Stacey Dales Asked Seth Rollings: “Just How Real Is Professional Wrestling???”

Seth Rollins spent the day running the show, and then Stacey Dales turned the chair around on him.

With a few minutes left and a heavyweight title match against Roman Reigns looming, Rollins offered to take wrestling questions. Dales opened with the one nobody asks politely.

How real is it?

Rollins did not dodge, and he did not oversell.

"It's real in the sense that there's a lot of physicality that goes on, and a lot of it is very painful," he said. "Every time I fall on my back or come flying off the top rope and fall on my stomach, bad things can happen. And those bumps, as we call them, do accumulate over time. It's like getting hit by a car."

Then he described the ring itself, which is where the romance drains out of the question fast.

"The mat is literally steel, it's plywood, and it's about this much padding and then canvas over top, and that's it," Rollins said. "There's no magic."

Dales pushed on the arithmetic of that. How many fractures does a career like his produce?

The answer is a list that would end most working lives. Rollins has torn up his entire right knee, MCL, meniscus and ACL. He did the meniscus in his left knee too. Rotator cuff surgery last October. Broken jaw, both shoulders separated multiple times, and his share of concussions.

So what brings him back?

"Oh my god, I love it," Rollins said. "I've loved it since I was a little kid."

The more interesting answer came when Dales asked about the line between choreography and chaos. Is any of it rehearsed? Does Rollins ever look across the ring at Reigns and decide a line got crossed?

Some of it is planned, Rollins said, but not the way people assume.

"It's like an improv comedy set a little bit," he said. "We've talked about what we might go over. Here are the set pieces. And then we speak a common language when we're out there, so we all kind of know where we're going, at least if we're good at what we do."

There is usually a leader in the ring, someone who can take a less experienced performer and get them through the paces. And then there is the variable nobody controls.

"It's the vibe with the crowd. There's a live audience interaction, because you don't know what kind of ride they're going to take you on," Rollins said. "You have a design. You're saying, this is the story we want to tell, this is what we want to get done in there. But sometimes the crowd takes you in a direction that you're not ready for, and you've got to be able to pivot to get it done."

Asked for his favorite move, Rollins picked the one with the best possible ending.

"My favorite wrestling move is one that I'm delivering, and it's my finishing move, and it's called the stomp. It's just where I put somebody's head directly into the mat, and then I pin them after 1, 2, 3," he said. "It's the simplest one. It's the one where I win."

The show cued up a photo of the stomp in mid-air, and Dales was appropriately impressed. Rollins, who had just finished cataloguing every joint he has damaged, took it in stride.

"Still got it."

Dales got one more in before the clock ran out, circling back to how much rehearsal goes into a match like the one coming against Reigns.

"It's just more of a conversation," Rollins said. "That's it."