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ROH Sold to Sinclair Broadcasting Group


Sean Liska

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I was watching an April 2010 tag between Kings of Wrestling and The Briscoes, two teams I generally like. But I thought this match was pretty weak. In particular, the opening matwork was embarrassing. And the moves just felt sloppy and ill-designed, with an overall lack of drama.

 

It was on Will's 2010 set, so obviously some people thought it was pretty great. I am wondering if I missed something - maybe some feud between them that helped provide context? Or maybe it got better, but my eyes and brain had already glazed over?

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Then he throws in some bull plop about not having Kevin Kelly as annoncer because of some youth movement crap. The same logic that lead to WWE trying to replace Jim Ross for years.

 

I just think it's funny that the company based on WRESTLING IS SERIOUS BUSINESS has as an announcer the guy who spent most of his WWF tenure being called a hermaphrodite by the Rock. I guess Todd Pettingill's price was too high.

 

 

Also as far as the people who are claiming ROH is the #2 company in the world, it struck a familiar chord with me. I'm a baseball fan, and as you can tell by the words under my username, I'm in Pittsburgh. If you're at all familiar with sports, you know what that means. If you're not, here's the condensed version: The Pirates are the local baseball team, they have been around for 125 years and had a rich history of winning up until the mid 90s. They have had 18 losing years in a row, some of them have been quite horrendous. This season they have a new coaching staff and are off to a better start, they still probably won't finish with a winning season but there's reason to be excited for the first time in decades.

 

What does this have to do with anything wrestling related? In my opinion there's a lot of lapsed wrestling fans who were turned off by the end of WCW and are looking for anything to get excited over that could possibly give real competition to WWE. Even though this deal has obvious flaws to anyone looking at it objectively for more than 2 seconds, as stated people want to believe.

 

You take someone who's still a fan but had all the passion beaten out of them by numerous years of what they consider a substandard presentation, and they will see reason for excitement in nearly anything that could possibly change the status quo.

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I just think it's funny that the company based on WRESTLING IS SERIOUS BUSINESS has as an announcer the guy who spent most of his WWF tenure being called a hermaphrodite by the Rock. I guess Todd Pettingill's price was too high.

If you listen to Kelly's shoot interview, you'll realize he's actually a real wrestling fan, was a big NWA fan and thought WWF was bullshit.

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Do the writers grasp that ROH programing is 1-2 hours a week out of:

 

21 hours of primetime programing

126 hours roughly of overall non-infomercial programing

168 hours of total program

 

It's a drop in the bucket. It would be like NBC buying the WWE and claiming it was going to be the cornerstone of turning their network around. It's still just 4 hours of programing.

 

John

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Simple answer: yes.

 

How many ROH wrestlers are under a written or exclusive contract? They have lost nearly all of the talent they have ever really groomed before. Maybe Aries will come back?

 

I don't know much about the new parent owner of ROH, but I am remaining optimistic about their future, although what I do know of Sinclair Broadcasting is not favorable. Hopefully they can pull it off, though. I also hope someone teaches Davey that moves are meant to be sold.

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Has the claim about Silken being a creepy predator been substantiated? It's the first time I recall hearing it. Not saying I wouldn't believe it, I've known at least three or four gay indy promoters who did indeed proposition wrestlers on their rosters, but ROH would be by far the biggest and most expensive company that was run in such an inappropriate way.

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Has the claim about Silken being a creepy predator been substantiated? It's the first time I recall hearing it. Not saying I wouldn't believe it, I've known at least three or four gay indy promoters who did indeed proposition wrestlers on their rosters, but ROH would be by far the biggest and most expensive company that was run in such an inappropriate way.

Larry Sweeney made claims on DOI and elsewhere during a manic period about Cary but expressed deep regret about it later.

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Wasn't the rumor at one time that Luke Williams and Cary were an item?

 

If anything, it seems every promotion Gabe's involved in seems to end up with a lot of young prettyboy type wrestlers who seem to be at the core of rumors like this *cough* *cough* Dragon Gate USA *cough* *cough*.

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Wasn't the rumor at one time that Luke Williams and Cary were an item?

I think that is still the case. Not a loose rumour at all pretty much fact just not reported. There has numerous radio interviews where Luke is being interview and Cary is in the background with phone getting past to Cary or visa versa.

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$2M over the course of 7 years... say a quarter million a year. That's not a shitload per year. It's not chump change, but not horrible. Wonder if that's increased over the past few years: higher burn rate since the economy when in the shitter.

 

Think of it in another direction...

 

Given all the money that the WWE makes (christ, just focus on the amount th goes into Vince's pocket each quarter in the dividend payments), the WWE could fund a ROH on each coast as "live" programing for a new WWE Channel and it probably would pay for itself in terms of ratings and advertising sales. I'm not saying *anyone else* could do it. But under the WWE umbrella... not too hard at all. Especially if they're smart on keeping costs reasonable rather than having it a money pit for old, washed up wrestlers both running it and also in the ring.

 

Granted there are arguments against it: there's the concept that you don't want say a Hero & Claudio on you channel in a small time promotion and instead you want to save them coming in to Raw or SmackDown as "new" talent. I'm not totally against that notion.

 

But...

 

The WWE could probably run a very smart cost effective ROH and PWG.

 

John

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Has the claim about Silken being a creepy predator been substantiated? It's the first time I recall hearing it. Not saying I wouldn't believe it, I've known at least three or four gay indy promoters who did indeed proposition wrestlers on their rosters, but ROH would be by far the biggest and most expensive company that was run in such an inappropriate way.

Well, there's AAA under Pena and IWA Puerto Rico under Jovica. Those would be bigger.

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  • 5 weeks later...

Listening to Cary Silkin's interview for 411Mania, Gary Juster (via Jim Cornette) was the conduit to Joe Koff (who's a big fan) and Sinclair Broadcasting. Juster had been wanting to get back into the business for awhile but didn't know how, and he had the contacts inside Sinclair Broadcasting. Apparently the deal was about 18 months in the making, which makes sense as they announced their debut for Charlotte that Juster was involved in promoting in January 2010.

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