Report: Why Certain Former WWE Stars Didn’t Appear at Impact Wrestling’s Bound for Glory

Impact Wrestling’s Bound for Glory had its fair share of surprises on Saturday, including the Impact World Championship changing hands twice and The IInspiration (formerly The IIconics) winning the Knockouts Tag Team Championships in their debut with the company. Leading up to Saturday’s event in Las Vegas there had been quite a few reports about other former WWE stars (now free agents following the waves of releases earlier this year) popping up during the show, but none of them did. Fightful Select’s Sean Ross Sapp then dropped a report on Sunday confirming Impact had been in negotiations with three former WWE stars — Braun Strowman, Bray Wyatt and Bronson Reed — but nothing materialized. 

Sapp wrote that Strowman and Impact have not agreed on a deal, Wyatt showing up was “never close to happening” and his 90-day No Compete clause from his WWE contract is still active and that Reed was booked, then unbooked from the show due to unknown reasons. 

Strowman confirmed in an interview with Sports Illustrated earlier in the week that he’s also been in negotiations with All Elite Wrestling. Other than a cinematic match with EC3 for Free The Narrative, “The Monster Among Men” has yet to wrestle since leaving WWE. 

“Everything happens for a reason. One door closes and it’s unbelievable how many other doors have opened. So may different opportunities,” Strowman said on the Control Your Narrative podcast earlier this month. “I turned down a lot of money, like an astronomical amount of money to do this. There’s days where I friggin think about it and I’m like ‘holy s—.’ Every three letter word corporation out there has made me an offer, talked to me about what I want to do moving forward. And I said ‘first and foremost, I have something that I want to do.’ One was this. Two was just having a chance to breathe and live. Like I said, I was unbelievably blessed for my time with WWE, but it was very time consuming. I went, in five years, I saw my parents eight times. I missed people’s funerals, I missed weddings, I missed births, I missed Christmas’, I missed Thanksgivings.

“The time was amazing, don’t get me wrong. But I’m still a human being, and I have needs when it comes to comfort. I’m very close with my parents, I’m very close with my family and my friends,” he continued. “So it’s not only being able to work with my friends on a project, being able to work on an app, being able to do all the other stuff that I have coming out very soon that I’ll be able to talk about more. But just being able to live and going back to my grassroots. And this was one of the biggest things to come out of the Narrative, was remembering who the f— I was.”