Earlier than profitable the WWE Championship in September 2021, Large E entered that respective yr as WWE’s Intercontinental Champion. Throughout a current episode of the “Sarah O’Connell Present,” Large E regarded again on the start of this Intercontinental Championship reign, focusing in on the truth that it came about in the course of the top of the COVID-19 pandemic — a time when WWE Superstars carried out in entrance of a digital board of followers.
“[The atmosphere was] very bizarre,” Large E stated. “Actually the inspiration of our business, of our enterprise, is actually about crowd interplay. You possibly can have an hour match, but when nobody is making a sound, in the event that they’re sitting on their fingers, you failed. That is all the time what we have now been taught as professional wrestlers. It is about partaking the group, it is about making them cheer. It is about making them boo. Now, we’re on this atmosphere the place that is not potential. We simply have screens in entrance of us, and now you are additionally anxious about COVID, which is ravaging the world. It was a really attention-grabbing time.”
Regardless of being void of a bodily reside viewers, Large E and lots of of his colleagues ultimately discovered distinctive methods to compensate for it. In an thought introduced forth by Jimmy and Jey Uso, some superstars, together with Large E, started elevating their quantity within the ring, a lot in order that followers would be capable of hear their mid-match conversations.
Large E’s second Intercontinental Championship reign began when he defeated Sami Zayn in a lumberjack match on the December 25, 2020 episode of “WWE SmackDown.”
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