Last night Ring of Honor presented the thirteenth edition of
its annual Death Before Dishonor event and overall the show was very good.
Obviously it wasn’t a top level show but it was more than
worth the $19.95 asking price.
A decent card from top to bottom with nothing mind-blowingly
good saw Adam Cole and Dalton Castle have probably the best match of the night.
The point of this article though is to discuss pro wrestling’s
obsession with trying to manufacture special moments.
It is a problem that seemingly plagues all companies from
the very top to the smallest indie.
We see it in WWE all the time what with Jerry Lawler
screaming “Wrestlemania moment” about thirty times every April.
And last night we saw the epidemic strike in ROH.
A decent show was heading to what looked to be an exciting
conclusion with a tantalising main event pitting Jay Lethal against Roderick
Strong.
Lethal and his cohorts in the House of Truth, in particular
Truth Martini, have provided us with some of the most entertaining moments of
2015 so far and Strong seems to have had more great matches this year than I’ve
had hot meals.
So you could forgive me for expecting great things from this
match.
The bell rang and for the next sixty minutes those two men
beat the living daylights out of one another.
I could not begrudge the wrestlers what they did in this
match because they gave it everything and looked understandably dead on their
feet by the time the match ended.
The problem was the result; they went to a sixty minute time
limit draw.
Now I have no problem with time limit draws and as a matter
of fact I think they are a woefully underutilised trope in pro wrestling.
The problem was last night ROH tried to manufacture
something special whilst failing to realise that you can’t manufacture a
special moment – it has to occur organically.
I realise that in a business like pro wrestling which is
pre-determined people will be thinking that nothing can happen organically and
you have to manufacture everything but last night proved that simply isn’t the
case.
ROH has a history with time limit draws and following the
match I measured the quality on my own personal ROH time limit draw scale which
starts at Aries vs. Black from Final Battle 2009 and goes all the way up to Joe
vs. Punk from Joe/Punk II.
I came to the conclusion that this sat at about the level of
Punk vs. Daniels from The Homecoming show during Punk’s title reign.
And I stand by that, it was a solid, if unspectacular, time
limit draw.
The problem was ROH had clearly tried to manufacture this
match into a truly special moment planned to be a moment that fans would talk
about for years to come and organically it just wasn’t.
In that sense it reminds me more of the Austin Aries vs.
Bryan Danielson match from Testing The Limit.
At that show, if my memory serves me correctly, Aries and
Dragon went 78 minutes in a 2/3 Falls match and at the end it felt like we were
supposed to be in awe at the epic moment we’d all just witnessed.
But once again it felt forced, it felt like they were too
focused on creating history and manufacturing that fabled special moment that
they forgot to have a good match.
And that’s what Lethal vs. Strong felt like last night, it
was good but the match was too focused on trying to be special to actually be
special.
Pro wrestling as a whole has got to realise that it
can’t create these moments and they have to just let them happen organically.
Obviously you have to book the best show you possibly can
but a booker can only create what he, she or they believe to be the best
narrative possible – the rest is out of their hands.
There is a multitude of different factors at play and you
can’t just decide, right, this is going to be a special moment – we’ll make
sure of that.
You can have an inclination that something could be special
but you can’t force that fact down the audience’s throat otherwise it will
never be that special moment.
Daniel Bryan’s moment at WrestleMania XXX felt special
because it felt organic, not because Michael Cole told me it was special.
Last night felt like Kevin Kelly trying to force me into
believing I’d seen something special.
Undoubtedly ROH can now take this forward in a myriad of
interesting ways though.
The one positive they can take out of this is they now have
a match lined up that possibly could be remembered as epic.
As a result of this draw we will obviously see a rematch and
after a sixty minute draw there’s only one specialist ROH match that would be a
fitting stipulation for said rematch – a Ringmaster’s Challenge match.
The Ringmaster’s Challenge is a 2/3 Falls Match with a few
additional stipulation’s.
The first fall must be won via pinfall, the second via
submission and the third if (note: when) required is a 15 minute Ironman match.
Pitting Lethal vs. Strong in this type of environment would
be fantastic and quite possibly allow ROH to have the moment they were so
desperate for last night.
Add the ROH World Championship (and possibly the Television Championship too) into the mix and you've got yourself a potentially epic main event for further down the line.
That is providing they don’t try hard to make it special and
just focus on producing the best match they possibly can.