In interviews Gabe Sapolsky has stated that most ROH fans don’t buy every DVD. He’s very grateful to the fans that do, but understands that most of us live on a tighter budget. So one show has an hour-long match, one has a cage match, one has a regular-length title match, one features the Briscoes on top, one features Danielson on top, and so on. If you have even a little knowledge of the results or reviews, you’ll know which DVD’s suit your tastes.
In a previous column I suggested the three modular tools Ring of Honor applies to attract people are special guests (Eddie Guerrero, Bruno Sammartino, Kenta Kobashi, etc.), unpredictable events (CM Punk winning the title when he was supposed to leave), and special matches. I drew a little flack for overlooking ROH’s basic strengths: booking that doesn’t insult your intelligence, emphasis on in-ring performance, quality wrestling, satisfying endings to most of the matches, and so-on. These were not excluded to minimize their importance. High-quality wrestling and sound booking are not modular tools to the company; they are part of its essence. A show can be fine without KENTA or Naomichi Marufuji, but if the wrestling is off, the fans leave disgruntled.
Those essential elements compose the company most put their faith in. A good base of fans will go (and hopefully bring friends or family) just because it’s ROH. There are always an unknown number of fans that might go if something catches their interest, and a smaller second group of fans that will go just to see something special. If they hear that there’s a fifteen-foot cage match, they might go to see someone fall. The “puro†fan that doesn’t give a crap about ROH will still travel across several states to see Mitsuharu Misawa live once in his life. Unfortunately due a booking practice in ROH, the special matches are losing their appeal.
There are different types of special matches. The best take time to build – Nigel McGuinness Vs. Bryan Danielson from Unified in 2006 was such a match, where their feud culminated in the unification of their championships. A big feud coming to a close, an anticipated title shot, someone’s farewell tour – these are special attractions. But you can’t do such a match every night. Another kind of a special match, though, is much easier to create: the gimmick match. While you can’t have Morishima and Danielson colliding for the first time ever any night, you can have a match where chairs and tables are legal every night.
As ROH saw crowds fluctuate in various markets, they put more of such matches out there. Gimmick matches are a shortcut. You don’t have to build a cage match for it to have an elevated level of interest. The spectacle will do it for you, and hopefully the spectacle will make up for any questionable plotting. Did Hero Vs. McGuinness really deserve or require a cage? Probably not, but it probably generated more interest than banning Sweet & Sour Inc. from ringside. Steel Cage Matches in all U.S. wrestling have been used so heavily in recent years that they’re more often seen on free television than Pay Per View, but they still have some juice in them. The expectations of brutality and the potential for someone falling or jumping off the cage generally elevates interest in a match.
ROH didn’t only do this with Hero/McGuinness. The Cabana/Jacobs minifeud ended on a Windy City Death Match. Whitmer/Jacobs had Falls Count Anywhere, Mixed Tags and a Steel Cage. And Homicide/Pearce got a cage. And Evans/Strong got a cage. The Briscoes’ war with Steen and Generico got a cage, a street fight, 2/3 falls match, lights out match, falls count anywhere match and a ladder match. As soon as the Age of the Fall won the tag titles, ROH booked them to defend in Ultimate Endurance elimination matches with different stipulations for all three falls.
Such a high frequency of such matches makes the concept of unusual matches seem usual. It doesn’t take Jim Cornette to figure what’s wrong with that.
They became so overused that multiple special matches on the same show didn’t do the trick. Sometimes they were placed haphazardly; why would Adam Pearce Vs. Delirious in an apparently disqualification-free Falls Count Anywhere match happen earlier than Bryan Danielson Vs. Necro Butcher in a Relaxed Rules match? This happened at Reckless Abandon, with both matches happening below an Iron Man match and a four-team scramble. The saddest thing of all is that Reckless Abandon wasn’t even a special show. It is a completely skippable DVD.
A few months before Reckless Abandon, ROH held Caged Rage, with a three-way elimination match and two cage matches, all in a row. This, too, was a completely skippable show. A show where the champion has to defend against two challengers and where six guys almost kill themselves jumping off of cages should not be something you can skip.
There is already a block of fans that only buy the shows that receive rave reviews, or shows that feature a very highly praised match. But this booking strategy will create a block of fans that will overlook a show if it doesn’t have gimmick matches, or doesn’t have highly praised ones. We’ve already seen shows like Caged Rage and Reckless Abandon become skippable DVD’s. This is indicative of the general overexposure of specialty matches, and of how the overuse will make certain ones completely overshadow others. Caged Rage featured the Briscoes, Kevin Steen and El Generico destroying each other with a brawl on the outside, brutality on the inside and Steen falling off the top and through the timekeeper’s table, but it couldn’t match the buzz of the Ladder War at Man Up.
One of the big attractions of specialty matches back in the day were that they were decisive in some way. A dream match would never happen again, and a Dog Collar Match or No Holds Barred meant that a feud was ending. In ROH in 2006 and 2007, though, specialty matches had too many have loopholes or special finishes to protect someone (Bryan Danielson falling out of Samoa Joe’s choke and to the floor outside the cage) or that violated what the audience was led to expect (a no-disqualification match being “thrown out†such that there was no winner). These matches are now even less likely to provide satisfactory endings to rivalries than normal matches.
Special matches fall victim to such endings when wrestlers are booked in too many rivalries, or when a feud gets out of hand and somehow winds up with multiple special matches (Delirious Vs. the Hangmen 3, the Briscoes Vs. Steen & Generico). The worst part about this is that the wrestlers have to seriously damage themselves to make any gimmick match seem special, and especially when it’s the final one.
We as fans shouldn’t be too holier-than-thou towards wrestlers and promoters over the damage done to wrestlers’ bodies, but it is sad that wrestlers have to take so much damage to help cover for the overexposure of specialty matches. Someone like El Generico is absolutely talented enough to be worth seeing outside of a cage or without multiple chairshots to the head. Ring of Honor, which once had a Pure Wrestling Championship, should know how to use him without resorting to a series of matches that left him injured.
Related to the unnecessary risk of wrestlers’ health, those same risks are a lot more special to people that haven’t seen them often. For the Boston, MA crowd that only gets to see ROH every couple of months this isn’t a problem, but for people who follow a decent number of DVD’s, these matches are very overextended.
The Ladder War at Man Up shocked the Hell out of those casual friends of mine who hadn’t seen the Briscoes’ feud with Steen and Generico. Those more insider fans that had followed it (already more likely to have a critical point of view) were more dismissive. It hurt to hear one of them say he’d seen this all before. That should not happen to a match where Kevin Steen almost broke his back tumbling off a maintenance ladder. This problem is much more common to those people that follow ROH closely, but burnout can happen to anyone.
This booking style can devalue championships if feuds for the title that aren’t even that important have to culminate in a cage. Too many special matches on a card or too big of a special match on the same card as a title defense overshadow the title, and if it’s done frequently, they can diminish the importance of titles in the long term. There was a time when, even if the ROH World Championship was defended on every show, it was something people seriously looked forward to. During long reigns that people expected to go long, though, the attraction of gimmick matches detracted from the importance of title matches on the shows. And it can be worse than that.
Look at the FIP Title. Ring of Honor brought in the FIP Title more frequently, where there were count-outs and no disqualifications. People were dropped on guardrails. Delirious’ concussion actually became incorporated into his storyline. And yet the title didn’t have much buzz. The specialties of that match were already too common to be special, and they had to swap the belt to a rookie of debatable worthiness to get it serious attention.
The allure of a specialty match is that it fits into a more general category, of important matches. Most important matches aren’t modular; you can’t throw the climax to KENTA Vs. Bryan Danielson onto any show. It needs to be planned and built. Other important matches are difficult to plan; Bryan Danielson and Tyler Black got the stage at Breakout and had the opportunity to have a match so impressive that people would buzz about it and it would become important, but it wasn’t important until it happened. The hype that comes from something after it happens can’t be used beforehand. You can, however, use the hype of a Cage Match or a Barbed Wire Match to shake loose straggling ROH fans and general wrestling fans.
It’s not lazy writing, but it is taking an easy option. These are the most freely available modular booking tools available to ROH. They can’t always get a foreign superstar. They can always make weapons legal. And when they’re worried about not filling up a 600-seat building in Long Island, they’ve got to pull something, even if it’s humorous minimalistic. Though Eye of the Storm was re-booked thanks to a snowstorm, ROH tried to attract fans with an MMA-influenced match between Rocky Romero and Bryan Danielson that wouldn’t feature springboards or running the ropes, but focus on striking and technical exchanges. It was almost humorous; they tried to make a specialty out of simplicity.
That simplicity is linked to one of ROH’s intrinsic strengths: quality wrestling. The Best of Three series between Bryan Danielson and Austin Aries (Honor Nation, Chaos at the Cow Palace and Glory By Honor 6 Night 1), Bryan Danielson Vs. Jimmy Jacobs (Unscripted 3), the half-hour Iron Man between Roderick Strong and Austin Aries (Reckless Abandon) and even Nigel McGuinness Vs. Tyler Black (March 16th Pay Per View taping) were all related to that crucial core, far more important than a dozen “Insert City Here†Street Fights and Relaxed Rules matches. No weapons, minimal interference, and a story told in the ring that far overwhelmed the storyline that led the men to the ring. ROH can’t expect such high quality performances often, but relying more heavily on the basics could help specialty matches feel special again.
