Simply put, Rhett Titus is on the run of his career to this point.
That’s nothing against previous work with the likes of Kenny King or his multitude of championships acquired on the independent scene, of course. However, as one-half of the current Ring of Honor Tag Team Champions and a vital part of the promotion’s stable The Foundation, Titus is finally beginning to earn the level of recognition many Ring of Honor fans have felt he’s deserved for years.
However, it almost didn’t come to pass. As we discussed as part of our recent chat for Love Wrestling, his joining The Foundation wasn’t something that ROH themselves had planned, but was, in fact, current PURE Champion Jonathan Gresham.
“Obviously, I don’t have any idea where you were headed prior to the pandemic coming and any of that sort of stuff,” I began my question. “You don’t want to say a benefit of everything that’s happened in the world, but, you’ve become a part of what is one of the coolest factions, not just in Ring of Honor but in professional wrestling, in my opinion.”
“Just give me a little bit of background on how it came to be and how you started to team with guys like Jon Gresham and Jay Lethal and a guy who’s got, by my money, the best name in pro wrestling, Hot Sauce Tracy Williams. How did that end up happening?”
Titus chuckled before beginning. “Well, to be honest, prior to the pandemic, I really had no idea of the direction that I was going either,” he said half-jokingly. “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.”
However, he continued, it was then that Gresham floated the idea of becoming a part of the Foundation.
“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.”
Hot Sauce Tracy Williams
We both laughed as Titus zoomed his camera in on the door adjacent to us. Ironically, his door reference provided me the perfect opening to ask him about his current tag team partner, Tracy Williams. While Titus has had the opportunity to team with a number of notable ROH talents in the past, he and Williams simply seem to have a chemistry that maybe wasn’t there with previous partners.
“I have to ask on Tracy Williams, though, what makes him a particularly great tag team partner? I know that you’re a great wrestler. He’s a great wrestler, you’ve sort of been a tag team specialist, even in your own words, but there’s just something – and again, it might just be my personal bias coming in – but that just makes you guys work. You know what I mean?”
Titus agreed.
“You know, it’s one of those things where – I always had really good chemistry with Kenny King as a tag team, and once we stopped teaming, I was kind of searching for another tag partner. I just never found that same chemistry, like I had with Kenny, and Tracy Williams, he has had a lot of different types of partners as well. A few different ones in Ring of Honor, and also other ones on the indies. But, with all those different partners, you kind of learn how to work with different people and that sort of thing. You kind of learn how to adjust. With the experience of having all these other partners, when we came together, it was just kind of like it fit like a glove. [We’ve] both kind of been deemed tag team specialists over the years, so to put the two of us together, it was right from the start.”
“We made history at Final Battle, in the first-ever pure rules tag team match, which I’m very proud of and we wrestled two really, really good pure wrestlers in Fred Yehi and Wheeler YUTA. But, from there, we kind of went on a roll, and now we’re the Ring of Honor World Tag Team Champions. So, hey, man, we’ve only had four or five tag team matches together as a team, but we’re the champs now and we can only get better from here.”
Please credit Spencer Love/Love Wrestling with any of the above quotations used.
