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I decided that it’d be fun for me to do something I haven’t done in a while by dipping into my inbox and responding to some of the feedback I’ve gotten. Today, I’ll respond to three of my correspondents.
Let’s open this with an email from A. Russo, who took me to task over a couple of guys I recommended bringing into ROH:
Have you lost your mind? Bob Backlund and Monty Brown. I'm a fan of ROH and there's no way I would want to see those 2 fools anywhere near a ring. You must be insane. A. Russo.
P.S. I do enjoy your column. Keep up the good work.
Well, I appreciate being put over at the end, but I assure you that my mind is no further gone now than it was before I wrote that column. The thing to understand is that ROH has developed beyond just being an indy where small guys chain wrestle and work spotfests for an entire card. It’s become a little of everything from the pure wrestling, to high flying, to brawling, to comedy, and everything in between. That’s why it’s gotten over so well and, even at what a lot of people are considering a lull in its storytelling flow, is still widely regarded by people like us as the best thing going in North American wrestling today.
In that spirit, I absolutely believe that both Backlund and Monty Brown would be great people to bring in because they would both be something truly different. Backlund’s much older than anyone on the ROH roster, sure, but he can mat wrestle just as well or better than anyone you put him in there with, and in a promotion where goofballs like Delirious and El Generico have gotten way over, I think his crazy old man gimmick would be a major plus. He is getting older, but a)he’s still in great shape and I have no doubt he could work longer matches even in his mid 50s, and the easy ROH schedule would work well for a guy his age who wouldn’t want to be on the road every night. Plus, he’s got years of experience and was World Champion for almost six years, which is not something many guys ROH has access to could say. I think he’d be a great presence in the locker room.
As for Monty Brown, he’s a big muscular guy and no, that may not be the first type that springs to mind when you think of the typical ROH wrestler, but he’s more than just a musclehead. The guy is a really, really good worker considering he only has a few years in the business. He’s got the power moves, but also can surprise you by pulling out mat wrestling moves or big suplexes when you least expect it. He seems to know when to pull out big moves in the context of the match and how to read the crowd to know when things need to happen. He can also cut a great promo. I’m actually amazed that a guy with only a few years in the business can possibly be as good as him, and unfortunately I think whatever family issues resulted in his hiatus may have at least temporarily derailed a very promising career that I think could very well one day lead to World Titles if he’s able to get back on his game.
We’ll continue with a conversation I had with Matt Carter, who wrote me in response to a column I wrote some time back putting over Jimmy Jacobs:
Hey Man
Great column
Just as a note, for me, it is hard to get into Jimmy as a heel stable leader because I just keep seeing DIFH and that lame emo guy :-)
Matt
I understood what it was he was saying, but I had no idea what DIFH stood for. I knew it was part of Jimmy’s Myspace name for a while so I knew it must mean something, and asked him. His response:
Do It For Her DIFH
That was Jimmy Jacobs and Tyler Black's tag team in WSX
Jimmy would come out with a cell phone and try to get phone numbers from girls before and during the matches
They were the "emo" tag team :)
I felt like an idiot because I think I was one of the only three people who actually watched the entire run of WSX when it was on MTV, and thought that it was a fun gimmick that played off his ROH character at the time without totally ripping it off. Also, I had no idea at the time what an awesome team Jacobs and Black would turn into in ROH. I thanked Matt for filling me in:
No problem.
I am maybe the ONLY Society X fan out here :-)
I LOVED Matt Classic
I agreed with him on this, Matt Classic was a hilarious character that was right up Colt Cabana’s alley. The thing about it, though, was that as fun as the gimmick was, I’d rather see Cabana work as himself, especially on a national scale. I continued by telling Matt that I enjoyed WSX because it struck me as like a wrestling version of Mystery Science Theater 3000 because it was so bad, it was good:
Yeah. That is exactly it. It was so over the top and nasty...it was great!
I also think the half hour format made it move nice and fast...the matches weren't that shortened (compared to most WWE type matches), it was mostly promo time that was short and sweet.
Plus it was all guys (for the most part) I hadn't seen much of before...outside of Vampiro and XPac, I hadn't seen them before WSX. Probably my biggest complaint of the TNA is that they seem to be the home for washed up talent. I am not being disrespectful, but they haven't showcased anyone that hasn't been a WCW or WWE champion (until now i guess with Joe, but it almost is too little too late)
There’s something to be said for WSX helping get young guys over (or at least it would have if it had a longer run), but I think there’s also benefits to TNA’s way of doing things. Let’s face it, as great a bunch of workers as Christopher Daniels, AJ Styles, AMW, Samoa Joe, Chris Sabin, and all the rest are, nobody was tuning in because it was a bunch of guys nobody had ever heard of. It’s like the old question about a tree falling in the woods while nobody’s around because if nobody’s watching, it doesn’t matter if you’re putting on the greatest matches in wrestling history. Now that they have recognizable names like Angle, Christian, Sting, and Booker T, Impact has a much larger number of people tuning in.
Finally, we’re going to wrap things up with Suzanne Abshire, who has a few things she wanted to get my take on:
What would you think of WWE using the Draft to start over with the 3 Brands, what I mean by that is making the 3 shows as follows:
2-Hours of ECW RAW on the USA Network Monday Night
3 Champions: ECW World, ECW World Tag Team, and ECW World Television Champions
Commentators: Mike Adimle and TAZZ
1-Hour of Divas on SCI FI Tuesday Night
1 Champion: WWE Women's World Champion
Commentators: ??? and Sunny
2-Hours of WWE Friday Night SMACKDOWN! on the CW Network/MYNetwork Friday Night
3 Champions: WWE World Heavyweight, WWE World Tag Team, and WWE Intercontinental Champions.
Commentators: Micheal Cole and Mick Foley
PPV's/Saturday Night's Main Event Commentators: JR and The King
This would put all of the Divas on one show where they belong to give them more focus. It would also eliminate having to switch commentators for PPV's/Saturday Night's Main Events. It would also knock the number of titles in WWE down to 7. Finally it would be a much better use of the ECW name and the wrestlers in general.
Well, your idea is innovative, I’ll give you that. I love the idea of the Divas getting a show to themselves, and the one hour slot on Tuesday nights would be a great time to do it. A year or so ago I might have had more of a problem with it, but the division has turned into the diamond in the rough where WWE of late has been concerned, and if they can continue doing a good mix of wrestling vs T&A, I’d be all for it. The only problem I see there is that WWE has generally been okay booking one or two women’s matches per show, but I’m not sure how well they’d keep up on booking it as its own brand every week.
I do take issue with some of your other ideas, though. For one, there is no way in hell that Raw would ever become the ECW show. Sorry, it’s just not going to happen. They can’t even do a good job making ECW On Sci-Fi the ECW show we want, and there’s no way we’d get anything different on Mondays. It’s the flagship show, after all, and even though its two top champions are currently guys who just came over from ECW, it’s never going to become ECW itself.
Also, while the idea of hiring Sunny to be an announcer on the Divas’ show is a good one (being that she understands the business like few other women), I think restricting JR and Lawler to PPVs only is a terrible one. Even though they did end up getting split up by the draft, they’re the two best and most popular announcers WWE has, and as long as they’re willing to keep working, I don’t see any reason to restrict their schedule like that.
While I agree with you that losing Bryan Danielson would hurt ROH especially right now since from what I have heard that Gabe Sapolsky is working on a TV deal for ROH on Versus, but people said the same thing when CM Punk, Colt Cabana, and Samoa Joe left and eventually they recovered from it.
True, but the difference is that when Punk left, Danielson was on his way back and Cabana, Joe, Aries, and Daniels were all still there. By the time Joe, Cabana, and Daniels all left one after the other, you still had Danielson, Aries, Nigel, and they had Morishima in running with the ROH Title at the time. Now Morishima’s more or less gone, and if Danielson left, you’d basically be left with Aries, Nigel, and a bunch of guys who are still being built up. ROH would survive, but at least in the short term it would hurt ROH a lot. Even in the long term it would hurt because Danielson routinely has the best match on any given show, and I don’t think I’d be exaggerating too much if I said he’s the most over guy in the company right now. In the face of all the other departures over the last year or so, Danielson’s a guy they’ve needed to count on to help carry things while the next generation is built up. They’re getting there, but aren’t there yet and it’d be a blow if he left now.
Now I want to piggy back off of something JR said on his website and get your thoughts on it. He suggested that Vince McMahon and Gabe Sapolsky work out some kind of a deal like the one that Vince McMahon had with Paul Heyman. The idea is Vince McMahon would give Gabe Sapolsky money and they would share talent, and maybe do a mini-Invasion angle with ROH to help boost its ratings and get ROH more exposure so it can get its own TV deal which would help WWE out because then ROH would become a legit threat to TNA which would help both ROH and WWE depending on how successful they were in hurting TNA. What do you thing about something like that?
I definitely think it’d be great for ROH to get the kind of money and talent exchanges that would come with a deal with WWE. Who wouldn’t want to see CM Punk return to ROH for one night only to defend the World Title? The thing I’d be leery of is letting WWE get its fingers into ROH and use their influence to create changes that don’t need to be made and shouldn’t be made. I don’t have anything in particular in mind that they might do, and granted they mostly left ECW alone back when Heyman was running things, but if there ever comes a day when I turn on Monday Night Raw and I see Aurora Rose come out as the new owner of ROH, and then a couple of years later see a neutered version of ROH which featured strip poker, Roderick Strong and Claudio Castagnoli doing weekly 30 second jobs to Trevor Murdoch and Kane, and 20 minutes of Raw flashbacks, I would not be a very happy camper.
As for them joining forces to put a hurting on TNA, I don’t know if that’s something ROH is really interested in. They realize they’re a smaller company than TNA, but at the same time it behooves them to stay on TNA’s good side because the last thing anyone wants to see is another blowup like the one following the Feinstein scandal. Not that ROH is regularly using anyone under TNA contract, but then you wouldn’t see guys like the Motor City Machine Guns making special appearances. ROH has generally been known for playing nice with other companies, because rather than belligerently going head to head like a lot of other companies do, they’re smart enough to realize that such behavior often turns into setbacks down the road, and I don’t think anyone can argue with the kinds of results they’ve gotten by having Daniels, Styles, and Joe spend two years working for them while also under TNA contracts. Furthermore, they’ve gotten great results by bringing in guys from NOAH and Dragon Gate, two promotions ROH needs a lot more than they need ROH. ROH knows better than to overstep its position, and even though that position may very well change for the better down the road, they’re smart enough to see where they are and not allow themselves to make their situation worse by being bullheaded.
That’s all for now, hope you enjoyed this. If you did, let me know and send me more feedback at stupwinsider@yahoo.com and I’ll do another one of these down the road sometime. Doesn’t have to be just about ROH, either, throw me anything you want, I’m easy. Thanks for reading!
