Ultimate X is a high-risk spectacle that has commanded the attention of IMPACT fans for more than fifteen years. At this Sunday’s Homecoming pay-per-view, it returns for its 42nd edition with a new cast of competitors trying to make their mark on the grandest stage the X-Division has to offer, in a match that has a history of creating indelible moments.
In their own words, we present the recollections of past and present IMPACT Wrestling stars who made the match what it is today, innovated upon the format to take it to new heights both figuratively and literally, and were forever changed by the events that took place below, on and above Ultimate X’s criss-crossed cables.
EDDIE EDWARDS (2 Ultimate X Matches, 2 Victories): For a lot of our locker room, I think that we feel that every match and every pay-per-view, we wanna take another step above and beyond, and it’s accentuated with the Ultimate X match.
DJZ (7 Ultimate X Matches, 1 Victory): It’s a completely original concept from IMPACT. They perfected it, and I don’t really know that I’ve seen any other major wrestling organization do anything quite like it.
SONJAY DUTT (5 Ultimate X Matches, 0 Victories): Your object is something so drastically different than a regular match. You’re high in the air, you’re shimmying, you’re using every part of your body to try to get the belt or the X.
EDWARDS: From the outside looking in, it seems like climbing and pulling yourself across those cables is relatively easy, but you get up there and you’re trying to crawl across, after however long the match is… it takes up a lot more energy than you’d expect it to.
SONJAY: You don’t know how difficult it is until you get out there. I’ve always had bad shoulders and it was never too kind to me, hanging above the ring like that and trying to rappel across those cables.
DJZ: Obviously you have to use your upper body strength to hang from that rope and then shimmy yourself across. That takes some upper body strength, that takes some serious core strength. So you do have to be in some type of athletic condition, I think to be successful in that type of a match. Beyond that, I think you just need to be a little bit psychotic because the risk of injury is greater in that type of match than in most other situations you could find yourself in in a pro wrestling match. You gotta be a little crazy to be enthusiastic about participating in an Ultimate X match.
SONJAY: Any time I’ve fallen off that thing, it’s just been like, “Wow, I wish I didn’t do that.” I don’t think people really appreciate how high that thing is when you’re all the way up there, hanging upside-down.
FRANKIE KAZARIAN (8 Ultimate X Matches, 3 Victories): You can’t go into that match and expect to come out the same wrestler you were. You just can’t. And I never did.
Ultimate X originated from humble beginnings in IMPACT’s “Asylum Years,” during which the company produced televised pay-per-view events every single week for a rabid, hardcore audience. In its most basic form, it features two cables strung across the ring more than ten feet in the air, with the object to be captured to determine a victor suspended right in the middle of the X the cables created.
The match itself was an untested shot in the dark, potentially another soon-forgotten oddball match variation – the Hard 10 Tournament or Dupp Cup, anyone? But it would stand the test of time to a degree that no one involved could have expected.
KAZARIAN: It was explained to me a couple of weeks beforehand by people in creative at TNA at the time. They’d created this new concept for a match. They said it was basically going to be poles surrounding the four sides of the ring and chains going across with the title in the middle. And they described it as a ladder match with no ladder. And being a fan of ladder matches and cool concepts in wrestling, I thought it was great.
We were all flown in the night before to try out this structure and see what it was all about. By the time we got to the building, it hadn’t even been constructed. The idea was basically steel poles inside the ring posts and stringing cables across from that. They tried to do that and I went up there as a test, and this is the night before the actual pay-per-view, and the minute I got on the cable and started navigating my way across, all the poles just bent and collapsed into the ring, and I was standing in the middle of the ring. So the (ring crew workers) are kind of shaking their heads, and they were working on stuff all night and it started to get heated – people are giving advice, and there was carpenters there who said they knew what they were doing but they obviously didn’t… so long story short, we really had no idea of how it was going to come together, and if it was even going to be a thing.
We got to the building the next day, and they decided to build the apparatus out of lighting trusses – having trusses outside of the ring and splitting the cables across that. By the time they got it erected and everything, it was basically showtime. So we had no way to get up there and see if it was gonna work, or see how high it was. So we went into that first Ultimate X completely blind, just with some ideas of what we thought could be done. So I’m very very proud of that match, and proud of the guys who were in it with me. To be part of the first of anything in pro wrestling is very special, and to be involved in the history of that match which has become so special is very cool, and something I wear as a badge of honor.
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