Pro Wrestling Chronicle

John Philapavage is back with a commentary on ROH and PPV, and what lessons he has learned from watching Gabe Sapolsky and his mentor, Paul Heyman, book a wrestling darling a decade apart. Is this the end of ROH or “Money For Nothing”? It costs nothing to

Money For Nothing?

Sunday I finished up the long overdue ROH Apologist column and finally got it up on the site. I wrote out three topics that I hadn’t talked about in that column to focus on for this one, promised to hit the site within the week. Sunday I never would have guessed what my lead was going to be Friday. Not in a million years. And probably more to my amazement, after analyzing the news, to my own surprise, I’m actually in favor of the move.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Ring of Honor has inked a six show, year long Pay-Per-View and Video on Demand deal. It’s all over our site, and it’s the talk of many other prominent sites we commentate on (after we send you there for news and hope you come back). The deal will land them on your PPV provider, cable or dish, July 1st, but will be taped May 12th in NYC.

Now anyone who knows me knows I’ve been an avid follower of ROH since before the first ever show. It’s my “home” promotion in more ways then one. Not only has it been my favorite since its first show five-plus years ago, but it took me just under an hour to get to the first venue they ran monthly. In it’s first year I once tried to find a building that would affordably house the company in my home area of Allentown, PA, in the hopes of helping my new favorite company grow (You’d be amazed at how impossible it is to get buildings or draw crowds in an area of roughly 700,000 people). And somewhere I have those 12-14 episodes of ROH TV on VHS tape, courtesy of the old trusty Channel 48 –WGTW.

As big a fan as I was and continue to be, I absolutely HATED when people argued that ROH needed to be on TV or PPV to be relevant. Let younger fans scoff, I thought. Let them believe that being on national TV or on PPV - status masturbation for the fans as far as I was concerned – was the end all and be all. Perception was not reality, and I felt that any fan that believed the company was irrelevant compared to a TNA or nonsense start up was just plain stupid.

I still do. I don’t think those fans really care about the business, wrestlers, or wrestling companies, because they don’t bother to educate themselves on the facts, and yet they walk around talking about wrestling. I know, I use to be an ECW fan.

For those that remember, there was an ECW before WWE. It was on Sport Channel Philadelphia in the mid to late 90s and it was the best kept secret in wrestling. It was, much like ROH is to this day, the little engine that could with the passionate fan base and high standards. It was the Internet/Newsletter crowd before and during the explosion of those two carriers of information. Ask Paul Siegfried, our RAW Ramblings man, about ECW. Paul and I use to watch ECW 3 times in one week, because that’s how many times it aired. Ten years ago, when ECW’s first PPV finally aired, Paul and I paid a kid from school w/ Request PPV on his cable to tape a VHS copy of ECW Barely Legal for us because neither of us, being 15 and 16, had access to PPV. I sat at home that night and watched ECW’s first PPV on scrambled TV for 3 hours, marking out to the commentary of Joey Styles, like our grandfathers listening to a radio call of a Baseball Game.

Or ask our own Gene Boyer, who sat in the audience at the famed ECW Arena a few years before me. Gene saw almost every famous angle in the Arena, from 1994 to 1999. I thought PPV was going to show the whole world that ECW was the greatest thing ever. And two years later, I thought national TV would save that same company. This is why I know how stupid those people are: I was one of them.

So when people say ROH should be on PPV or national TV, I tell them, after years of following the business side of wrestling, that the economics of doing that would crush the company within a year. When they say ROH should be on national TV, I point to TNA, who derives no income for rights fees or sponsorship from Spike, and uses TV to promote PPV to a small audience which in turn becomes 20-40 thousand PPV buyers. They tape TV in front of less then 1000 people and still have yet to run affective house shows after being on TV for well over a year. To date, that business model has lost TNA and parent company Panda Energy over 35 million dollars. But TNA is so much bigger - and therefore better - then ROH, a small profit company. So I’m told by a few high school kids.

So when Gene Boyer e-mailed me and mentioned ROH had signed a deal, I thought that was it. My small little territory that had escaped from 1980s NWA was headed for bust. Then the details came in. Taped shows. No costly satellite feeds. A shorter two hour block. Video on Demand, to be accessed anytime, day or night. A longer DVD version, edited at the same time. The same production costs. A vehicle to promote DVD, live events, and the website.

I realized this wasn’t Heyman handling everything without a plan. This was still the ROH of Cary Silken and Gabe Sapolsky. One year. Only six events. No real overhead. An easy to exit contract. Clarity on the TNA situation. Wrestlers under a simple contract that doesn’t threaten there own ability to make money. I feel good about this one. It doesn’t place the booking on peaking on LIVE PPV shows each month. It leaves the option to show two hours of tape of the Punk vs. Joe Trilogy, if that’s what they want to do to make money. It’s a revenue stream w/o much risk. And with little changing and the emphasis staying on the product, I can breath easy as a fan again.

Paul Heyman took over ECW in September 1993. at five years and three months ECW was headed towards it’s second anniversary on PPV. They had lost Sandman and Bam Bam Bigelow in recent months, as well as bombed on their version of Wrestlemania, November to Remember 1998. They were only 4 months removed from there most critically acclaimed PPV, Heatwave ’98, and 10 months from appearing on national TV, weekly. They existed in the middle of a wrestling boom. Yet, they were losing millions of dollars.

Ring of Honor has lost a million of dollars over the years. They’ve also made a million dollars. They’ve just done so slowly. Five years and three months into his reign as booker, Gabe Sapolsky finds himself much like his mentor. He’s headed for PPV, the talk of the business, the “genius” of his time. But Sapolsky is going to come out of this a year later with six PPV under his belt with something his mentor did not have - a financially viable company. I’m sure he’s grateful for the lessons.