Want more wrestling news, rumors, and results? Be sure to visit PWInsider.com and PWInsiderXtra.com.
Only one major angle happened at ROH’s final Cleveland show, as Delirious turned heel and joined Age Of The Fall. Delirious, still reeling from being shot down by Daizee Haze in Manhattan, brutalized Rhett Titus during their match, giving him five Panic Attacks in the corner until the referee stopped the match. Delirious was not exhibiting any of his trademark mannerisms such as running to the ring and spazzing out when the bell rang. Jimmy Jacobs came to ringside during the match to cheer him on, and after the match was over officially named Delirious his newest cohort. This prompted Daizee Haze to come out to the ring and try to stop Delirious from joining AOTF, saying she was wrong and shouldn’t have blown him off, but Delirious left with Jacobs anyway.
Later in the evening, Delirious joined in on an attack on Austin Aries after Aries defeated fellow AOTF member Tyler Black. The Briscoes ran out to make the save, leading into Delirious’ first official match as a member of AOTF, which was unfortunately a loss as he and Jacobs were defeated by the Briscoes.
The Delirious plot thickened the following evening, as Daizee Haze again tried to get Delirious to reconsider joining Age Of The Fall, but was confronted by Jimmy Jacobs, who says that Delirious listens to him now. This led to Daizee being attacked and given a DDT by SHIMMER Champion MsChif. This plays into the scenario I laid out in a recent column where I said that Delirious and MsChif would be an ideal match, the only difference being that they’ll apparently be working from the heel side instead of as faces as I proposed. Hopefully this will lead to MsChif getting more regular ROH bookings, hopefully including on the east coast, so that she won’t be one of those “Midwest only†acts like an Ace Steel or Chad Collyer.
Age Of The Fall’s big weekend came to a successful climax as Jimmy Jacobs conquered his biggest fear (according to Lacey) as he defeated his former enforcer, the Necro Butcher in a No DQ match that saw involvement from both Tyler Black and Austin Aries. In the end, Necro was laid out on a table and Aries was powerbombed on top of him, putting them both through the table and setting up the win for Jacobs. Though AOTF did lose some key matches (including Black being defeated by El Generico in Chicago), this was a huge weekend for the group which has become one of the top one or two centerpieces of ROH over the last year.
Another major focal point of ROH is obviously ROH World Champion Nigel McGuinness, who was involved in what appeared to be a throwaway title defense that turned into what was said to be a great match, as well as a tag match that set up a future challenger to his throne. Nigel defended the ROH World Title against El Generico in Cleveland, and even though I think everybody knew that Generico didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning, word is they ended up putting on quite a show. Generico showed a lot of resilience by continuing to escape defeat at the hands of several of Nigel’s finishing moves, including multiple lariats, Tower of Londons, and London Dungeons before finally falling in defeat to the London Dungeon. This was followed up in Chicago Ridge by Nigel and Claudio Castagnoli losing to Bryan Danielson & Austin Aries when Danielson made Nigel submit to Cattle Mutilation. This obviously sets up Bryan Danielson as the next logical challenger for the ROH World Title, but one would think that he probably won’t get it, if for no other reason than he still has to deal with Claudio Castagnoli, especially when Claudio attacked him again after the match.
Speaking of Claudio, he had quite the violent weekend, also losing control during his match with Erick Stevens for the FIP Title, pummeling Stevens until he got himself disqualified. I’m not sure I like that result because even though I understand the idea is to get Claudio over as a violent jerk who has no qualms about injuring anyone in his path, but this also sends two negative messages. One is that the FIP Title is so meaningless that Claudio really didn’t care that he blew his shot at it by getting himself disqualified, and the other is that it makes Erick Stevens look like a wimp who can’t hang with the real ROH main eventers yet again. Fortunately, Stevens ended up getting some heat back the next night with a clean win over Chris Hero following a big powerslam off the top rope.
Speaking of Chris Hero, he spent most of his non-Stevens time this past weekend battling Roderick Strong on behalf of Sweet & Sour Incorporated. Hero and Go Shiozaki teamed up to defeat Strong and Brent Albright after Hero knocked Strong out by hitting him with a loaded elbow pad, but wasn’t able to defeat Strong a second time when they met during the Sweet & Sour Gauntlet in Chicago. Strong went through several members of Sweet & Sour before defeating Hero, but after losing, Hero knocked Strong out with three roaring elbows, allowing Larry Sweeney to simply roll into the ring and pick up a cheap win over Strong. I liked the way this all played out, as it’s Strong fighting for his honor against overwhelming odds, and at least for now, not being able to win through.
Finally, NWA World Champion Brent Albright successfully defended his title in Chicago against Go Shiozaki, winning by knockout after giving Shiozaki his hammerlock/knees to the face combo until the referee stopped the match. I’m glad Shiozaki didn’t the win, not that I expected him to, but the NWA generally likes to have guys who can wrestle hold that title, so that left Shiozaki out. Adam Pearce let us know that he was still in the title picture as well, running down Albright in an interview and beating Ruckus with Albright’s finisher, the half nelson suplex. The match in New York was awesome, especially since I came to find out later that I was in attendance for the only NWA Title change to ever take place in New York City, which is a mind boggling thought when you consider the history of that title.
* * *
But now this weekend’s events are behind us, and even though we have a month and a trip to Japan between now and then, news has quickly started to leak out about Glory By Honor VII, which will be taking place in Philadelphia on September 20th at the New Alhambra Arena, formerly known as the ECW Arena. This is obviously being built up as a very special show, and not just because of the legendary building it’s being held in.
Already announced as appearing at the show will be Katsuhiko Nakajima and former New Japan IWGP Champion, All Japan Triple Crown Champion, and WCW United States Champion Kensuke Sasaki. I don’t know diddly squat about Nakajima and so can’t comment on him, but getting Sasaki in there is a huge deal, and I can’t wait to see who they book him against. There’s been talk that originally they were going to do a tag match, but they are now more likely to break them off into singles matches instead. So who do you book Sasaki against? The obvious choices would be Nigel McGuinness, Bryan Danielson, and Austin Aries. Of those three, I would say Aries would be the best choice because I can guarantee you that Sasaki’s going over no matter who he’s in there with, and there’d be no point in having him go over the ROH World Champion. I think Aries could pull a better match out of a guy like Sasaki than Danielson could, but Aries is already booked in another match, so that pretty much leaves Danielson as the go to guy for this one. Too bad Samoa Joe’s not still around, I think that would be an amazing (not to mention incredibly stiff) match.
Also announced for Glory By Honor VII is the long-awaited (and long expected…by me) return of Steel Cage Warfare, pitting Austin Aries and the Briscoes against Jimmy Jacobs, Tyler Black, and Delirious. Necro Butcher is also planned to be involved in this somehow, though it has yet to be stated in what capacity. Having been in attendance for the first Steel Cage Warfare match, I think it would work better in a four-on-four rather than three-on-three format, so I expect Necro to somehow wind up on Aries’ team against Jacobs, Black, Delirious, and probably Joey Matthews. This will be good, and makes me hope I can make it and won’t be otherwise occupied by other commitments!
Before I go, I also want to briefly mention ROH’s plans to further expand into southern markets, with a show already announced in the St Louis area and plans to set up shop in Nashville, as well. It’s pretty well known that ROH has already hit its saturation point in the northeast and the Midwest and has already dropped several markets in those regions such as Buffalo, Cleveland, Long Island, and Minnesota. As ROH casts around trying to find another way to grow their business, they may have used the first two Virginia shows to test the waters of how well they would play south of the Mason-Dixon.
I have a couple of thoughts on this latest move. The first thing is that most of the talent that ROH uses is from the areas they already run up north, so it’ll be interesting to see how well they draw and what kind of name recognition ROH can draw on by this expansion. Of course, the flipside of that is that now they can start using local talent from their new markets that we might not otherwise see in ROH.
Another thing to consider is that if they do move into Tennessee, that’s Jarrett Territory. TNA has their headquarters and editing facilities in Nashville, and the Jarretts have had a lot of stroke there (no pun intended) for a long, long time. That’s not to say that I think there are going to be any anonymous calls made to the fire marshal to try and get the show shut down or anything like that, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see TNA suddenly decide to run a house show across town the night ROH is there (as they’ve “coincidentally†done on several occasions already in the northeast), or at the very least send street teams to mob the ROH show and promote TNA. Actually, if TNA does run a house show in Nashville the night ROH is there, they might be able to take a big chunk of the crowd that would be attending ROH by promoting the fact that they have Samoa Joe, AJ Styles, Jay Lethal, and lots of other names who have left ROH and try to draw that audience away.
But all my conspiracy theories about predatory business practices aside, if ROH continues to do well in Virginia, does well in St Louis, and starts running in Tennessee, then ROH is going to be covering more territory than they’ve ever had before. They’ll have set up shop in all the major northeast markets (Boston, New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia), three major upper Midwest markets (Dayton, Chicago, Detroit, and St Paul/Minneapolis if they ever decide to go back there), eastern Canada (Toronto and Montreal), Florida (both through their own shows and through their synergy with FIP), and several southern markets (St Louis, Nashville, Virginia/DC). Except for the Carolinas, Georgia, and the Gulf Coast states, this would have ROH covering pretty much the entire eastern United States, and if they do continue to draw well down south, I can certainly see ROH wanting to expand into those other southern areas before too long, maybe sometime in early 2009.
With that kind of touring schedule, ROH can legitimately claim themselves to be a national promotion, where they really would be stretching to say so before, no matter how many DVDs they sell. This, coupled with the PPVs, puts ROH in a much better position to try and secure a TV deal. The only down side I can see is that where before you were probably pretty much guaranteed to get an ROH show in your area three to five times a year (depending on the market you’re in), a lot of former ROH strongholds like New Jersey and Philly are now only going to get two or three shows a year, and they’ll be around five months apart. While that’s a bit of a drag for people like me who like going to every show, it’s only a good thing for the future health of the company, so try not to get too upset about not getting as many live ROH shows as you used to.
That’ll do it for me today, thanks for reading this monster edition of the pROHfile and as always, all feedback can be sent to stupwinsider@yahoo.com. Take care, and I’ll see you soon.
