[2003-08-16-ROH-Bitter Friends, Stiffer Enemies] CM Punk vs Samoa Joe

[ohtani's jacket]

This planted the seeds for their famous trilogy of matches by showing that Punk could be competitive with Joe. I don't have a lot of time for Punk's straight edge gimmick, and I see him as a loose and scrappy worker, but he has good ring sense. He's a much better matchup with Joe than you'd expect. That's largely because of how inventive he is. I haven't really enjoyed Joe steamrolling over folks even if they try to make the matches seem competitive, and I'm looking forward to seeing someone step up as the Sting to his Vader. I'm not sure what state Joe was in physically, but I kind of feel like an epic world title fight is something from ROH at this point in time. I haven't followed the promotion all that closely, but the general impression I get is one of second year growing pains. US wrestling in general seems to be down from 2002 while Japanese wrestling is up.