Marty Scurll On ROH Cancelling Their Shows Due to COVID-19, Says They Test-Filmed Empty Arena Matches

On the debut episode of the ROHStrong podcast, Marty Scurll weighed in on the decision by ROH to cancel their shows due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The company announced on March 12th that the ROH Past vs. Present and 18th Anniversary shows, which had been set for that weekend, were being canceled due to the health risks and Scurll recalled that it was a very difficult decision, particularly for him since these were to be the first shows he felt he had full control over as the company’s booker.

Marty Scurll also noted that the company did try filming some empty arena matches to see how it might work and explained why they decided not to go that route. You can check out the highlights and full episode below:

On the decision to cancel the shows: “Yes, so — I’m trying to go from my memory here. I believe the night before the shows were canceled was when they announced [the] lockdown. Or at least, maybe they announced, you know, no mass gatherings over 50 people. It’s hard to remember now, because it keeps changing all the time. But either way, I was on the flights to Vegas. And you know, when I left in the morning, I remember texting sort of the Ring of Honor office and being like, ‘Are we still going ahead with this?’ And they were like, ‘As of now, yeah.’ [I said] ‘Okay, because it’s five in the morning here. I really don’t wanna fly to Vegas, two flights if it’s gonna be canceled.’ And yeah, at first the President had made these announcements the night before. And I was like, ‘Oh man, I’m not sure if we’re gonna be able to run the show.’

“And it was funny, because everyone I was speaking to at first, I think everyone was kind of, you know, like, ‘Oh no, we should still run the shows. We’ve got a lot of fans running from afar and all the wrestlers are traveling or whatnot.’ But as the event kind of unfolded through the day and more and more stuff kept coming out, quickly people, you know — ideas sort of changed to, ‘Oh, actually maybe this actually isn’t a good idea to run this show.’ And I think when they said, ‘Okay, we’re going on lockdown,’ I was just like, ‘Guys, we can’t run’ — it broke my heart, but I said, ‘We can’t run these shows. This is way bigger than pro wrestling, like, that would be so irresponsible for us to run a wrestling show and put our fans’ health at risk, and our talent and our staff’s health at risk.’ And ultimately, the decision was made that you know, it really wouldn’t be a good idea to run these shows.

Marty Scurll on how hard of a decision it was for him: “Obviously, that disappointed a lot of people. But I can promise you this: no one was more heartbroken than myself. Because these were — even though I’ve been sort of hands-on with the shows since January, I felt like these were really like my first shows that I had kind of full control of. And I put a lot of, like, so many hours, and time and thought into these shows. We had — obviously the Past vs. Present show, which is a concept I came up with where I had a bunch of Ring of Honor past stars. Some of them coming out of retirement, some of them that had been training for months to get in shape and get into ring shape. I had a lot of surprises in store for that weekend, a lot of new and exciting things. And you know, I wanted so badly for those shows to happen. But ultimately, it wasn’t worth putting people’s lives at risk. We’ve gotta be responsible, we’ve gotta make smart decisions. So no, yeah the decision was made, ‘Okay, we need to cancel it.'”

Marty Scurll on testing the idea of an empty arena show: “Obviously, we still had a lot of talent coming there. And we discussed about doing empty arena shows and everything else. And we actually did film a handful of matches with no fans with some of the talent that was there, just to see how it would look and if we could make something from it. But I didn’t want to, especially with this Past vs. Present show, I didn’t want to have these guys who haven’t wrestled for Ring of Honor for years or coming out of retirement to have to put them through wrestling in front of no fans. This is something special, so let’s save this concept for when we can run properly again. And plus as well, I didn’t want any wrestlers that hadn’t left yet, I didn’t want them making the trip if they didn’t have to. It was like, ‘It’s not worth you coming all this way and God forbid something happens to you.’ I was like, ‘We can’t.'”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit ROHStrong with a h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.