The Rise, Fall, And Rise Again Of Ring Of Honor Part 3 | partsFUNknown
With us having successfully completed our look through Ring of Honor's history, let us know in the comments what your favourite era of Ring of Honor is!
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With us having successfully completed our look through Ring of Honor's history, let us know in the comments what your favourite era of Ring of Honor is!
SUBSCRIBE TO partsFUNknown: https://bit.ly/2J2Hl6q
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/partsfunknown
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/partsfunknown/
Buy wrestling merchandise here: https://www.wrestleshop.com/
Read more Feature content here on WrestleTalk.com: https://wrestletalk.com/features/
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00:00 You know, I originally considered calling this short series the Rise, Fall, Rise, Fall
00:04 and Rise Again of Ring of Honor, because hot damn does this company have a turbulent history.
00:09 I could probably even make the argument to throw an extra rise and fall in there, but
00:13 that would just be insanity.
00:14 If you watched part 1 and 2 of our Tidy Little series, you'll have heard the story of a
00:18 company usually able to take the roster they had and produce top notch wrestling regardless
00:23 of how many of their top stars walked out the door.
00:25 As such, if you've watched these videos, you know the main theme of Ring of Honor's
00:29 history has been its identity and how strongly fans have been able to connect to that identity.
00:34 During their early years, their identity was very positive, capturing the imaginations
00:38 of their fans through great matches and storylines with a roster of insanely talented wrestlers.
00:43 But as those years went by and ownership and management changed, that strong identity began
00:47 to wane.
00:48 Coupled with excessive technical difficulties, ROH lost some of that goodwill they had with
00:52 their fans, despite still putting on some great matches.
00:55 As complicated and turbulent as the initial rise, fall, rise, fall, however many times
00:59 over was for Ring of Honor, business had never been stronger by the time ROH pushed onward
01:04 into 2018.
01:06 With the Elite drawing the largest crowds in the promotion's history, putting on fantastic
01:10 matches and selling merch at an unprecedented pace, the two sides seemed destined to shake
01:14 up the wrestling business together, but what seemed like a perfect marriage turned into
01:17 a very bitter divorce, with a new, better, hotter suitor emerging to succeed where ROH
01:22 would fail.
01:23 It's time to close the book on the Honorable Ring, and boy if the last chapter isn't
01:27 the most Shakespearean tragedy I've ever seen take place in a corporate landscape.
01:31 I'm Tempest Haling from PartsFunKnown, and this is the Rise, Fall, and Rise Again
01:35 of Ring of Honor, Part 3, Exodus, Pandemic, and Tony Khan.
01:40 While it was covered at the end of Part 2, I really want to hammer home just how awesome
01:44 Ring of Honor was with the Elite at the helm.
01:46 You were guaranteed multiple great matches on each big ROH show, with Hangman Page beginning
01:51 to show glimpses of the star he would become, Cody defending the ROH World Championship
01:55 and later leading the ROH side in the Bullet Club Civil War, and the Young Bucks continuing
01:59 to be the best tag team on the planet.
02:02 There may have been distractions from management over the years, but the bottom line of Ring
02:05 of Honor was always being able to produce great wrestling, and let me tell you, the
02:09 Elite produced more great wrestling than just about any other act in Ring of Honor at the
02:12 time.
02:13 But they weren't the only ones producing huge moments.
02:15 Broken Matt Hardy's appearance at Final Battle 2016 is one of the loudest pops I've
02:19 ever heard in any promotion.
02:21 By this time, the business was shifting, and Ring of Honor had started to outrank Impact
02:25 in a number of metrics.
02:27 Meaning when the Broken Hardys showed up to face the Young Bucks in an incredible passing
02:31 of the torch ladder match at Supercard of Honor 11, it didn't feel like they were taking
02:34 a step backwards.
02:36 Supercard of Honor 11 was the biggest non-WWE show of WrestleMania weekend in 2017, and
02:41 while that wasn't necessarily the first time that it happened, the margin of which
02:45 they were the biggest show was much larger.
02:46 Also, that ladder match really is awesome.
02:49 It's one of my favorite matches of all time.
02:51 They recreate the exact finish of the famous Hardys-Edge and Christian ladder match from
02:55 No Mercy as a great false finish, and I love this match so much I might go watch it again
03:00 right now.
03:01 In fact, hold on.
03:03 Yep, still f***ing great.
03:06 There was always something to look forward to during this era.
03:08 If it wasn't the Hardys, it was Minoru Suzuki challenging Cody for the ROH World Title,
03:13 or any of the redonkulous ladder wars that could stack up against any of the best ladder
03:17 matches in WWE history and do more than okay.
03:20 Ring of Honor was just such a solid promotion, and more and more people had taken notice.
03:24 A lot of this was discussed in Part 2, but I really need y'all to know just how awesome
03:29 this stuff was, because it makes what happens next that much harder to swallow.
03:33 The story of All In has been told and told again over the last few years, but what it
03:36 came down to is pretty simple.
03:38 A lot of fans had let it play out long enough, and were very tired of the product WWE was
03:42 offering, and, for the first time in a very long while, that growing hardcore wrestling
03:47 audience was very willing to spend a lot of money if it meant not only seeing great wrestling,
03:52 but supporting it as well.
03:53 So while Supercard of Honor 12 drew 6,000 people to see Cody Rhodes pin Kenny Omega
03:57 in a fantastic match, Ring of Honor would not be the ones to fulfill this growing appetite.
04:02 Cody Rhodes and The Young Bucks co-promoted All In, the biggest independent wrestling
04:06 show of all time, selling over 11,000 tickets in under a half hour.
04:10 You could not have had a bigger sign that pro wrestling fans were ready and willing
04:14 to invest their time and money in pro wrestling.
04:16 Seriously, flashing neon lights saying "Take Our Money" would have been the next step,
04:20 and even then who knows if Ring of Honor would have capitalized on the momentum the hardcore
04:24 wrestling scene was experiencing.
04:26 What's worse is they helped produce the show!
04:28 There was a very heavy ROH presence at All In.
04:32 The show was run mostly by ROH crew, the ROH World Championship was defended by Jay Lethal,
04:37 and ROH owned the distribution rights of the show.
04:40 There is no reason they shouldn't have looked at this event as the biggest turning point
04:44 in Ring of Honor history and the biggest opportunity for growth the company had ever seen.
04:49 But they didn't!
04:50 Somehow Ring of Honor chose not to push their chips to the center of the table and held,
04:54 and held, and before you knew it it was Final Battle 2018 and nearly every member of the
04:59 elite and SoCal Uncensored walked away from the promotion.
05:02 As I said last time, ROH helping run All In was about as ironic as Bret Hart walking Shawn
05:08 Michaels through how to put him in the sharpshooter, and sure enough, ROH had about as much luck
05:11 as Bret did.
05:12 ROH COO Joe Coff has shouldered the blame for Ring of Honor's cautious approach to
05:16 this emerging wrestling landscape, but their caution quite literally cost Ring of Honor
05:21 everything that had made it the second biggest promotion in the US.
05:24 In one fell swoop, The Young Bucks, Cody, Hangman Page, Christopher Daniels, Frankie
05:30 Kazarian and Scorpio Sky were all clicked, dragged and dropped right in the bin by ROH.
05:36 While WWE can seemingly get away with the mass releases doing to have so much top talent
05:41 on their roster, a promotion like ROH would not be so fortunate.
05:45 They had seen stars leave before, that was the only life ROH had known, but this was
05:49 a mass exodus that they were not prepared for.
05:52 It was clear there was a steep drop in interest in Ring of Honor following the launch of All
05:56 Elite Wrestling in 2019, with all of the stars who had been making Ring of Honor the fun
06:00 promotion to watch now repping the Jacksonville Jaguars.
06:03 Honestly, pretending to like the Jags would probably have been enough to keep me from
06:06 signing an AEW during that first year, but I digress.
06:09 However, the real impact of this mass exodus would not be felt until a few months later
06:13 when Ring of Honor co-promoted the biggest event in their company history with New Japan
06:17 Pro Wrestling, packing 16,000 people into Madison Square Garden for G1 Supercard, the
06:22 first non-WWE wrestling event held at MSG in nearly 60 years.
06:27 On paper, that sounds like a monumental accomplishment, and on paper, it is.
06:32 The problem was, all the tickets were sold mid-2018, when everyone believed they'd
06:36 be seeing the Elite at the show.
06:38 The tickets were sold, but no one could have anticipated the sheer clusterfuckery that
06:42 would go down inside the world's most famous arena.
06:45 We went over Ring of Honor's working relationship with New Japan Pro Wrestling in the last video,
06:49 with ROH serving as the window for North American fans to see their favorite New Japan stars
06:53 live.
06:54 For a long time, that worked great, but as the 2010s went on, New Japan Pro Wrestling
06:57 continued to get more and more popular, and soon enough, they began to run US shows of
07:01 their own, cutting out the ROH middleman.
07:04 They still worked together, but there was suddenly a new way for fans to see the New
07:07 Japan stars straight from the source as New Japan ran their first major events in the
07:11 United States in 2017.
07:13 By the time G1 Supercard arrived, it was New Japan people wanted to see while Ring of Honor
07:17 was slowly becoming just an add-on.
07:20 Worse than that, G1 Supercard was half a fantastic show and half a disaster.
07:24 Unfortunately for ROH, it was very easy to see where the issues with the show came from
07:28 as every single New Japan promoted match met or exceeded fans' lofty expectations, while
07:33 every single Ring of Honor moment, match, and decision proceeded to turn more and more
07:38 fans away from them.
07:39 You had Bully Ray taking up an ungodly amount of time with an awful street fight with Flip
07:44 Gordon and the Lifeblood, while career mid-carder and extremely not-world champion level Matt
07:48 Taven won the ROH World Championship in ROH's top match.
07:52 They attempted to bring in Enzo and Cass, former WWE stars not exactly known for having
07:56 good matches, they did bring in The Allure, former TNA stars not exactly known for having
08:01 good matches.
08:02 This night would be far more damaging for Ring of Honor than they would realize at the
08:05 time.
08:06 The piss-poor quality of their product at G1 Supercard turned a lot of fans off, with
08:10 many of the decisions being made seemingly being in direct contrast with what Ring of
08:14 Honor had been known for.
08:15 But the Enzo and Cass fiasco would prove even more costly.
08:19 Not only was it a dumb idea that soured the fans, but Ring of Honor had involved them
08:22 in an angle also involving New Japan stars Evil Sonata and the Gorillas of Destiny without
08:27 New Japan's knowledge or blessing.
08:29 That would be the unofficial wrath on the partnership between New Japan and ROH, with
08:33 the former feeling disrespected by the latter's lack of communication.
08:36 Now you have to consider that not only had ROH lost the services of the Elite and SCU,
08:41 but they had now lost their direct access to New Japan's roster, meaning those major
08:45 shows were about to become real miserable.
08:48 Follow up G1 Supercard with Best in the World 2019, considered by many to be one of the
08:53 worst pay-per-views of the year, and ROH was in the gutter.
08:56 This is a story about identity, and Ring of Honor's identity had died a painful death.
09:00 They trudged along until they and the rest of the world came to a screeching halt in
09:05 2020.
09:06 For all their flaws, Ring of Honor handled the pandemic better than any promotion, paying
09:10 all of their talent, releasing no one, and when the time came, produced shows from a
09:14 bubble surpassing the measures taken by any other company at the time.
09:18 There's nothing to be taken away from this.
09:20 During the period where the promotion had the least amount of goodwill with the fans,
09:24 Ring of Honor stepped up and protected their talent and top marks will be given for that.
09:28 However, as fans began to return to shows, it was becoming very clear that there was
09:32 very little interest in the Ring of Honor product.
09:34 Over the course of the pandemic, top ROH star and booker Marty Skrull was accused of taking
09:38 advantage of a 16-year-old girl at a bar.
09:40 Skrull would state that the encounter was consensual, but his time in Ring of Honor
09:44 was over nonetheless, leaving yet another major black eye on the promotion that they
09:48 really could not afford at the time.
09:50 Finally, fans were able to attend Best in the World 2021.
09:53 1250 fans, to be exact.
09:56 ROH certainly had a number of talented stars on their roster.
09:59 Jonathan Gresham, Bandito, Dragon Lee, Tony Deppin, The Briscos, the list goes on, but
10:04 Ring of Honor no longer had the identity of having the best wrestling in America.
10:08 In 2021, they weren't even close.
10:11 On October 27, 2021, ROH announced that they were releasing all of their talent and would
10:16 be going on hiatus to reimagine Ring of Honor.
10:18 In short, Sinclair Broadcasting pulled the plug, with Joe Koff shouldering the blame
10:22 for not being more aggressive and growing ROH in 2018.
10:26 Final Battle 2021 would be the final show under the Sinclair umbrella, but you could
10:29 already see glimpses of what was to come next.
10:32 AEW stars FTR arrived and challenged the Briscos despite having nowhere to wrestle.
10:36 A few months of radio silence later, and you had Tony Khan walking out on AEW Dynamite
10:41 to let everyone know he was the brand new owner of Ring of Honor.
10:44 The Sinclair era was over, and Ring of Honor was once again in new hands, and not that
10:48 I'm trying to earn a little extra Khan coin here, but ROH was in far more capable hands
10:52 than it was.
10:53 Say what you will about Tony Khan, but he has built a track record for himself, and
10:56 after three years of mostly great booking in AEW, Khan now had the chance to rebuild
11:01 Ring of Honor anew.
11:02 Supercard of Honor 15 was the first show under the Tony Khan banner, a stellar show mixing
11:06 ROH stars with AEW contracted talent, with some independent talent, and a smidge of New
11:12 Japan, with AEW now being New Japan's primary US partner.
11:15 That catches us up to present day, but this story very clearly is not as close to its
11:19 end as it seemed two years ago.
11:21 With the association with AEW, Ring of Honor has had access to not only many of the best
11:25 wrestlers in the world, but many of the men who helped build Ring of Honor from the ground
11:29 up.
11:30 It remains to be seen how many of these names will find their way back to the Honorable
11:33 Ring, but the prospect of Bryan Danielson, CM Punk, Christopher Daniels, Frankie Kazarian,
11:38 and Samoa Joe being on a Ring of Honor show in 2022 is particularly magical.
11:44 It remains to be seen what Tony Khan will do with Ring of Honor in the big picture.
11:47 They don't have a TV deal, and another pay-per-view has not been announced, but already ROH titles
11:52 are being defended in AEW, and non-contracted talent like Willow and Dalton Castle have
11:56 already made appearances.
11:58 One could spend an entire video just theorizing about what Tony could do with ROH, but in
12:02 a more vague sense, I don't think the specifics matter.
12:06 Currently Ring of Honor is in limbo with a very tumultuous past not far enough down the
12:10 road to feel comfortable, but with very exciting possibilities ahead.
12:14 Ring of Honor is without an identity at the moment, as they're largely without a product
12:17 of their own.
12:18 Thus, Tony Khan can take this opportunity to re-establish Ring of Honor in any way he
12:22 sees fit, and hopefully build an identity that fans can identify with and recognize
12:27 as a symbol of excellence in wrestling once again.
12:29 It won't be easy, but Ring of Honor is a brand with so many memories and feelings associated
12:34 with it that it should be protected.
12:36 Ring of Honor has risen and fallen more than most wrestling companies of its era, and now
12:40 it's time for Ring of Honor to rise again.
12:43 [MUSIC]
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