Quick Thoughts #4: You Can’t Manufacture Special Moments

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.