Rhett Titus on How He First Discovered ROH, Being Viewed as a ‘Tag Team Specialist’

– Spencer Love recently interviewed wrestler Rhett Titus ahead of the 500th episode of ROH TV. Titus discussed discovering ROH, how he’d rather be underrated than overrated, and more. Below are some highlights and audio from the interview.

Rhett Titus on discovering ROH: “Well, honestly, it was right after, you know, in 2002, and WCW went out of business and ECW went out business, and wrestling was kind of just like ‘ahh,’ at the time because there was no competition or anything like that. I remember my brother-in-law was like, ‘hey, you want to go to this indie show? It’s called Ring of Honor.’ I was like, ‘ahh,’ you know because I’d been to a lot of indie shows ever since like ECW went out of business and live it was, you know, just-”

“He was like, ‘well, Steve Corino and Eddie Guerrero are going to be there,’ I was like, ‘oh!’ Those being two of my favorites, I was sold. So, I went to the Ring of Honor show. From the first match, I was like, ‘oh my gosh, what the hell is this? This isn’t sports entertainment. This is wrestling as a sport!’ I had always wanted to be a professional wrestler growing up, but I was like, ‘man, this is something like I’ve never seen. This is what I want to do with my life.’ From that point on, I was hooked on Ring of Honor. I was checking the website every day, and buying all the VHS tapes, and all that stuff. Then, all of a sudden they said, ‘hey, we’re opening a wrestling school.’ And when the school opened, I was only 15 at the time, but I was like, ‘oh, I gotta get in there!’ I kept emailing them, and finally, when I turned 17, they let me in there. I was trained by Austin Aries. Awesome training from Austin Aries. One of the best wrestlers to ever do it. A two-time Ring of Honor World Champion. About six months after my training, I got thrown into the fire! My first match was literally on a Ring of Honor show in Dayton, Ohio, and I wrestled Shane Hagadorn. Leading up to it, I wasn’t really too confident about it. You know, I was like, ‘oh my gosh, uh,’ and then, as soon as I got out the curtain, I was like, ‘this is where I’m supposed to be. This is what I’m supposed to be doing.’ It all kind of felt right, you know. And the rest is history, as they say.”

Rhett Titus on the backstage culture in ROH: “Yeah, no, it’s one of those things where everybody, like, kind of looks to me as like a veteran of the locker room and to me, it’s like, man, these 15 years just went by so quick. I’m still a hungry dude just trying to get comfortable, you know what I mean? But, you can never get comfortable, because everything is always changing and there’s always new guys coming up and keeping you on your toes and that sort of thing. But for right now? Ring of Honor, man, I have to say it’s the best it’s ever been. The product that we’re putting out right now is absolutely amazing even with the limitations that the pandemic has put on us. We brought back to the Pure title and pure rules and that sort of thing, and that’s something that you really got to focus on. It’s a different level of thinking of pro wrestling. Even when you’re watching at home, you’re watching, you’re saying like, ‘how many rope breaks does this guy left have left on your TV screen?’ Those sorts of things. You’ve really got to – you can’t just like casually watch it. There’s strategies to it, and there’s a psychology behind it. You definitely want to sit and watch it with a fine eye. But I mean, everything from the presentation to the matches to the commentators – Ian and Caprice, they’re the best duo going today. Ring of Honor is really firing on all cylinders right now, so to be part of it after all these years and continue to be a driving force in the company. It’s an absolute – you know, pardon the pun, but Honor.”

Rhett Titus on ROH during the pandemic: “Yeah, you know, from the moment this pandemic all kind of started, it was my wedding anniversary, and I was on my way to Las Vegas for the Anniversary Show and the TV taping. I got off the plane and I actually bumped into Cheeseburger and Grizzly Redwood, and Grizzly was actually coming back, it was, I think, almost a 10-year hiatus for him. He was coming back for the Past versus Present show. So, I got off the plane, they’re like, ‘hey, do you check your email yet?’ I was like, ‘no,’ they’re like, ‘the shows are canceled.’ I was like, ‘what? Man, maybe this is a little bit more serious than I thought it was!” Because I know how much money it takes to put on pay-per-view, have that time slot, you know, the satellite, and they had catering waiting for us, and all the flights for everybody to get out there, and hotels for multiple days and, you know, all these reservations made. So a lot of money, it was just kind of like thrown out right off the bat there.”

“That was to just make everybody feel safe, because, at that time, the news media were kind of saying like, hey, this is gonna be a big thing, and nobody knew at that time what it was gonna be, but it seemed like it was gonna be serious. They also spent a lot of money on changing our flights to go home as well, too, if we felt like we wanted to go home. That [I’m] so, so, so thankful for. But, from there, I was like, ‘alright, this is gonna be cool. I’m gonna have two weeks to sit at home and do this quarantine thing!'”

Rhett Titus on dealing with the quarantine: “I had never heard of the word quarantine before all of this, and then all of a sudden, it’s like this word that we use every day now. But yeah, what we thought was gonna be two weeks turned into two months and then it was like, ‘all right, we’re gonna get back to work soon,’ but the thing was Ring of Honor didn’t want to put us at risk whatsoever, or our fans that, because we have people coming from multiple different countries, multiple different states from all over, you know, so the risk that would be putting everybody at would be very high. They chose to keep everyone safe, keep everybody at home, keep paying us, and taking care of everybody. We hop on some Zooms here and there and chit-chat and come up with creative ideas about what we could do going forward. But, it wasn’t ’till they really figured out the testing and the transmission of the disease where they brought us back into the bubble.

“So, basically, with the bubble, it’s a way where we can go and usually tape about eight weeks of TV or so and do it all at once. Basically, they bring us into the hotel – well, even before we go to the hotel, we got to take a test before we even leave our house. So once we pass that test to leave our house, we go to the hotel, we get a room by ourselves. We can’t have any visitors anything like that, nobody [else] inside there. We take another test when we get to the hotel, then another test before we wrestle, and then temperature checks at the door and questionnaires before we go into the building. And then, we have to wear face masks the whole time we’re there unless we’re on camera, which tears your ear up!”

“But even after that, all those steps they take, each match gets a brand new ring canvas, and those are quite expensive. The ropes, turnbuckles, any area that was touched, or anything all get sanitized and wiped down. They’re really, really sparing no expense to make sure everybody’s safe and everybody appreciates that to the utmost.”

Rhett Titus on joining The Foundation: “Well, to be honest, prior to the pandemic, I really had no idea of the direction that I was going either. The pandemic gave everybody time to think and kinda come up with new stuff and that sort of thing. But, you know, I still wasn’t really sure on what I was going to be doing. It was the first TV taping back in August, the first bubble that we had, and I got there and there wasn’t really anything for me. I was just kind of like, ‘alright,’ you know. Here I am, and there’s nothing to do. Jonathan Gresham pulled me aside and you know, me and Gresham have wrestled before, and we had a lot of cool talks about wrestling before, and we had a lot of similarities and mindsets about wrestling. He pulled me aside and he’s like, ‘hey, man, like, I had this idea.’ And, basically, he laid it all on me right there. I was like, ‘wow, this sounds amazing to me. This is something I want to be a part of, of course!’ Too many times have I seen people come into Ring of Honor and use Ring of Honor for their own benefit, and not really think about, you know, what Ring of Honor was built upon and people that want to be in Ring of Honor to be IN Ring of Honor. We’re four like-minded individuals, myself, Jon, Hot Sauce, and Jay Lethal, where we’re all about bringing the company back to its glory days and making sure the Code of Honor is adhered to and restoring honor. It’s not just a gimmick or an angle. This is how we all really feel and personally if you don’t feel the same way, you know, the door’s right there.”

Rhett Titus on being branded a tag team specialist: I’d rather be underrated than overrated! But, it’s one of those things where like, yeah, it kind of puts a little bit of a chip on my shoulder because I know that I can just go out there with anybody and have whatever style match that they want to have or whatever style match that I want to have and you know, it’s gonna come out being a banger. It’s cool because I think it’s one of those things where I’ve been around for so long that sometimes people start taking me for granted and that sort of thing. They’re like ‘oh yeah, you know, he’s been here and he’ll always be here,’ and you know, they kind of just don’t look at me like that way. But now, in 2021 and the end of 2020, people really have been turning their heads and be like, ‘man like where the hell’s Rhett Titus been all these years!’ But, you know, I’ve been right here having great matches and they’ve just been getting overlooked. But, now it’s finally nice to see people are starting to take notice.”

On ROH’s 500th TV episode: “One of my personal favorite matches from all 500 that I participated in was the Steel Cage Warfare which put Team S.C.U.M against Team Ring of Honor. That was a pay-per-view main event worthy match, but they put it on free TV for everybody to see. A lot of different moving parts in that match, and a lot of different stories told. That was ultimately the match that got me kicked out of Ring of Honor for a while. But, I found my way back in!”

“Another match that I really enjoyed, too, that I wasn’t a part of was for the Ring of Honor World Championship was Jay Lethal defending against Kyle O’Reilly. I want to say that was in the summer of 2016 or so, somewhere around there. All those years bleed together. Another one was if you ever seen this one, The Briscoes versus RUSH and Dragon Lee. Man, that was a barnburner.”