Les Thatcher is all about telling a story in the wrestling ring and someone whom he believes is spinning quite the yarn currently is Roman Reigns.
The man who brought you Heartland Wrestling recently spoke with Dominic DeAngelo of WrestleZone about how time isn’t being factored in enough to letting a story develop on the canvas.
“To me, Dom, two guys in a wrestling match is like a human book and for you to read a novel or me read a novel or anybody, you can’t flip through the pages at 100 miles an hour,” Les said. “You’ll pick up a paragraph, a word, a sentence, but you won’t get the story. You got to turn those pages slow enough.
“And that’s the other thing, I know there’s a lot of spots, a lot of big bumps, more than I care to see. And it’s not telling a story, it’s just pops. I mean, you can make a story out of something, but the match itself is not telling a story like it should.”
One individual who Thatcher believes is cracking the spine of that figurative storybook is WWE’s current Universal Champion, Roman Reigns.
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— Adam Pearce (@ScrapDaddyAP) May 17, 2021
“If I’m drawn in then I think they’re doing a job I respect, right? Right now, to me, some of the stuff on the program is not the best in the world, but I think Roman Reigns is the number one heel in the business today.” Thatcher then cited one of the intense interactions Roman created with WWE’s current “babyface” official in long-time colleague Adam Pearce, who he says comes off as being a genuine guy in a world of authority characters.
“Of all the goofy, evil commissioners or the clown commissioners that that company has had over the years, not because he’s my friend but he is, Adam Pearce is the best damn official because he comes across as real as opposed to being a character.
“When I saw him and Roman and Usos are wandering behind Adam. Now I’m moving up on my seat a little bit and I’m thinking, ‘What are they gonna do?’ And then I realize, ‘Damn, Les! They got ya!’ Right? Which is the idea, Dom!”
Les says the most engaging part of Roman isn’t what he does when the bell rings, but more so of how he handles himself when he sits at the head of that table.
“The key to Roman is he says very little. It’s his facial expressions, his body language. You and I were talking about this before we were recording: ‘details, details, details,’ Which is missing when you’re concerned with how many rotations you do off the top rope.”
Check out the full interview with Les Thatcher below: