Mt. Killamanjaro
@MikeKillam
Friday night, Ring of Honor put on one hell of a wrestling iPPV in New York City, under the name “Supercard of Honor VII”. I particularly enjoyed Michael Elgin’s match with Jay Lethal – it seems Mr. Unbreakable is incapable of having a bad match. The American Wolves in tag action is always a special treat, but they seemed to step up their game to a whole different level for WrestleMania weekend. Great to see Mike Bennett in action, as per usual. And the World title match between Kevin Steen and Jay Briscoe was rolling along at a great pace – telling a great story – until the final five minutes. More on that later.
What prompted me to even write this editorial was a whiny fan with a WordPress blog (titularly refered to as the “Angry ROH Mark”), who just couldn’t help but express his dissatisfaction with my live coverage, as well as my apparent ignorance with the ROH product altogether. He goes by the moniker “redragon1978” – you can read the full article HERE. I suspect the name might be a bit more than a small white lie.
Let’s take a look!
Where do I start ? First off wrestlezone.com hardly ever covers Ring Of Honor Second of all when they do cover Ring Of Honor they either paint the BEST PRO WRESTLING company in a bad light (The Chalie Haas situation) or you [expletive] up the results, here’s an idea for MKE KILLAM of wrestlzone.com DO SOME RESEARCH before you try to report on Ring Of Honor !
I don’t mind fans trying to depict Ring of Honor as the “best pro wrestling company” – I did that for TNA throughout 2012; everyone thought I was crazy. I’m even willing to look past over twenty grammatical failures in your opening paragraph. But please don’t try and sugar-coat the “Charlie Haas situation” in his favor, to make him look like a white knight leaving the business with grace and respect. Need I remind you an ROH official writes and communicates with Wrestlezone.com on a fairly frequent basis. When we posted the news about Haas getting drunk, slobbering all over a match with some indie wrestler, and making a fool of himself as he stumbled around the ring crying, it wasn’t just for kicks and giggles.
I have no idea what personal demons Haas may have been dealing with at the time. And quite frankly, he’s never earned enough of my respect to care. He showed up drunk to a wrestling show, screwed over the fans in attendance who were there to see him, and screwed over those in NYC for “Supercard of Honor VII” who – like me – were anticipating a great match with his long-time partner Shelton Benjamin.
If you had done alittle research or maybe even WATCHED the show over any length of time you’d have known the story between “The Outlaw” Charlie Haas and “Cheeseburger” you moron !
I’ll take responsibility for this one: I had no idea who “Cheeseburger” was while watching the iPPV Friday night. That bit of ignorance is on me, and I’ll be the first to say I don’t get to watch ROH on a weekly basis; at least not religiously. But that brings up a point I constantly get from wrestling fans who write me or Tweet me about why Wrestlezone.com doesn’t do more coverage of Ring of Honor.
The bottom line is, that while ROH puts on a great wrestling product and – from time to time – a solid iPPV experience, it doesn’t financially benefit us to any great extent. Which may sound could and uncaring, but the first thing you need to understand is that WZ is a business that makes money. The guys who write on our website only have so much time during the day, and during their shifts. It costs money to be a ROH fan, and even more to cover them – all the iPPV costs, and weekly DVD releases add up. There’s no way that what little interest Wrestlezone gets from our ROH coverage would ever add up to the money we’d put out trying to cover it.
I apologize to Ring of Honor, and their fans, because I really do enjoy the product and I wish I could spend more time trying to do right by a wrestling company I do respect and appreciate.
You compained that your internet cut out for 10 minutes during the Jay Lethal vs Michael Elgin match , here’s another big thing in ROH a famous quote “MAN UP” !! Stop [PG] about the connection . [PG] happens stop being a jerk , Do you complain about all the [PG] commercials during WWE PPV’s during your results posts ? No I don’t think so , so shut the [PG] up !
My internet did go out for ten minutes during a match – it had nothing to do with the quality of the stream. I’m not going to make things up for a match I didn’t get to see. I have since gone back and watched the match over again, but at the time we were the only big wrestling news site providing live coverage, and there wasn’t an alternative to aggregate the match from. We’ll get to the actual stream issues soon.
Also…are you really comparing short advertisement breaks between matches to whole chunks of contests being cut off by production flaws? Really?
Your hack job of a “detailed” recap of the 10 man tag between SCUM and ROH was awful Mike , take pride in your job or quit !
Have you ever tried to provide live coverage for a 10-man tag team match? It’s bad enough that I wasn’t overly familiar with several of the competitors. It certainly did not help that they were brawling around ringside for five minutes. I suppose my “hack job” was partially due to ignorance, but again there wasn’t a lot of alternative to aggregate from.
Oh and your [PG] about having to explain who the ROH WORLD TAG TEAM CHAMPIONS ReDRagon and the “American Wolves” are is just disrecpectful to all the wrestlers involved . All four wrestlers are INTERNATIONALLY known [PG] !
First of all…”ReDRagon” is a ridiculous name, and the capitalization doesn’t make any sense – not the point. I don’t think any of those guys would take offense to me explaining to our readers which wrestlers make up the two teams performing in the match. You might be surprised how many people don’t recognize names like Bobby Fish or Kyle O’Reilly. It’s not disrespectful to make our coverage more accessible to the common fan.
Finally you end your article by once again blasting ROH for the feed cutting out , it hppened to everyone but the beauty of an ROH IPPV is that you can rewind it and watch it seconds after it happens so once again SHUT THE [PG] UP !
And here is why I really wanted to write this editorial. Last night, Jay Briscoe won the ROH World Heavyweight Championship by defeating Kevin Steen in a damn good wrestling match. That is, until the feed cut out, rendering hundreds (if not more) fans incapable of seeing the finish. When it came back on, Jay was celebrating in the ring with his family, and the commentary team was going crazy. It was an eye-rolling, deep-chested-groaning moment from me, and from dozens of people with whom I interacted with throughout the night. One of the biggest moments in company history – as eloquently spoken by our own Kevin Kelly – and we missed it.
I’ll admit, I went a bit crazy on Twitter during the actual interruption. But I stand by my rant that Ring of Honor needs to get their production issues under control if they are going to continue growing, and attempting to make money off their iPPV experience. It’s annoying things like what happened last night that are enough to make me not want to fork out $15 next month. It rendered three hours of great wrestling useless, because I suddenly forgot all that when the night ended in frustration. As a Kevin Steen fan, it pissed me off not getting to see the final moments of his title reign.
Fans like you, and indeed ROH themselves, kept telling me I could rewind the show and see what I was missing. Myself and dozens of others attempted to do just that for over twenty minutes (which is why the live coverage was absent for a good chunk of time; sorry!). No dice. Eventually I just gave up, defeated and deflated, and I posted what actually happened. A good match got cut off by a crappy production glitch, and it screwed over tons of fans from witnessing an historic moment.
YOU , JUSTIN LABAR and JOSH ISENBERG are just net nerds who write for wrestlezone.com JUSTIN is trying to be a sports entertainer working with his “Good Friend” Kevin Nash on some indy show because he’s NEVER make it in PRO WRESTLING .
Finally, something we agree on!
Kidding, of course. I love Justin LaBar and Josh Isenberg, and you’d be hard-pressed to find two harder working individuals doing what we (mostly they) do. Go take a look at how many people follow LaBar on Twitter – that more than anything you can say, is validation. Plus…he bought me a deep dish pizza in Chicago last year before Extreme Rules. I really can’t hate the guy.
Here’s the thing, “redragon1978” – if that is your real name! I will admit that my coverage of “Supercard of Honor VII” could have been better. Indeed, if we had a hard working individual willing to spend money on Ring of Honor every week AND NOT GET PAID FOR IT, we’d probably have better coverage. I would like nothing more than to work for the most trafficked name in WWE, TNA and ROH wrestling news on the internet.
In fact, if any wrestling fans out there fancy themselves a decent writer and a consistently knowledgeable Ring of Honor viewer, and you want to sell your soul to the Wrestlezone machine for little-to-no compensation, get ahold of Nick Paglino. I’m sure he’d love, just like I would love, to do a better job covering ROH. They deserve, you deserve it, and we should be providing it.
