Impact World Heavyweight Championship
| Impact World Championship | |||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
The current Impact World Championship belt
(2018 – present) |
|||||||||||||||||||
| Details | |||||||||||||||||||
| Promotion | Impact Wrestling | ||||||||||||||||||
| Date established | May 13, 2007 | ||||||||||||||||||
| Current champion(s) | Austin Aries | ||||||||||||||||||
| Date won | April 24, 2018 | ||||||||||||||||||
| Past design(s) |  |
||||||||||||||||||
| Other name(s) | |||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||
| Statistics | |
|---|---|
| First champion(s) | Kurt Angle |
| Most reigns | Kurt Angle (6 reigns) |
| Longest reign | Bobby Roode (256 days) |
| Shortest reign | Kurt Angle (1 day) |
| Oldest winner | Sting (52 years) |
| Youngest winner | Magnus (26 years) |
| Heaviest champion | Samoa Joe (290 Ibs) |
| Lightest champion | Austin Aries (202 lbs) |
The Impact World Championship is a professional wrestling world heavyweight championship owned and promoted by Impact Wrestling. It is the promotion's principal championship. Like most professional wrestling championships, the title is won via the result of a predetermined match.
Before the championship was created, the promotion, then known as Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA), controlled the NWA World Heavyweight Championship via an agreement with the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA). In 2007, the agreement between TNA and the NWA ended, leading to the creation of the TNA World Heavyweight Championship. The championship was unveiled on May 14, 2007 at the taping of TNA's primary television program, Impact!, which aired on May 17, 2007. The inaugural champion was Kurt Angle, who also holds the record for the most reigns at six.
When TNA changed its name and became Impact Wrestling in March 2017, the title was renamed soon after to reflect the change. After Impact Wrestling rebranded to GFW later that year, the title was unified with the original GFW Global Championship at Slammiversary XV and became the Unified GFW World Heavyweight Championship. Following Destination X, the title took the GFW Global Championship name and kept the former TNA lineage.
On October 23, 2017, the GFW name was dropped and the company name was reverted to Impact Wrestling when the company severed ties with Jeff Jarrett and thus he took the GFW name with him. Impact Wrestling however kept the Global Championship name for their championship and the title was then called the Impact Global Championship. As of the February 1, 2018 episode of Impact, the title has been known as the Impact World (Heavyweight) Championship. As of June 4, 2018, the title has been merged with the Impact Grand Championship.
Impact Wrestling was formed as NWA: Total Nonstop Action in May 2002. Later that same year, TNA was granted control over the NWA World Heavyweight and World Tag Team Championships by the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) governing body; subsequently becoming an official NWA territory as NWA-TNA. On June 19, 2002, NWA-TNA held its first show; a weekly pay-per-view event. The main event of the telecast was a twenty-man Gauntlet for the Gold match in which 20 men trying to throw each other over the top rope and down to the floor in order to eliminate them, until there were two men left who wrestle a standard match to become the first ever TNA-era NWA World Heavyweight Champion.Ken Shamrock defeated Malice to win the championship with Ricky Steamboat as the special guest referee at the event.
...
Wikipedia