Who is WWE official Adam Pearce?
Adam Pearce is currently signed by WWE as an on-screen official and a producer. Before his background role with the promotion, he was quite a successful wrestler who started out by fighting in the independent circuit in 1996.
The 42-year-old even made several appearances on WWF from 1997 to 2000 as an enhancement talent. He had the opportunity to sign with WCW around the same, but declined it twice, because of proximity reasons as well as WCW being “disorganized”.
However, his fighting career is best remembered by his time at National Wrestling Alliance (NWA), where he was a five-time World Heavyweight Champion. He also had notable stints at ROH as well as NJPW.
Pearce left independent wrestling altogether in December 2014, and joined WWE full-time as a trainer and a coach. He joined as a trainer at the WWE Performance Center as a trainer as well as a producer on NXT.
He made several on-screen cameos inside the ring, such as the time when he was present during the contract signing between AJ Styles and Shinsuke Nakamura on SmackDown in 2018.
For most of 2020, the American appeared as an authority figure on both RAW as well as SmackDown. He entered mainstream WWE culture only this week on SmackDown after he started a storyline with the Universal Champion Roman Reigns.
On the 8th January episode of SmackDown this year, Pearce booked a gauntlet match as the main event. The catch was that the winner of the match would go on to challenge Roman Reigns for his title at Royal Rumble.
This irked the Tribal Chief, and through Paul Heyman’s intervention, Pearce was then added to the match. Pearce was the final entrant in the match, but Reigns and Jey Uso attacked both him, as well as Shinsuke Nakamura.
They then lay Pearce on top of Uso to secure the pinfall and hand him the win, thus confirming his participation at Royal Rumble as The Big Dog’s opponent. This makes it two confirmed title fights at the PPV event so far.
Earlier this week, Bill Goldberg’s challenge for the WWE Heavyweight Championship was accepted by current champion Drew McIntyre. As much as the storyline leading up to that match does not make sense, WWE did a pretty good job with Pearce’s storyline.
This will be his first wrestling match since 2014, and with the way the match has been set up, there could be an upset on the cards. Last month, Reigns defended his belt twice against Kevin Owens in quick succession.
Those two matches were intense and Pearce would have to be at the top of his game to match that level. The Royal Rumble is scheduled to take place in St. Petersburg, Florida, on January 31st, 2021.
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