How did you find ROH?

[Starshine]

From various forums and the like.

I didn't get into watching ROH until 2007, but had been loosely following events in the promotion starting the prior year. Before that I knew that Samoa Joe was this super dominant champion back in 2004, and he was becoming a pretty big deal. I knew a guy names Austin Aries upset him and took his belt. I knew about CM Punk and his whole straight edge schtick. I knew just about everyone who knew talked up Bryan Danielson as the best thing in the ring going. I had a cursory knowledge of the company, but ths actual event that got me interested enough to really follow was Takeshi Morishima beating Homicide for the world title. It just seemed like such a random and exciting turn of events that I wanted in on it.

The first ROH shows I bought on Ebay were 'Joe vs. Kobashi' and 'Better Than Our Best.'

[Deleted]

Bought the Round Robin Challenge DVD at the Mall. I heard a lot of good things about Danielson and Low-Ki from diffetent forums and knew of Daniels from other promotions.

[Cyno]

Internet buzz. Heard about ROH and TNA around the same time around 2004-2005. ROH was the underground new hotness and TNA was like its dorky cousin who really liked late 90's WCW.

[r.]

Internet chatroom.

I remember it well. I was shortly after TNA started airing on FS1, someone PM'd me that I would really like ROH were some of their talents had come from.

They were right, I was floored with how good it was for such a small promotion, plus my dad really dug it too. We both would look forward to watching it whenever we could.


Which brings me to my two questions for everyone;

1: What was ROH's best year in your opinion?

2: When did it fall off (If ever) for you?

[Dr. Bolty, Disaster Enby]

Dec 12, 2021 16:11:07 GMT -5 r. said:

Which brings me to my two questions for everyone;

1: What was ROH's best year in your opinion?

2: When did it fall off (If ever) for you?

2006. Danielson's title reign was the peak of Gabe Sapolsky's booking style, and the combination of Danielson with the world title and Aries & Strong with the tag titles nearly guaranteed a match or two worth buying the DVD for. Add in the CZW feud, Homicide's chase for the title, the return of the Briscoes with a very strong run of matches throughout the year (with their title win at Final Battle), Delirious's feel good addition to the roster, KENTA's build to a title shot, and Jimmy Jacobs finding himself with the Ballad of Lacey gimmick...geez, it's kind of absurd how good the year was.

When it fell off? I stopped watching early in 2008. There was a distinct loss of momentum, I was starting to get way into finding 90's AJPW matches, and the move to TV on HDNet made it harder to follow since I didn't get the channel and it made following by DVD feel like I was missing something. This was also all in the wake of "pay per view continuity" becoming a thing in 2007, which also did a lot to dilute the experience of following along.

I poked my head in now and again since then, but 2006 ROH was my wrestling in a way no other year of any other promotion has been.

[Starshine]

Dec 12, 2021 16:11:03 GMT -5 Cyno said:

Internet buzz. Heard about ROH and TNA around the same time around 2004-2005. ROH was the underground new hotness and TNA was like its dorky cousin who really liked late 90's WCW.

To be fair to TNA though, they were a great "dipping your toe into the pool" company for getting into ROH since so many notable names working there eventually ended up doing a stint with them.

[Cyno]

Dec 12, 2021 16:31:49 GMT -5 Starshine said:

Dec 12, 2021 16:11:03 GMT -5 Cyno said:

Internet buzz. Heard about ROH and TNA around the same time around 2004-2005. ROH was the underground new hotness and TNA was like its dorky cousin who really liked late 90's WCW.

To be fair to TNA though, they were a great "dipping your toe into the pool" company for getting into ROH since so many notable names working there eventually ended up doing a stint with them.

Yeah, though it could be a bit weird when TNA and ROH didn't really respect each others' continuities. So you had weird situations like Raven and CM Punk having this vicious blood feud in ROH at the same time as they were stablemates in The Gathering in TNA.

[BlackoutCreature]

Dec 12, 2021 16:11:07 GMT -5 r. said:

Which brings me to my two questions for everyone;

1: What was ROH's best year in your opinion?

2: When did it fall off (If ever) for you?

Both of these questions are actually pretty hard for me to answer. For 1, it's mostly because I've only seen a handful of select shows from ROH's Golden Age of guys like Samoa Joe, CM Punk and Bryan Danielson, so it's difficult to say exactly when it hit its peak, although it would definitely be in that mid-00's time frame.

For question 2, ROH's decline was just a very muddled period. You could see the cracks as far back as 2014 with the horrible Michael Elgin work-shoot angle over his work visa issues and how that completely derailed his ROH career. As the decade continued the booking was just incredibly uninspired. I mean, it didn't need to be too elaborate as most of the talent was really over (The Bullet Club/The Elite were red hot at the time), but you could tell it was just by-the-book, formulaic stuff propped up by over talent (similar to ECW in 1998-1999), and whenever an attempt was made to spice things up, it was just really poorly thought out (such as Adam Cole joining the Bullet Club).

But in the end you can't get away from 2019. The loss of the Elite, the disastrous MSG show, Matt Taven's never-ending title reign that nobody wanted in the first place, a pathetic women's division, and a total waste of really promising talent with things like Lifeblood. It's hard to argue that the company just didn't completely bottom out that year.

[mcmahonfan85]

Dec 12, 2021 16:31:49 GMT -5 Starshine said:

Dec 12, 2021 16:11:03 GMT -5 Cyno said:

Internet buzz. Heard about ROH and TNA around the same time around 2004-2005. ROH was the underground new hotness and TNA was like its dorky cousin who really liked late 90's WCW.

To be fair to TNA though, they were a great "dipping your toe into the pool" company for getting into ROH since so many notable names working there eventually ended up doing a stint with them.

not really. if anything, ROH was a great rehab for TNA and their crappy presentation. i started watching TNA back when it was on FSN, before i started watching ROH, and its where i first got exposed to Styles, Joe, Daniels, etc. their music would hit, the fans (the worst crowd ever) would lose their shit and start a "This is awesome" chant before the bell even rang, and they'd wrestle a whopping three minutes. a first seeing the crowd pop like that for them you're intrigued to see them, but after a few matches that only last a couple of minutes you can't help but declare them overrated. then you see them in ROH and discover the hype is more than justified.

same thing happened with Paul London and WWE. seeing him come out every week on Velocity as the most happy, hyper guy only to get beat (you'll never find anyone more excited to get their ass kicked), after a while i was annoyed by him and thought he sucked. then i saw him in ROH, and was annoyed by WWE and thought they sucked for how badly they booked him.

[Big BosskMan]

Saw their first DVDs in FYE and bought them. They had the early shows, with the famous three ways between Danielson, Low Ki, and Daniels.

Later I went through Final Battle 2004, where How dropped the title to Aries.

[DSR]

Between this forum's original form and PWI magazine, I had heard there was a buzz about ROH. Summer 2004, I picked up Era of Honor Begins and the first Round Robin Challenge at my local FYE. I put them on at a friend's house.

My friends quickly wrote the whole thing off when Era of Honor Begins started with the Christopher Street Connection making out in the middle of the ring. But I stuck with it and while my friends went to sleep, I watched the whole show. I distinctly remember in the main event Bryan Danielson gets kicked in the back, and gets up with this look on his face like "You're gonna regret that shit." That moment was what hooked me on ROH.

Immediately after that show was over, I put in Round Robin Challenge. I stayed up all night watching ROH. I was IN from then on.

When I went to college, I made new friends* that loved pro wrestling, and we went to ROH shows together and it was great.





*I kept the old friends, I just made new ones too.

[Mozenrath]

2005, due to Matt Hardy.

["American Cream" Dusty Loads]

From here actually. This has pretty much the only wrestling forum I’ve been on since I started watching wrestling. I heard about it from here, looked some stuff up and then my first wrestling show ever was Final Battle 2006 and it’s still the most fun I’ve had at a wrestling show since.

[Cyno]

Also, I loved it when they used an ROH ring and setup in Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler" for Randy "The Ram" Robinson's last match against his arch-rival, the Ayatollah (as played by Ernest "The Cat" Miller).

There were a lot of ROH alum and (at the time) current roster members in that movie, too, like Nigel McGuinness, Necro Butcher, Jay Lethal, Claudio Castagnoli (aka, Cesaro), and Larry Sweeney.

[Bishblast]

Pro Wrestling Illustrated or some such magazine in 2002. Then I bought the first show DVD they put out from a Suncoast video in the local mall.

[Rave]

The Age of the Fall debut. The image of Jimmy Jacobs in white covered in Jay Briscoe's blood was posted to a message board I used to frequent. I'm attracted to strong imagery, and that's still one of the strongest images I've seen in wrestling. Captured my attention immediately.

[ronnie2hotty]

Dec 12, 2021 16:11:07 GMT -5 r. said:

Which brings me to my two questions for everyone;

1: What was ROH's best year in your opinion?

2: When did it fall off (If ever) for you?

1. My personal opinion was 2008. I think 2008 is highly underrated. It was the last year of Gabe's booking. Even though some people crapped on the faction warfare, I really think the overall quality of the shows were top notch all year long. It may not have had the highest highs the company ever saw, but I always thought the match quality was a consistently good.

2. 2009 after Gave was fired at the end of 2008. The HDNet era started and I just wasn't a fan of it, or Adam Pearce's booking style. Looking back, it was more of a stubborn thing to get used to, similar to the NXT black and gold vs. NXT 2.0 kind of thing going on now (but not as far in the opposite direction as that). After the first few months of 2009, I didn't follow it regularly again. I'd pick it up every once in a while if I read about something getting some internet buzz, and give it a watch, but it didn't stick.

If there's other old-school ROH fans, I'd check out the THRoh The Years podcast. They cover ROH show-by-show from the beginning. It's a great look at ROH and it's evolution through the eyes of two people who were fans. They just finished Joe vs Kobashi.

[YAKMAN is ICHIBAN]

Dec 12, 2021 11:52:28 GMT -5 mcmahonfan85 said:

internet forums

Yeah, by the time ROH rolled around I was already way active online so no interesting story there. TNA too.


For Japanese wrestling, I learned about it from AJPW gifs downloaded from Kazaa, and FMW Tokyopop DVDs from Media Play. Hayabusa was just so unbelievably f***ing cool.

ECW I learned about from whispers from my pro wrestling watching friends about this violent, raunchy, "real" wrestling where they used barbed wire. Then I found it late night on whatever channel it was on and watched it in my room. Very risque, like putting on Howard Stern or late-night HBO and hoping mom doesn't walk in. Came for the ultraviolence, stayed for the awesome technical and lucha wreslting.

["Sweet & Sour" ImSoFudginGreat]

I used to look at gamefaqs for CAW’s on one of the Smackdown games (I think HCTP) and one creator held CPU battle royals and whoever won he typed out the formula for that wrestler. In one match he had Amazing Red and I thought he looked awesome so I looked him up and found Red vs Jay Briscoe from Era or Honor begins and I fell hard for them from there.

On an unrelated note, I helped my parents get their Christmas decorations out of the loft over the weekend and found a bunch of my old ROH dvd’s from when I stopped watching wrestling for a bit in the early 2010’s. I had a lazy Sunday watching a bunch of shows. Good times, but bittersweet if ROH truly is done.

Dec 12, 2021 16:11:07 GMT -5 r. said:

Which brings me to my two questions for everyone;

1: What was ROH's best year in your opinion?

2: When did it fall off (If ever) for you?

1: 2005. I pretty much loved their entire roster

2: 2009/2010, though that was wrestling in general for me.

[Deleted]

I don't remember for sure, but it was probably around the time of the Joe vs Punk feud.

I did buy every DVD of the Gabe Sapolsky era and catch up though.