[quote name='Halo05']Hooray for Necro Butcher.
The 2008 DVD sets were mentioned earlier but I don't recall seeing release dates so thanks for that. I'm torn on several of them. I mean, Edge? I like his work but I really don't think he's done enough to warrant his own DVD set. I'll probably wind up getting it simply to see what is said about the whole Lita/Matt Hardy/Edge situation.[/quote]
Just wait for a YouTube/DailyMotion dump of the "documentary" part of it, as they'll probably spend 3-5 minutes discussing it. Besides, that whole feud started off hotter than hell and fizzled out even faster, once they turned Matt Hardy into "DDP/Kanyon" to Edge's "Undertaker/Kane."
I'm probably most psyched for the Rock and Stone Cold ones. They're not my favorite wrestlers but if they put in the right interviews and matches, they could fill in some holes in my collection. For example, I've still never seen Stone Cold's first World Title win. I'm also sick of relying on Youtube for Rock interview moments.
Too much of their stuff is stuck right in the middle of the WWF Attitude era. While I can live with the 3-4 PPVs in the Wrestlemania/Royal Rumble box sets, I can't imagine an entire set with all that goddamned "WWF" blurring (save, for instance, for Rock's SSeries debut, Stone Cold's feud with Savio Vega, and the like).
[quote name='Zen Davis']Well RoH is branding themselves as a professional wrestling sports endeavor rather than sports entertainment and hence they are going one step further to seperate themselves from WWE and TNA? Not making excuses. Just continuing discussion.[/quote]
That's quite true. I like the fact that it's treated as a "sport," and for those who follow the feuds, every match matters. Every match is important, and every match is given to the performers to work with what their capabilities are. Just like UFC, where a PPV might have a dog-ass main event (I don't follow UFC, but I'm sure one of you can come up with a 30-second arm bar main event match, or something similarly disappointing); but there's little chance that every match on the card is a complete dud. Knowing that, UFC fans follow most of the fighters enough to say, "oh, that Rich Franklin match blah blah" or "did you see the opener?"
They still enjoy it, even if the best match of the night wasn't the final one, or the one they paid money to see. Most importantly, I *believe* UFC is doing better than WWE in PPV buys right now, which shoots to hell the theory that the main event must outshine everything else on the card.
That said, while ROH is trying to bring back respect for professional wrestling, and treat it like a sport, they're still wrestlers. The entire locker room's style will be forced to change if they move to a spot where guys are wrestling more than 6-8 times in one month. While I think WWE-style wrestling can be vastly improved (when was the last time you saw two guys make a collar-and-elbow tieup MATTER!?!?!?!), it's also done in a way to protect guys who have 4-5 matches per week. ROH should be more forward-thinking and do the same. At the end of the day, it's still professional wrestling, and not a sport. I like what they have to offer, but not if it becomes a place where top-card guys feel they have to drop people on their necks to get over or keep viewers. Bret Hart, for as much of a princess as he is, had amazing matches over the years; the same of Flair. Neither, as far as I can tell, felt the need to "work stiff" and still did what they did.
ROH wrestlers who need to work stiff to have a good match aren't, then, IMO, very good wrestlers. They're just fighters who are taking a pratfall at the end of a match.
It's wrestling: it doesn't NEED to be real. Perception is more important than reality. Remember when we all thought Shawn Michaels wasn't in on the Montreal Screwjob? It was 6 years or so before he came clean on that, wasn't it? And the Matt Hardy/Edge feud may have had elements of being real, but it sucked as a feud.
I think their passion for making the promise of what RoH is reach its fullest is going to cause a large number of these guys to end up self-destructing. I think you're right about it and it's the reason I got banned from the RoH board when I threw a shitfest about Dragon going to fight Morishima at the Man Up PPV even though it was only weeks out after his supposed surgery.
Interesting. I'll be honest when I say that Danielson's eye angle was so well done that it doesn't matter if it was real or fake; isn't that all we ultimately demand of our wrestlers: don't tell me it's fake. Santino shouldn't be having interviews with magazines in his (whatever his real name is) persona. He should be more like Delirious, or Awesome Kong.
But despite all that, it sounds to me like you were banned for reacting exactly the same way they wanted people to react; so what gives? Were you banned for being a mark (like we all should be), or is there more to the story?
However, it does provide a thrilling experience as a live spectator so it does cause for a skewed perspective on things. I want to continue to have the thrills that I do watching RoH live but I want these guys to be able to walk and think right when they're 40.
The latter is contingent upon the former, but the former does not necessarily lead to the latter. Sure, there have been numerous "wrestling deaths" (an ambiguous term if I've ever heard one, as I challenge anyone who thinks they know what a "wrestling death" is to tell me if Mike Awesome's suicide was "wrestling related" or not), but Flair's still got it, Tully Blanchard always appears to be doing well (even if he's an evangelical nutjob like Nikita Koloff - another guy who's still healthy). Injuries happen, and the way ROH guys wrestle it seems like an inveitability; meanwhile, guys wrestled very well and very believably for decades and aren't all broken down and crippled like Dynamite Kid.
I think you can be thrilled and I also think that wrestlers can be healthy when they're older.
One last push to try and reach the Hall of Fame? Shawn Michaels he's not. Hell, Terry Funk he's not.
k Foley and Flair, now that'd be an announcing duo I'd pay to hear do a show together!
finish, which at least built off of Regal being berated earlier, and fits Regal wanting to please Vince, which should happen since he cost HHH his Rumble shot tonight. 
