Ring of Honor Weekly

I don’t pretend to know what Mr. Wheeler is thinking. I am not a mind reader. I respect the fact that everyone is entitled to their own opinions. That said, I have to disagree with Mr. Wheeler that ROH should not have received the number one spot for promotion of the year and that it should have gone to WWE. I have prepared several counter arguments to Mr. Wheeler’s arguments. I don’t know what Mr. Wheeler’s defenition of Regional is but my definition for regional is that you only run your shows in one region. For example, a promotion like UWA-Hardcore which to my knowledge only runs shows in Toronto would be a regional promotion. Or if you want an American example, Chikara Pro, which only runs shows in the Northeast (Philly to be exact with one show in New England) would be an American example. Since ROH runs shows not only in the Northeast but they have ventured out into the Midwest (holding regular shows in Dayton, Chicago and Detroit) as well as running shows in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Tokyo Japan, Osaka Japan and Liverpool England. I would venture to say that ROH is much more than a Regional promotion.

As for the comparisons with the original ECW. Yes, ECW did have TV deals, but it was not with Sportchannel (which is currently Fox Sports Net) itself. It was with the individual stations, therefore not everyone who had Sportschannel on their cable systems received ECW. Therefore your argument that ECW had a national TV deal is moot because it was more of a regional deal. As far as ECW having a national television deal, ECW tried to run before they could walk and they were out of business within a year of receiving a national TV deal. It is my oppinion that ROH is not stepping over the current bounds that it has set and they are following the natural progression in their growth.

Mr. Wheeler also goes on to compare the WWE style matches to ROH style matches. When you have a national television show (or multiple national shows as the WWE does) as well as Live PPVs, you have something to build towards. The reason you don’t see WWE wrestlers such as Shawn Michaels and CM Punk going out and “doing a Broadway” every week is not feasable. Why give something away for free when you could have your audience go out and buy the match on PPV. With ROH since there is no Live PPV to build towards, the performers have to go out there and have great matches for several reasons. One of these reasons is that they are not on TV and they do not draw between 6000-10,000 fans to each one of their shows. ROH’s performers want to give it their all so their audience can go and say, that was a great match and word of mouth spreads. Also, ROH uses their live shows as a way to build up their taped PPVs. Do you think the average wrestling fan who may want to check out something new is going to buy a PPV of this seemingly new company if he keeps hearing how terrible the live shows are? Neither do I.

As for your complaint about ROH not doing a Live PPV, I think you overestimate the amount of capital ROH has, as compared to the amount it would cost to produce a live PPV. ROH is promoted by one person. Now this person while he does help fund this company he does not have the capital or the resources of a Vince McMahon who at one point in time was a Billonaire (ask him he’ll remind you). Production Trucks, Satelite Feeds, television lighting rigs and everything else that the bigger companies use to produce Live PPVs all cost money. Now, could ROH rent all this stuff and put on a PPV? The answer is yes, however that would put them in debt. Also, you have to remeber that it does take a while to receive the final buyrates for your ppvs and it takes even longer to receive the money that you make for people buying the PPVs. So, I do not believe it woud have been feasible for ROH to run a live PPV after only one PPV airing.

Wrestleholic hit the proverbial nail on the head when it comes to the ECW comparisons. Gabe knows that ECW grew too quick too fast. Sure they were on TV and had live PPV, but they were only around for a couple more years after they got the major TV deal.

Also, it’s funny that he said ROH had “three or four “great” matches in 2007.” I guess it’s his opinion and personal taste but to me it seems like three or four could easily be an underestimation.

This guy talks about ROH-bots taking over when it seems from his comments that he’s a WWE-bot just blindly saying that WWE should win promotion of the year basically because they’re the biggest. The biggest doesn’t always mean the best and you should be able to see why WWE isn’t the best. They put the same few guys (Cena, HHH, Taker, Batista) in main events for every PPV. The WWE fans are obviously sick of Cena by the boos he gets all the time and they want someone else in the main event slot (as seen by their tremendous backing of Jeff Hardy). ROH had many different guys in main event slots in 2007. ROH offers more diversity than WWE. I mean when was the last time a tag title match main evented any WWE show. Gabe knows what the fans want and gives it to them more so than does Vince who only cares about what he wants.

The guy is basically saying, WWE should have won cos its the biggest therefore, the best.

It seems to me he is bashing ROH and it certainly sounds like he doesn’t watch enough of it to bash it. He is afraid of change I guess.
Yes, WWE can be entertaining, like the Royal Rumble often is, but it can also be extremely embarrassing and silly which ROH very rarely is.

If you use a ‘movie’ analogy like I am about to, maybe he will see more sense.
Ok, so I Am Legend may have been the more mainstream and popular movie, it certainly made a lot of cash, but was it better than No Country For Old Men?
No, I bet some people have never heard of that film but when it wins a Best Picture Oscar I can’t see Will Smith complaining really. Bigger isn’t always better.

Four or Five ‘great’ matches, well, lets see, the Dragon/Aries trilogy, Steen & Generico vs. The Briscoe’s feud, Morishima vs. Dragon, KENTA vs. Dragon, Nigel vs. Dragon, Nigel vs. Aries, KENTA vs. Misawa, Claudio vs. Matt Sidal, Claudio vs. Morishima, Jacobs vs. Whitmer cage match, DG matches, that seems like a lot more than 4 or 5 to me, which proves, he doesn’t watch enough ROH to comment.

The guy complaining about production quality is kind of ridiculous, maybe he doesn’t realize that Vince has a little bit more funds than ROH does. What he is pretty much saying is that ONLY a promotion on T.V. is promotion of the year. Say WWE has their worst year ever in 2007, that means that TNA would be the best promotion of the year by default and the thought of that just makes my head hurt. ROH was the best promotion of the year, lie someone already said because it had the best balance of matches/storylines/angles/shows than anyone else.

There isn’t much left to be said that anybody else already did, but…

Cena was voted the best wrestler of 2007 because he was the best wrestler in 2007, not just because he brought in the most money. Oh ya he doesn’t have as money moves as Dragon I forgot.

A lot of other guys on the board here really hit it on the head; Andy is looking at a “biggest = best” philosophy, and it’s just not a valid recognition of what’s going on in the world around us.

Part of it can be seen in the Rise & Fall of ECW feature (if you want to bring ECW into play). When ECW tried to make the transition to television as Vince pointed out, they had to serve many more masters than they were accustomed to in the past, and they were not prepared for that. When you get right down to it, the crux of the ECW failure becomes a litany of instances of poor (or absent) preparation. ECW was not prepared to bow to some of the masters they would have to please to generate solid network TV, in part due to Paul Heyman’s perfectionism (or so I’ve been lead to believe), and in addition, they were not careful about the choices they made in the rush to do so. The deal with TNN was, by all accounts, abysmal, and really sped up the company’s descent into oblivion. More careful planning (in the vein that ROH is espousing at this juncture) may have been able to save ECW, or at least prolong things another couple of years.

I always thought the promotion of the year is the promotion that has the highest quantity/quality of great matches, angles and storylines. WWE rarely has great top to bottom shows, rarely has genuine great matches or very rarely has a quality angle or storyline.

WWE does have those things (good matches/good angles) from time to time but not as much as ROH in the slightest. ROH has more of the criteria so deserves promotion of the year.

So by his understanding the bigger the promotion the better it is, or the more money you have the better it is. Its naive and written with a 10 year old attitude, filled with pure ignorance.

Did ROH have a bad year by their current standards? I suppose the answer to that is yes. My second question is, who didn’t have a bad year by their standards?

TNA has not had a big growth year, despite this being Kurt Angle’s first full year, Booker T debuting, Pacman Jones being bought in etc. Impact ratings have stayed fairly constant, going up slightly but not as much as they should for the number 2 US promotion with a two hour TV slot. Most PPVs have been poor, as have most of the Impact shows. Unfortunately, TNA is a shadow of itself during 2006, the year where the Styles/Daniels/Joe feud made it look like they were coming close to being as good as people thought they should be.

Chikara had a great year but if ROH can’t win Promotion of the year with average attendances of 500-1000, non live PPVs and 2 mass release DVDs, how can a promotion with an average attendance of 100, non live podcast PPVs and 1 mass release DVD.

In Japan Pro Wrestling NOAH had a bad year. No wheer near as good as 2005 or 2006, most shows weren’t well received even though some matchs were amazing. Dragon Gate did fairly well with the debut of New Hazard but they have had better years and at certain points the booking was quite suspect. All Japan is entertaining but it wasn’t the best promotion in Japan last year.

New Japan had probably the most improved year this year. With Tanahashi’s matchs against Nagata and Goto, an improved Jr Heavyweight showing and the unexpected rise of Goto combining with the likes of Makabe, Nakamura and Tanahashi getting pushed, they had a great year that put them on a whole new level. Yet, business wise they had a less well attended Tokyo Dome show (the 2008 one), have not regained as many fans as they have had in the past, and not seen as big a growth financially as they have in terms of product.

Since I have no clue about lucha, this leaves WWE. Have they improved over 2006? Maybe. The Benoit incident, subsequent wellness test failures and WWEs bad luck with injuries held them back and really caused some damage. A fair few storylines (the New Hart Foundation, Kennedy’s push, a sustained push for HHH vs Cena) were canned for various reasons. WWE had some great matchs and some lousy matchs, same with the TV and PPVs. Business wise though, how was 2007? Did PPV buys and attendance go up? No, it didn’t. Did they move to a bigger stage in terms of TV networks or timeslots for ECW? No, they didn’t. WWE had a decent year, not a good one. They are still not as good as they were in 2000, they don’t have as many big names and, to be honest, the system there prevents people from becoming big names.

The situation is this:
-New Japan had a much improved year in terms of quality but business didn’t improve in terms of attendance. Plus, they are a puro promotion who are not on (US) TV.
-ROH didn’t improve on their brilliant 2005 and 2006. They had good storylines, matchs and shows. They also had bad shows and matches and storylines that petered out or nearly collapsed. They tried to expand with taped PPV’s and waited till 2008 to release nationwide DVDs, with many critics complaining about the match choices. Business didn’t improve and the problems on the West Coast didn’t help.
-WWE stayed fairly stable, improving a little in some areas and regressing in others. Like ROH, there was a mix of good and bad, maybe less good matches (for wrestling fans, not casual WWE viewers) then ROH, and arguably lower quality matches on the PPVs. Business didn’t go up in terms of PPV buys this year.

So, who should have got Promotion of the year; a re-emerging Japanese promotion not on US TV, An upstart promotion known for good matches but with a very low nationwide profile or the Industry Giant, who hasn’t reached the heights he once had seven years ago and who hadn’t improved much over the previous year?

I’ve seen a lot of people called Andy Wheeler “retarded” for his comments. I disagree. I have several retarded friends and they are all pleasant to listen to. Mr. Wheeler’s vitriol made his arguments difficult to read. My retarded friends might stutter and get lost trying to make an argument, but they would be respectful about it.

Pulse Glazer asked for responses to Mr. Wheeler’s arguments, so I’ll respond. My preference is to make a case rather than to attack a case, but this is supposed to be a direct response.

I disagree with Mr. Wheeler’s argument that Ring of Honor shouldn’t be the “promotion of the year” for 2007. Firstly, I feel such accolades are shallow at best and aren’t worth getting angry over, and Mr. Wheeler evidenced the shallowness of this particular award by suggesting that to vote for the company that most entertained is an act of “blind faith.” Instead “promotion of the year” should go to the company that grew the most, or made the most money, or in some other arbitrary fashion was the biggest. If this were the case then Peyton Manning would deserve Player of the Year for all the money he’s made off of the companies he’s licensed himself out to – a great idea for DirecTV and MasterCard, but not for quality performance.

In this vacuum where how a voter feels doesn’t matter, what exactly did WWE do? They announced plans to expand internationally, but did not. They released a theatrical failure. They lost the Italian television market. After one of their employees murdered his family, they sent other employees to defend the company in public embarrassment after public embarrassment. WWE became the center of attention and scrutiny for the worst year in U.S. professional wrestling history, and it was only the ambivalence of senators that kept Congress from sacking them. They employed an anti-drug policy that made them a laughing stock. But they sure made a lot of money. To say that WWE did a better job this year than ROH, which went to Japan and PPV but didn’t particularly expand in DVD sales or live attendance, is a joke. It’s not even comparing apples and oranges; it’s comparing a rotten grapefruit to a raspberry.

TNA is a bigger company than ROH. They have more money, even if they lost more than ROH. They’re on TV. They’re got a million viewers a week. They’ve got hundreds of thousands of viewers on youtube. More people buy their PPV’s than buy any ROH DVD. So shouldn’t they get “promotion of the year” over ROH, even if I can’t sit through their weekly show and any given half hour of TNA TV makes me embarrassed to be a pro wrestling fan?

If I had to vote for a bigger company, I would sooner vote for New Japan Pro Wrestling than World Wrestling Entertainment. They aren’t in an economic renaissance, either, but between Yuji Nagata’s world-class performances as the veteran, the rise of Hiroshi Tanahashi, Shinsuke Nakamura and Hirooki Goto, and something impressive going down on every show that I had the privilege to tune into, they have a serious, high-quality promotion with a broad fanbase. Their issues were willing up stadiums, not bungling a P.R. catastrophe or falling on their faces for a third straight vanity film. I’d still sooner pick up an NJPW DVD than a WWE one if I didn’t have foreknowledge of the shows. I think the reason NJPW didn’t rank higher on many “top promotion of 2007” lists is that very few American wrestling fans watch them.

This all comes from a regular WWE viewer that thinks of WWE in 2007 was fun. Yet WWE is responsible for a lot of programming. Raw had a great streak in early 2007 and Smackdown had moments of greatness, but ECW was atrocious for most of the year, and after Michaels left Raw, you were lucky to get a really good show out of them. WWE also put a lot of PPV’s that were not worth the money. The Royal Rumble, Wrestlemania 23 and Armageddon were great, but most of them weren’t. So even though WWE produced a lot of good wrestling shows this year, they were responsible for far more crap.

Mr. Wheeler provides the argument that Shawn Michaels and CM Punk could wrestle 60-minute matches every week and match the aesthetic and artistic success of the ROH product, as though this demeans ROH’s product. This is similarly a silly argument, as with Samoa Joe, Kurt Angle, AJ Styles, et. al., arguably TNA could put on such a performance. The reality remains that neither company does. And perhaps Dean Koontz could write like Seamus Heaney, but he does not. Perhaps Jessica Alba could act better than Kathy Bates, but she does not. The former in these cases having more financial success than the latter does not make them superior in any moral or meritorious way. It merely makes them richer. Henry David Thoreau sold very few copies of Walden in his century, yet every Literature professor I had in college heralded that book as the greatest piece of literary thought of Thoreau’s lifetime. These use of size as a measure of quality is a sign of either an idiot economist or a naive audience.

I liked WWE this year. I do not have an “ROH addiction,” as Mr. Wheeler puts it. ROH is my favorite company, yet I also deeply enjoy WWE, PWG, NJPW and Pro Wrestling NOAH. I thought WWE Raw from February to April was one of the best stretches of wrestling television this decade. The Umaga/Cena, Michaels/Cena and MVP/Hardy feuds were three of my favorite feuds this year. I go back and forth between MVP/Hardy and the Briscoes/Steen & Generico as my favorite for 2007. I think Edge is the best heel in U.S. wrestling. The Undertaker is one of my two favorite wrestlers of all time (the other being Kenta Kobashi). Yet month-to-month, I have no question that Ring of Honor puts on a better product than WWE. It is in part because ROH works within a smaller niche, and as many literary thinkers have suggested, perfection may only be possible in small things. ROH is imperfect, but it entertains more thoroughly and more regularly than any of my other favored promotions. That’s why it received my vote in 2007, and part of why it dominated my Riren 100.

I am a “match guy.” Sure, I love Santino Marella and Larry Sweeney’s promos, but I really tune in and pay to see matches. And ROH’s most cherished match, Danielson Vs. Morishima I, did not make my top 25 matches of the year. NJPW, NOAH and WWE all had at least one match in my top 10. My biggest mark out moment of the year was Kobashi’s return. If I could go back and experience anything from ROH or WWE over Wrestlemania weekend again, it would be the finish to the Undertaker/Batista match. I am not some blurred and blinded Ring of Honor junky. I am a pro wrestling fan, so being told that my preference is like unto illogical addiction, while his preference is somehow superior despite his largely irrational and even spiteful arguments, is offensive.