.

Military.com reported that the United States Army is currently seeking to recoup around $6 million from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and the United Football League over issues with a partnership deal between the two sides. It was reported that the US Army had spent $11 million on a partnership deal with The Rock and the UFL in return for the league to help drive new enlistments. It was reported that this deal did not lead to a single new Army recruit and instead may possibly have had a negative impact on finding new recruits. The US Army is claiming that Johnson was supposed to serve as a “pseudo brand ambassador for the Army” and “he did not fulfill his end of the bargain to publish a specific number of service-related posts on his social media accounts.” It was reported that the Army had expected at least five social media posts from Johnson and instead he only made two posts.

As noted before, WWE parent company TKO Group reached a settlement deal for an anti-trust lawsuit against UFC this past March. This settlement was for around $335 million and way lower than the $800 million to $1.6 billion that was being originally asked for damages. F4WOnline’s Josh Nason reported that the presiding judge Richard Boulware denied approving the settlement deal this past Tuesday and set a trial date of October 28th for the Cung Le vs. Zuffa lawsuit and the Kajan Johnson vs. Zuffa lawsuit to proceed separately. Nason reported that a status conference between all parties is currently scheduled to take place on August 19th and there is a possibility that the trial date could get pushed back depending on the arguments given to do so. In regards to the reason for the settlement rejection decision, Nason reported that Boulware feels that the settlement dollars from TKO should be higher and is looking for “major contractual changes” in Johnson’s lawsuit case.

Indies wrestler and former AEW talent Joey Janela recently announced on Twitter that his scheduled bookings for the month of August are currently in doubt due to him currently dealing with gallstone pancreatitis. Janela stated “Well I’ve been in pain for quite a while, worst the past couple days along with insane vomiting I braved through it to do a something at the limp bizkit concert and today had to check into a hospital. Turns out I have gallstone pancreatitis, my August schedule is uncertain for the time being, and bills gonna be through the roof. I’ll be trying to get some merch out there, should be in here for a minute.“

As noted before, Elias was released from WWE in September of 2023 and has been working under the ring name of Elijah in the indies. In a recent interview with Metro, Elijah gave his thoughts about how he considered retiring from wrestling after his release from WWE. Elijah stated “The fact that I just kinda was relegated to like short backstage – it was so frustrating that I was like, ‘You know what? Maybe I’m done with wrestling. Maybe I’m just you know, I’m just over it. It beats that fun thing you have as a kid when you want to wrestle and you want to be in WWE… Someone like me, I didn’t like just to sit by and just collect the paycheck. I wanted to be in the mix. I wanted to show you that I could be right in there with any of those guys. To not have that happen was really just disheartening, you know what I mean? So I didn’t really know what I do after.” Elijah also gave his thoughts about how working in the indies helped reignite his passing for wrestling. Elijah stated “Then I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s there, that fun of wrestling! It’s there.’ I just kind of want to do that now. It’s enjoyable to travel and wrestle, and be me, and meet people.” (Transcript h/t: Fightful.com)

In a recent interview with the Sports Business Journal’s The Sports Media podcast, Nielsen SVP, Product Strategy & Thought Leadership Brian Fuhrer gave his thoughts about if Nielsen gets a bad rap over the criticisms of their ratings tracking system for television shows. Fuhrer stated “I would say that we’re an easy target. We’ve been around a while and we try to do the best we can. I think we have a really good relationship with all of our clients and we continue to work with them to maximize opportunity across all different platforms.” Fuhrer also gave his thoughts about the biggest change made to Nielsen’s ratings measurement process over the past five years. Fuhrer stated “It comes as no surprise that consumers have really adopted the ability to watch content whenever they want. The infusion of content that Netflix introduced and training consumers to watch these deep libraries of content at any point, that’s been the biggest change. Moving away from the linear world, or in addition to the linear world, adding all of this tremendously deep on-demand libraries that streaming provides, that’s been the biggest change from a behavior standpoint.” Fuhrer also gave his thoughts about what is the next frontier for Nielsen’s ratings system. Fuhrer stated “Continuing to expand on the streaming measurement that we had, and the thing that’s really interesting now is how its converging across everything. They are not dissimilar platforms. Content is just existing simultaneously across the traditional broadcast, syndication, and streaming at the same time. Putting all that together so people can really understand what the audiences are, and value the content and advertising is really critical.” (Transcript h/t: Fightful.com)

Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre recently announced one new match for the card of their 91st Anniversary Show on September 13th at the Arena Mexico in Mexico City, Mexico:

Lucha de Apuestas, Mask Quadrangular match – Hechicero vs. Valiente vs. Euforia vs. Esfinge