June 22nd, 2013, Best In The World 2013.
If you watched it from start to finish live I have no doubt you got your moneys worth, if you tried to watch it in the comfort of your own home like say I did the following morning, in Ireland, then what you saw were a dozen still images mixed together with the dreaded faded circle that signals buffering – overall it was a failure but only the start of the issues.
Come Monday, June 24th, The Briscoes were seemingly done with the company. After main eventing the iPPV event the stalwart tag teams contract had apparently expired and the company once again came under scrutiny from fans and critics alike for poorly handling the situation, which caused the first ever vacation of the ROH World Championship, viewed by many as something of prestige due to the many highly regarded names to have held it such as Samoa Joe, CM Punk, Bryan Danielson, Nigel McGuinness, Jerry Lynn and Kevin Steen.
People were complaining, keyboards were getting a beating, I appeared on PWPonderings’ Weekly Newscast to verbally express my issue – which was not the iPPV issues or The Briscoes apparent departure and then impending vacation of the ROH World Championship, but how it took the company three days to express any regret for how things went down, and even then it was minimal – and it seemed ROH had once again dropped the proverbial ball, something which saddens a lot of people.
In 2004 I began watching Ring of Honor. It became my more favorable wrestling promotion due to the standard of matches, wrestling based product, edgy feel and strong characters. I’m a wrestling fan who likes the actual wrestling and only appreciates promos when they are needed, not stupidity we have often found on WWE’s flagship show Monday Night RAW, TNA’s Impact Wrestling and – to show some unbias – ROH’s white trash lawyer segment which is cringe worthy viewing.
Many independent wrestling fans will get what I mean when I say we have an extra attachment to certain wrestlers than say the mainstream audience does. Like when Bryan signed for the WWE, how many of us went to bat for him against those who slated him as a “vanilla midget” or for having “no personality”, knowing he in fact has a personality, is more than just a phenomenal wrestler and deserved everything he’d coming to him. That former ROH World Champion will main event SummerSlam against John Cena for the WWE Championship – hows that for an “indy vanilla midget”?
Ring of Honor has given us that. We get the chance to watch these guys grow, improve, tell their stories, do great things. You know what makes me pity a lot of fans who exclusively watch WWE or TNA? They never got to see Kevin Steen and El Generico’s feud, because if such minimal events can trigger such mark out moments from them when Generico defeated Steen at Final Battle 2010 with that steel chair shot to the head, had they seen it their computers would have been very sticky for days following.
So to see the company many of us support, some more vehemently than others once again fail to provide its fans, especially newer ones who took it upon themselves to purchase iPPV’s such as Best In The World 2013 and several others which had interference due to technical streaming issues in-order to experience Ring of Honor it was a genuine slap in the face to those of us who stuck with the company through 2011 and half of 2012 when for all extensive purposes ROH became just another wrestling company.
Many of us were mad. Many of us wanted answers. Ring of Honor was taking hit after hit.
The only way to truly get out of a negative predicament – or predicaments in this case – is to turn it into a positive. So the negatives are we can no longer watch Ring of Honor events live, which for many takes away from certain events, because while we wait for those Video on Demand events it’s always nicer to be able to watch certain moments live, The Briscoes are seemingly done with ROH for the moment which served as the catalyst to the ROH World Championship being vacated for the first time ever.
And then we get the positives – the ROH World Title Tournament. Originally many of us were skeptical as to whether officials would truly give it their all in providing us with the best in wrestling action to make this tournament meaningful and to be fair, we’ve gotten a pretty good list of names. We have former ROH World Champions such as Kevin Steen and Roderick Strong, future ROH World Champions such as Adam Cole and Michael Elgin, future stars in ROH such as Tommaso Ciampa and ACH, plus some special guests in Brian Kendrick and Paul London.
So that’s all good, but to add to this we get some more guests such as NJPW’s IWGP Jr. Heavyweight Tag Team Champions, Rocky Romero and Alex Koslov, Forever Hooligans. The return of the top tag team maybe in the world today, Nick and Matt Jackson, The Young Bucks. One-half of NJPW’s Time Splitters with Alex Shelley, KUSHIDA. Newer roster members like Adam Page and Silas Young receiving solid pushes and on ROH TV a match including Shane Matthews and Scott Parker, 3.0.
Since Best In The World weekend which was to put it bluntly, horrific on all fronts but seeing it live and in person, Ring of Honor has had pressure to step it up a gear and to be fair, they’ve done it, bringing in a plethora of outside names, creating a tournament stacked with credible names, making the television show a little bit more must-see and creating an event for Toronto worthy of our money.
Can more be done? Sure. If somebody in the company hasn’t been hired to look into the iPPV situation and how to fix it then Ring of Honor are missing out on a platform which allows them to publicize themselves at a specific time throughout all social mediums. Watching on VOD is cool and all but you won’t get the same height of publicity out of it, and it’s such a simple thing to fix considering several promotions without the financial backing ROH has have perfect streaming.
But the improvement since Best In The World is commendable. But the one question all fans have since the purchase by Sinclair in the summer of 2011 looms over all this – will these decisions remain consistent or will they fall again? For their sake from a fan to the company, I hope they have finally learnt from past mistakes.
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