If you actually, you know, read me, I very rarely go on about how much better anything in ROH is than WWE or TNA except consistent match quality and consistency within stories. Those aren’t debatable. I’m an English teacher and I know how people recognize and present stories. ROH’s booker and wrestlers simply take more pride and put more effort into that than WWE. Do I need you to like ROH? Absolutely not. I think you should try it, just as I tried it, PWG, Shimmer, WWE, TNA, CMLL, NOAH, DDT and so on. You admitted you won’t try ROH, yet you’d rather watch WWE and TNA instead. More power to you, just don’t click the link to my column titled ROH WEEKLY!!! next time then. I mean, really.

Let’s hit your list:

1. If you don’t like longer wrestling matches, ROH isn’t for you. Why would you even watch it?

2. Enjoy blind faith, I prefer thinking.

3. The way to allay that suspicion would be to see some Danielson matches. It isn’t just us praising the guy. Everyone from Ross to Lance Storm to half of Japan has creamed over the guy. He’s trained by Michaels and Regal and his work is a mixture of both. You can say “oh noes” all you want, but until you watch… except you won’t watch, so why even form an uneducated opinion?

4. Sports Entertainment has a different audience than wrestling. Red is not blue. Next.

5. Try ROH live if you want to mark out. People who’ve never seen wrestling do. It’s actually pretty cool.

I have a Wii too. It is awesome. If you don’t like hearing about ROH, don’t click the columns that you know are about it. Obviosly, others do, so I’ll keep writing them.

Enjoy the Greatest hits DVDs. Besides Stars of Honor, they’re great, but before you waste your money, consider if you can stand matches that long (20-30 mins mostly). If you can’t, you’re just going to be back here writing more of this.

Vin asked me to reply (and he’s a hero, so…) otherwise I had sworn off pathetic attempts at attention by our own writers, so here we are. I really enjoy your writing. Cut the shit and we can be friends.

ROH fans kind of have to brag about it. Fans that have never heard of indy promotions aren’t gonna get excited if we say “Oh, uh yeah…Danielson had a good match. If you ever have 20 bucks to spare, buy this show. You might like it, I guess…”

That isn’t going to interest anyone. I can understand that you feel annoyed by all the ROH talk, but their lack of advertising and national deals outside of the Best Ofs in FYE or Best Buy aren’t helping. Word of mouth is one of the biggest advertisements it has.

ROH’s niche IS for the workrate marks, but I think you might like Larry Sweeney since you said you like Sports Entertainment.

Finally, most hype and excessive t-bagging usually stems from the elitist jerks at the official ROH forums. I hate to plug another site in your column, but if you ever want to see a better overall look at the indy world, I’d check out http://thecoolkidstable.net.

As a fan of old school NWA Mid-Atlantic, I thought I’d really dig ROH, but I don’t. You hit the nail on the head BC, hearing all the talk really sucks.

BTW, spelling error - “Never mind that WWE’s exciting again for the first time in years, do to the roster shakeups and…” don’t you mean DUE to?

Damn, a Music major calling out an English major… sad.

You had me, then you lost me. First of all, kudos to mentioning Matt Fraction, as that made me laugh out loud (although he is pretty awesome). Generally, I agree that people blow ROH WAY out of proportion, and Aaron and I have lots of fun conversations about it, but we typically agree on things more or less (although I must say that the Marafuji/Quackenbush match you suggested to me, Aaron? Disappointing…).

However, I think there’s places for everyone and, to a degree, ROH NEEDS people to scream from the mountaintops, because so many people don’t know about it. Is it all gold? Sweet lord, no. I’ve been to two ROH shows live and seen a DVD or two, and there’s some great stuff, but there are plenty of clunkers, just like the mainstream stuff that you love so much.

I don’t think ROH fans should shut up, but I will admit, as someone who primarily watches WWE, that I feel like people treat me like an idiot because I don’t follow ROH as much. However, as a writer on a wrestling site, you should try to see what people do like about these other groups, and check out an ROH match when you get a chance. They’re certainly not all good (the Briscoes are best if you shut your brain off and just watch the fireworks), but you owe it to yourself to be intellectual, and not incendiary, y’dig?

[...] week both Brad Curran and Andy Wheeler had quite a few comments about ROH. I’ve decided to discuss each and every [...]

Wow. Just wow. The short response to an article like this one should be: Why the hell have you written it in the first place? Think about it: you don’t like ROH. You don’t watch ROH. You don’t think you should watch ROH. Practically, you have nothing to do with ROH, yet you chose to write about this “nothing” in such an insulting and arrogant fashion to make even otherwise quiet people (like myself, who haven’t posted a comment on ANY other wrestling-related English or American website ever)react and respond. Now that might prove one of your points, well, if getting a reaction was indeed one of them.

Alright, that’s the basic problem with the article, let’s see the more irritating ones. The first thing that annoys me nowadays are columnists who think it’s important to brag about what kind of degree they have or what kind of school they are attending at the moment. How on Earth THAT has anything to do with wrestling is beyond me. Guess what - I have a degree too, but I’m not gonna tell you anymore about that because there’s simply no need for it. Last time I checked this was a wrestling site, not the American Philosophical Quarterly.

The mark/smark debate is another thing that bothers me when it comes to reading such writings. The author obviously considers himself a “smark” (though I guess he’ll be the first one to deny that - it’s another pointless trend these days…), lecturing those moronic ROHbots about why and how wrestling should be enjoyed and interpreted. It’s not quantum physics, it’s wrestling. Or sports entertainment, if you prefer. People go out there, pretend to fight believable enough for the viewer to be able to suspend disbelief. That’s all there is to it. And the drama - which obviously plays a larger part in companies like WWE and TNA, because a) they have the financials to produce over-the-top angles and b) they have mainstream TV exposure - and they want to suck in as many viewers as they can on a weekly basis. Now that wasn’t a revelation for any of you, was it?
ROH has less drama and pyro and whatnot because they don’t have enough money for all that - and because they have a marginal, yet rather vocal fanbase that watches them mainly because of the in-ring activities. But isn’t ROH over-the-top in it’s own way? Well of course it is - Age of the Fall waging war on the whole damn world sounds rather unreal and unbeliavable; Delirious manages to talk mostly gibberish and “masked man language” - which doesn’t sound all that intellectual. Yet, magically, it’s all working. It’s working because they back it up with the kind of action an ROH fan (I refuse to call them ROHbots) desires from a wrestling show to deliver. Once again, it’s that simple. Was ECW over-the-top in it’s heyday? Hell, they were the epitome of being over-the-top - because it was an alternative to the product the major companies offered those days. Today, ROH is that alternative. I’m not going to expand on that any further, because this has already gone on long enough - now let’s review the major points of the article, shall we?

1.) WWE and/or TNA is cheaper. Amen. You have the right to choose, I believe nobody’s holding you at gunpoint every time you happen upon an ROH DVD and threatens you with blowing your brains out if you don’t buy it. And besides undermining the whole concept of being “critical” (you know, the part where you have to actually KNOW something about the thing you’re criticizing), this first point really isn’t an argument. The logical conclusion to that should be something like “Following ROH is more expensive than following WWE or TNA, THEREFORE ROH is worse.” That doesn’t seem like a causal relation to me.

2.) Being a WWE-Mark (there’s your mandatory counter-confession) is fine with me. I’ve been watching WWE since I was a little kid too - and I still watch their shows today. I still LIKE and ENJOY watching them today. I also watch TNA. And I watch ROH too. And CZW. And NOAH. And Dragon Gate. And wXw. What’s the point? You like WWE and TNA, I guess we’ve had that pretty much figured out from the first sentence of the article. Emphasizing it again is perfectly useless, not to mention the fact that liking WWE and TNA does not imply that one has to despise the indies, and vice versa.

3.) Not being a workrate-fetishist is also fine with me - most of the time I can fully enjoy even a potential trainwreck if it has a story to tell and is booked to at least attempt to be entertaining. But then again, taking a shot at Danielson and the Briscoes BECAUSE they are very good workers seems to me to be insult for the sake of insulting. And again, I have to ask the question: how do you even know that they are good workers? Because everyone is “holding down shift and typing 8 furiously”? The whole article is targetted at those people and is trying to make fun of them - and now all of a sudden they become the source of reference? If they are such blithering idiots, then why do you believe them? Oh, alright, you don’t believe them - you’re suspicious. Yet you don’t want to find out whether you agreed with them or not - you said that you’re not watching indy matches. Being suspicious generally involves a certain kind of behavior - the kind when you try to investigate whether there are any grounds for said suspicion in the first place. If you refuse to do that, then you’re not being suspicious - you just don’t give a sh*t. And even that is perfectly fine, right until you start raving about it and presenting that approach as somehow being superior.

4.) Enjoying the kind of comedy the WWE offers is also a matter of tastes - and it’s too bad, because you can’t rationalize taste. Believe it or not, I myself even like some of the lame jokes I hear on WWE TV, and I can’t really formulate an impressive argument on why that is so. If you had entitled your article “Why I like WWE and TNA” and managed to get rid of the superfluous indy-bashing overtone, there wouldn’t be any problems with anything you said. Chances are you wouldn’t have garnered the same kind of attention either, which once again might be the key feature.

5.) And here, at point number five is where the articles really turns from being a rather long rant about the companies you like or don’t like into an insulting diatribe with a “just-so-cause”. So expect the same kind of response here.
Jealous, ha? With an analogy presented to resemble the way a smart, grown up and responsible adult (you) is longing for the days of being a stupid, don’t-know-any-better, bubble-blowing child (anyone who likes ROH). How anyone should accept that as a sincere jealousy is hard for me to imagine. Once again, it’s nothing more than conceit and arrogance veiled rather thinly - and for no apparent reason. ROH has done it’s fair share of presenting evidence why their style of wrestling can be enjoyed and beloved by those who seek something else than what they can get from the “big two”. You claim that to be an overstatement. So the onus is not on them - it’s on you to provide the reasons why. And ranting about their product based solely on your disapproval of their fans’ behavior proves to be a category-mistake. You may very well have reasons why you don’t like their WRESTLING - but when you say you don’t even watch them, it’s hard to feel convinced. It feels more like a hatefilled tirade of a bitter person who hasn’t done his homework.

Well, that was quite long… If there are indeed people who managed to read the whole thing, many thanks go out to them. And if anyone wants to raise any objections, they are more than welcome to do so right here.

kliq

Dude writes a column about not wanting to watch ROH.

People get up in arms about the idea of someone not wanting to watch ROH.

Dude chuckles to himself.

At the very least Brad deserves credit for not pirating the shows.

I guess missing the point is the flavor of the week… Why do I write a column on something I’m not watching and I’m not planning to watch - just to proclaim that it sucks? I don’t watch MMA, I’ve seen some matches but I figured it’s not my style. Should I write a column that doesn’t offer anything besides the proclamation that “MMA sucks”? No, I think I shouldn’t. Because these are the things that manage to piss people off in the first place - NOT the idea that someone doesn’t want to watch ROH. I guess I made that perfectly clear in my comment, but I understand that it happens to be quite long.

So this should count as a summary: The problem is NOT with the idea but with the way it is presented. Columnists should at least attempt to make legitimate arguments, not just state that “I hate xyz, because it sucks”. Sorry, that’s not an argument…

Oh, and on giving credit: I guess he hasn’t stolen his XBOX either, nor has he ever attempted to murder his neighbor. These things and the fact that he’s against downloading have the following in common: they have nothing to do with the main story told in the article.

Iain,

I am not “up in arms” regarding Brad’s opinion of ROH. If he gave ROH a shot and didn’t like it, so be it. If he doesn’t want to give them a shot, that’s ok too.

However his thoughts about what sort of fan I am for liking ROH are way off, and he doesn’t know me from Adam, so I wonder what drove his claims about me. I’ve MET Aaron and Bones, and chatted online extensively with Aaron (I’m doing so now, in fact) so I know them a bit.

Also, I’ve written several ROH columns that weren’t blind love-fests, but I do happen to enjoy the product a great deal. Since I write about wrestling every week, I chose to focus more on the things about my favorite hobby that I LIKE, versus the parts I don’t like. Life’s short, and I’m tired of being jaded and bitter.

I don’t enjoy WWE and TNA anymore, and that’s MY business - I only have so many hours a week to devote to wrestling, so why waste them on a product that isn’t for me anymore? So I’m basically just leaving them alone in favor of the pro wrestling promotions I do appreciate.

I generally enjoy ROH, FIP, CHIKARA, etc, so that’s where I focus my attention now. I don’t believe ROH is better than anything ever, nor that a fan who doesn’t praise ROH is stupid. I DO think that a lot of fans of “pro wrestling” who aren’t into “sportz entertainment” might like ROH if they give them a chance, and I’d love to see that happen.

But why should Brad care either way about my, Aaron’s, or Bones’ fandom? The only good reason to write his column was to stir the pot, and clearly by all the comments here and columns writen by his collegues, his column accomplished its goal. For an editorial columnist (even a volunteer one) I believe that was a shortsighted goal.

Anyone can get a rise out of somebody else. So what? You think that’s clever writing? It isn’t. Any incendiary comment can get people banging away on their keyboards in response. Big deal.

As Aaron clearly articulated, if somebody doesn’t want to read about ROH, then I’d recommend they don’t click on my columns (WHEN they are ROH-related that is - my last five posts were NOT).

Kliq,

Simply outstanding. You presented your arguments clearly and made a great case. Thank you - good stuff.

- Vinny

Methinks the gentlemen protest too much. Would anybody react so passionately had the article been about not wanting to watch WWE or TNA? Doubtful. Still, the world turns.

Missing the point Iaiain. The article wasn’t “hey I don’t want to watch ROH!” It was “I don’t want to watch ROH so you shouldn’t either, and if you do, shut-up about it!” There’s a huge difference.

Only if you think that the statement “I don’t want to watch WWE/TNA so you shouldn’t either, and if you do, shut-up about it!” would provoke the same response.

It would not, and you know why? You simply can NOT get that passionate about midgets, strippers, and crappy stories with worse wrestling.

Man, I can get passionate about the sucktitude of Batman & Robin or the way the government fails to provide adequate benefits for the elderly. There are no particulars for passion, nor are there definites.

Can you get passionate about boring TV shows, short, bad matches, lame attempts at comedy, silly storylines, and a parade of has-beens?

Wow… if you did this for web site hits, kudos sir. lol

Of course! And fanboy elitism too, that’s always a winner.

Am I a fanboy, Iain? Is being TOO positive about pro wrestling a sin in the IWC these days? I simply got tired of hating what I was watching, and found something else to watch.

Fanboys are awesome, yet this thread now has as little awesomeness as nerdish debates over what the best Star Trek was, so let’s call it a day and admit everyone’s an awesome nerd.

[...] had time to consider that ROH takedown piece I was itching to write for months but had the good sense to put off until I had one of my bi-monthly [...]

Okay, seriously - the theme of the column is “why I refuse to watch ROH”. And the reason is: “Some of you guys talk about it too much.”

There’s not even an attempt to weigh the ROH product on its own merits - it’s just simply a knee-jerk reaction of “y’all kind of annoy me, so I’m going to jab you with a pointed stick here.” This is an intellectually lazy column, and an obvious attempt to get the ROH-bots riled up. (Of course, it worked).

If you work for IP, you can get into an RoH show for free, so the financial argument is moot. Outside of that, it’s confrontation for the sake of attention. And if you refuse to watch good wrestling because other people are telling you that you should, then I think it says more about you than anyone else.

[...] on Pulse Wrestling’s Real-Time Coverage for WWE: The Great American Bash 2008Steve Murray on Confessions of a Sport Entertainment Fan: Why I Refuse To Watch ROHPaul Marshall on Rasslin’ Roundtable - WWE Great American Bash [...]

Outstanding points, Mr. Murray!

I’d watch ROH, but they never show up here. :-/ But if they ever do show up, I’m totally there.

[...] never been able to work up that kind of enthusiasm about anything. I touched on that a little here in the context of pro wrestling, actually, and yes that was a shameless attempt at cross promotion, [...]