The Importance of Being Honorable

When I was a teenager, I was a bit of a loser. I don’t know if I’ve stopped being a loser now, but I was definitely one back then. I was unhappy and angsty and felt like people didn’t get me. This is not uncommon among 13-year-old boys, I don’t think. Certainly, my modest collection of friends were pretty unhappy and angsty as well, and they demonstrated this by listening to tempestuous rock bands and perpetually wearing dark clothing. I don’t think this was only to display how unhappy they were though; it was also a grasp at individualism, a way of defining yourself as different from the crowd, of pretending that your alienation and discontent was not being brought on by your fizzing hormones and your blotched, spotty face, but by other people not understanding you because of your sheer uniqueness.

These were all feelings I felt too, but I’ve never liked shouty rock music and I think clothes are the most boring thing to spend money on, especially when you’re 13 years old and don’t have a lot of it. How was I going to prove my individuality, then? What would I cling to as a shield from the harsh realities of growing up? The answer lay in professional wrestling, which I was mad keen on, and more specifically, in the high-tech, superior, streamer laden product of Ring of Honor.

I got into professional wrestling when I was 10 or 11 and immediately became aware of a world outside of WWE when my Dad accidentally bought me a copy of the insider Power Slam Magazine, thinking it was just about Raw and Smackdown and what not. I became attracted to Ring of Honor because it was generally accepted within the pages of the magazine that Ring of Honor was really, really good, and when so called ‘experts’ say something is really good, I’ve always wanted to believe them and be part of their special expert club. For a year and a bit I would tell anyone who would listen (my unfortunate Mum and Dad and my little brother) about how brilliant Ring of Honor was and how it was so much better than all the other professional wrestling companies, despite the fact I’d only read about it in the pages of magazines; I’d never actually seen any wrestling outside of mid noughties WWE. Eventually, my brother pointed out the insincerity of espousing ROH’s greatness without having ever seen a show, so to prove him wrong I saved up my allowance and bought a copy of the newest and best reviewed DVD they had to offer. It was April of 2007, and the show was called Good Times, Great Memories. Even eight years removed from my determined fanboyism, it holds up as a terrific event, and I was completely hooked from the very first match, in which four stars of the Chikara promotion threw down with Pelle Primeau and zany masked man Delirious in a wild, scorching six man mayhem, brimming with intricate double teams and crazy high flying antics the likes of which I’d never seen within a WWE ring. Elsewhere on the card, Japanese imports Takeshi Morishima and Shingo beat the heck out of each other in a total war over the ROH Championship, The Briscoe Brothers and the Motor City Machine Guns entered the 2007 Match of the Year candidate with a blinding tag team epic, and the WWE bound Colt Cabana said goodbye but not farewell in a light hearted main event with Adam Pearce that I didn’t really understand the significance of, but still cheerfully enjoyed. Match by match it was a phenomenal introduction to independent wrestling, and I was hooked.

I am now 20 years old and pretty content with life on the whole. I have been by and large since I was 15 or 16, when I carved out a niche for myself as ‘cheerful human who isn’t a total bore to hang around with.’ The happiest memories of those wilderness years, beginning with my 13th birthday and ending whenever people started wanting me to go to movies and parks and parties and stuff, are all related to Ring of Honor. I remember being entirely entranced by the lovelorn promos of Jimmy Jacobs and thinking he was just the coolest and best thing I’d seen on a wrestling show- his unspeakably violent cage match with BJ Whitmer at Supercard of Honor II is etched into my memory probably permanently. I remember buying my first ROH DVD that wasn’t previously recommended to me by a magazine, The Fight at the Roxbury from June 2007, and feeling a quiet sense of accomplishment at discovering the really fun Four Corner Survival with Nigel McGuinness, Claudio Castagnoli, Mike Quackenbush and Chris Hero all by myself. I remember a chilly Halloween evening spent wrapped up in Take No Prisoners and Tyler Black’s heroic attempt to win the ROH Championship from Nigel McGuinness. Coming home from school after a long, hard day of being crushingly unsuccessful in social interaction, and finding a DVD I’d ordered waiting for me on the table was just the best feeling, feverishly unwrapping it and hoping that somehow they’d have sent me an additional one by mistake. Even the titles are evocative- Up For Grabs, New Horizons, the Fifth Year Festival Finale… I have the DVDs lined up on a shelf and I can’t imagine a circumstance in which I’d get rid of them, even if my copy of Return Engagement is in such a bad state that most of the undercard is essentially unviewable. Once, we had to try and make some kind of clock in a woodwork class or something, and I cut pictures of ROH wrestlers out the magazines and pasted them all over its face so the hands would point to the 12 and the 3 and Bryan Danielson torturing Jimmy Jacobs in a submission hold.

The point is, I really really fucking loved Ring of Honor, it’s an absolutely integral part of my adolescence. I still feel a strong sense of loyalty towards the company and follow the product fairly closely, even though the quality of the company’s overall output is far from what it once was. The reason why the product that is broadcast every week on Destination America will be a far cry from the bleeding edge wrestling ROH offered up around a decade ago is partially due to change in bookers, the feted Gabe Sapolsky and underrated Adam Pearce giving way to the outdated Jim Cornette and inconsistent Delirious, but mostly is because of a mass exodus of the talent on which Ring of Honor consolidated the reputation it had built up from 2004 to 2006 as the number one destination in North America for grappling excellence. Even during the waning days of Sapolsky’s tenure and the earliest stages of Pearce’s, hardly the finest hour of either man’s stints at the helm, a stable core of wrestlers could be relied upon to deliver quality wrestling amidst the lethargy. Now, most of them have gone. The likes of Bryan Danielson, Tyler Black, Austin Aries, Claudio Castagnoli, Nigel McGuinness, Takeshi Morishima, Kevin Steen and El Generico are no longer concerned with gunning for the ROH World Championship. In some cases, this is for pretty sad reasons- McGuinness was ravaged by injury as a result of his fiercely high impact style and retired without having the run in WWE he desired or deserved. Injuries have also forced Takeshi Morishima out of the business, while Austin Aries’ career may well have plateaued in TNA, despite being arguably the most talented member of its roster since his return in 2011.

This column isn’t meant to be a melancholic reflection on the uncertainty and heartbreak of independent wrestling however; it’s intended as a celebration of Ring of Honor. So let’s savor some facts- former ROH Champion Bryan Danielson has morphed into Daniel Bryan and won the WWE World Heavyweight Championship in the main event of WrestleMania while riding the crest of a most astonishing wave of fan adulation. Another former ROH Champion, Tyler Black, has become the loathsome Seth Rollins and has also won the WWE World Heavyweight Championship in the main event of WrestleMania, cashing in his Money in the Bank briefcase on none other than Brock Lesnar and former Shield stablemate Roman Reigns. The Shield, for what it’s worth, were one of the greatest professional wrestling factions of all time. Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens, or El Generico and Kevin Steen, haven’t quite made it that far yet, but they are the undisputed big fish in the small but delightfully vibrant NXT pond, and Owens has leapfrogged half the WWE roster to get a PPV match with John Cena at Elimination Chamber, a match that he has a genuine, albeit slim, chance of winning. Claudio Castagnoli has not quite lived up to his outrageous potential as Cesaro but, if his career ended tomorrow, he’d go out as one half of the WWE Tag Team Champions, and be able to reminisce on a run with the United States Championship and a Battle Royal victory at WrestleMania that really should have launched him into megastardom. Years ago, there used to be a troll in the comments section of this website called, I think his name was ‘Sprite?’ At the bottom of every article posted about ROH, he’d leave some snide comment about how its stars were nothing but ‘McDonalds workers living out their WWE fantasies.” I used to get so fucking angry with Sprite, disrespecting all my favorite wrestlers. Well look at them now, Sprite! ROH alumni are all over the WWE, winning championships, having classic matches, and garnering new fans every day.

Ring of Honor as a whole will never join its former stars on top of the wrestling world. The gap between them and WWE, in terms of finance and reputation, is too vast to ever be scaled. However, with their imminent arrival on Destination America coinciding with TNA’s apparent departure and collapse into chaos, the little Philadelphia promotion that could can genuinely claim to now be North America’s number two promotion. That’s most gratifying considering from the very start, ROH’s approach to wrestling success was much more edifying than TNA’s; while the latter inanely splurged money on a cavalcade of ailing performers once of WWE or WCW, with nothing to offer aside from a glimmer of name value, and hired Vince Russo to write their product like four fucking times, Ring of Honor nurtured promising young talents, brought the cream of the European and Japanese scenes over to North America, toured Japan and England and broadcast PPVs and TV shows without a generous financial backer merrily sinking huge quantities of cash into the promotion, and achieved behind the scenes stability even as their original owner was outed as an apparent prospective pedophile. No wrestling company is perfect and ROH is certainly no exception, but they have achieved more than TNA in their lifespan and have done so in what could broadly be considered to be the ‘right’ way. Now, they seem primed to usurp their place in the North American wrestling scene’s rigidly structured hierarchy.

13 year old me is practically wetting himself with excitement at this remarkable development and he is mega excited to tune in for their first broadcast. 20 year old me is as well, though my excitement’s tempered by the knowledge that ROH isn’t quite what it was, and they’ll be broadcasting the exact same show I’ve not been an avid viewer of on their website. I like to think, though, that maybe a bored and vaguely unhappy 13 year old wrestling fan will be idly skimming through the TV channels one night, stumble across Ring of Honor on Destination America, and experience the same crucial moment in their wrestling fandom that I did the first time I saw lizard man Delirious charge around the ring howling gibberish at the top of his voice to the delight of a rabid Chicago crowd. Maybe in a few years time they’ll feel the same sense of pride watching the likes of Adam Cole, ACH and ReDragon tear up the WWE product. For now, all I know is that ROH is on Destination America, and Destination America is not a hugely prestigious nationwide network that wouldn’t consider The Briscoe Brothers as essentially its target audience, but the fact that it’s even made it this far underlines how disproportionately important ROH has been to the wrestling landscape, and I’m so happy about that.