BRM Reviews ROH Survival of the Fittest 2017: Night 3

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Big Red Machine
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BRM Reviews ROH Survival of the Fittest 2017: Night 3

Post by Big Red Machine » Dec 22nd, '21, 18:26

ROH Survival of the Fittest 2017: Night 3 (11/19/2017)- Oklahoma City, OK


JAY LETHAL vs. JOSH WOODS- 7.25/10
Woods absolutely TOOK IT to Lethal early on and had him down early, but Lethal was able to overcome it, come back, and win. This was a great showing for Woods. Yes, he was in there with an excellent worker in Jay Lethal, but Woods help up his own end of things with his body language and facial expressions.

CHEESEBURGER vs. GREGORY JAMES (w/his nameless, faceless follower)- no rating, meh segment
They wrestled for a bit until the Briscoes came out. Ian was upset because they apparently no-showed last night’s show in Dallas to fly to Philadelphia and beat up Tommy Dreamer because they’re feuding with Bully Ray. They attacked both guys for the double-DQ. They laid James out with a 3-D and said that they put Bully Ray out of wrestling and the 3-D was now their move. If only that had been true.
The Briscoes then cut some generic heel promos on the fans. Mark was the highlight for me, simply because I didn’t remember that he had this sort of thing in him (“I get confused every time I come to Oklahoma, because all the women have facial hair and the men act like effeminate little bitches!”).
Cheeseburger crawled back into the ring, so Jay challenged him to a match, resulting in…

CHEESEBURGER vs. JAY BRISCOE (w/Mark Briscoe)- 0.5/10
We got the New Japan special where the heel will choke the babyface right in front of the referee and the referee will count to four, but instead of proceeding to five and then disqualifying the heel, and the referee will just stop counting and try to pull the heel’s arm off of the babyface’s throat.
Burger got one burst of offense at the beginning and one short one at the end, but mostly this was just Jay beating Cheeseburger up. The live crowd was into Cheeseburger enough that decided not to give this a DUD, but by this point Cheeseburger had way outstayed his welcome with me, so beating him up did nothing to make me dislike Jay.
And speaking of sticking around long past your expiration date and not getting heat, next we got a…

DAWGZ PROMO- terrible
Cartoon bullsh*t from an undercard heel act with zero credibility, who do nothing but waste time on the shows. And this gimmick in particular comes off as the most low-rent bullsh*t stuck-in-the-nineties indy stereotype you’ve ever seen. This is what people who don’t like pro wrestling envision when they think of pro wrestling.
Anyway, Rhett wants some “real competition,” so we get…

RHETT TITUS vs. MARTY SCURLL- 3/10
Will Ferrara was on commentary for this match. Uch.
There was a lot of gaga early on. At one point Marty just turned his back to Rhett and did his stupid arm-flapping thing… and despite having already sucker-punched Marty once, Rhett responded to Marty turning his back to him by getting frustrated, as if this somehow meant that Marty was unable to be attacked.
Marty eventually started working on Rhett’s arms and got control… and then spent OVER TWENTY SECONDS doing his stupid chicken wing dance instead of just going for his finisher… and when he finally went to go lock on the hold, Rhett had recovered and dropkicked him in the face. How could anyone want to root for this clown?
Rhett took over for a bit after that, and Marty then had to cheat to get the advantage back. The referee caught him using illegal leverage, and (supposed) babyface Marty then started to argue with the referee, which let Rhett get the advantage AGAIN… and then Marty just countered a move into the crossface chicken wing for the win.

CODY FLAPS HIS GUMS BEFORE THE MATCH- HORRENDOUS!
We start off with stupid gaga about Silas “not having a good time” at this show because Silas’ one-note gimmick is that he’s grumpy, and Cody thinks he needs a hug. Once we were done with that crap, Cody told the crowd that he “wanted so badly for Oklahoma City to get an ROH World Title match,” but then he says he could have given BCB that title shot if BCB had won SOTF, but BCB lost his qualifier.
BCB snatches the mic away and gets some cheap heat by insulting Oklahoma City, then says that Silas will win SOTF and get the title shot and win the title from Cody. He says that Cody’s stupid ring gimmick is worth more to Cody than the title, so he wants Cody to put that on the line so he can pawn it off and buy beer. Cody says he is willing to put the belt on the line if the crowd wants, they all cheered, so Cody agreed.
Where to even start with this sh*t?
Cody claims he wanted to give Oklahoma City a title shot but was told he couldn’t. Presumably, this would be by ROH management. If this is true, it makes management a heel for no reason, and also makes absolutely no sense in storyline, as the storyline had been that ROH management wanted the title off of Cody because he insisted on going around and defending it in other promotions, and “oh no! What if he loses the title to someone who isn’t under contract?!”
Based on this, not only does it make no sense that ROH management wouldn’t be ecstatic to have Cody offer to defend the title against someone who is under ROH contract, but the mere fact that Cody got these outside title defenses sanctioned even though ROH management didn’t want them shows that if he wanted to get a title defense sanctioned against management’s desires, he had the stroke to do so.
All of this points to the idea that Cody was full of sh*t here and didn’t actually want to defend the title in Oklahoma City, an idea further backed up by the fact that his reasoning for why he was told he couldn’t put the title on the line makes no f*cking sense (you can’t defend the title if there is a match for a future world title shot on the same show?). And all of that actually makes perfect sense when you remember that Cody is theoretically a heel. So if Cody is a heel, why the hell is this segment structured so that he is the guy who gets to say all of the things that make the crowd cheer, and BCB is the guy with the cheap heat line designed to get you to boo him, even if you’re the kind of person who would much rather see Silas Young as ROH World Champion than Cody Rhodes?
And then we have this stupid f*cking ring which means absolutely nothing storyline and which Cody uses to do what is supposed to be a heel schtick with… and the fans are happy to see that put on the line instead of the world title which Cody is lying to their faces about wanting to defend tonight. Wow. When Jay Briscoe said earlier that wearing a Bullet Club shirt means you can’t think for yourself, he was apparently telling the truth.
Having now wasted five minutes of everyone’s time (and another minute before the bell rang because Cody was posturing and milking the crowd’s chanting for him), we finally got around to…

SINGLES MATCH FOR CODY RHODES’ ROH WORLD TITLE RING: Cody Rhodes(c) vs. Beer City Bruiser (w/Silas Young)- 4.75/10
The rang… and then Cody stuck his hand out and insisted that BCB kiss his ring. Hey, Sinclair! How about not ringing the bell until you’ve checked the competitors for potential weapons? And if you managed to forget to check them, how about going over and ordering Cody to remove this potential weapon from his person when he starts flaunting it?
BCB spit beer that he had in his mouth (again… good job, referee) at Cody’s ring, so Cody punched him with the ring on, though it fortunately didn’t do that much damage, because we’d hate for the results of a match to be tainted by horrible refereeing incompetence and cheating. This is Ring of Honor, after all.
They go to the outside pretty much immediately, and of course Todd Sinclair makes no effort to count them out. Cody got control and rolled back into the ring, but BCB took some time on the outside to recover and get some of his “protein shake” (it’s beer) from Silas Young… and f*cking 2017 CODY RHODES had the audacity to be upset because someone else was on the outside and wouldn’t get back into the ring right away. 2017 kayfabe Cody has the same lack of self-awareness as 2021 shoot Cody. And both have massive egos that make them heels. The only difference is that 2017’s kayfabe Cody’s legion of sycophants are the fans rather than Q.T. Marshall, Brandi, and friends.
BCB finally got back into the ring… and Cody immediately rolled out, then made a big show of calling Marty Scurll out from the back to be in his corner. Cody knew who he was wrestling, and BCB came out first. He knew Silas was out there with BCB before he came to the ring, but instead of bringing Marty (or one of this other friends) out with him right then, he had to wait until the middle of the match to do so, because Cody Runnells is addicted to getting cheered by the fans, and so he will do things in his promos and matches just to get little extra pops, even if those things don’t make any sense.
Marty gives Cody a back-up, sprays cologne on him, and they have a big hug. Then he grabbed Marty and kissed him on the lips, then Marty went to the back… so that whole detour served absolutely no f*cking purpose other than to stroke Cody’s ego with some cheers from the crowd, and all at the cost of grinding the action in the match to a halt. Keep up the good work there, Space Clown.
The bell rang about five minutes ago, and the two competitors have been in the ring together for MAYBE forty-five seconds of that time, and despite this Todd Sinclair has yet to reach the count of “ONE!”
Cody finally got back into the ring, and then BCB took over by just punching him in the face. Cody took over in a few moments and sent BCB to the outside and hit him with a dive, so we’re back to the outside. Silas Young grabbed Cody’s foot as he was climbing onto the apron, so Cody jumped down to go after Silas. Colt Cabana pointed out that this is exactly why Marty going to the back was stupid.
BCB used the distraction to attack Cody and rammed his injured lower back into the apron. Todd Sinclair has still not even lifted his hand to begin trying to count them out.
They got back into the ring, where the heels cheated more. At one point, BCB took a swig of his “protein shake” and then Silas distracted the referee… but instead of just having BCB spit it in Cody’s eyes, they decided it would be a good idea for Cody to kick BCB in the stomach, resulting in BCB accidentally spitting it into Cody’s eyes, which just made Cody look like an idiot.
From that point on they had a good few minutes of back-and-forth action until Cody got the win. The kind of thing that could have made for a good match (although still not one at the level the ROH World Champion should be having) if they had used the first two thirds of the match for wrestling instead of interrupting it with gaga. For reasons that I will absolutely never understand, the crowd gave this a standing ovation. How do you give this a standing ovation but not Woods vs. Lethal (which wasn’t even worthy of such a thing, but was still miles better than this)?

MADISON RAYNE vs. DEONNA PURRAZZO- 4/10
Someone named “Jessica James” was on commentary for this match. Ian described her as a “former Women of Honor star making her return.” I looked her up on cagematch.net. She wrestled three matches for ROH the previous year, all of which were dark matches. Please don’t tell me ROH paid this nobody to be at this show and randomly do guest commentary on one match. Like 80% of the people that later-years ROH had come and do guest commentary, she said nothing interesting, did not help get over any angles, and did not give any insight that couldn’t have been given by whatever former wrestler was doing color commentary. She also had zero personality beyond “nice respectful generic babyface.”
The match went less than six minutes. Deonna controlled about 85% of it, working the arm and getting the submission victory. You can’t tell me that Madison Rayne is “one of the best in the world” and then have her tap out in six minutes.

KENNY KING PROMO- bad
He comes out dressed in street clothes and cut a promo that amounted to saying “I was too dumb to get the stitches that the doctor recommended to me after last night’s match, so the commission won’t let me wrestle tonight, so the promised title match has to be cancelled. That doesn’t paint Kenny in a very good light, but at least he was honest.
He tells the crowd he might not be cleared to wrestle, but he still wants to fight, so he is going to do commentary, and he invites any of his Final Battle challengers to come out and brawl with him at any point during the night. That sounds to me like he is needlessly endangering Ian and Colt, and that management should get him out of there because this will surely result in someone interfering in a match.
Since this is a non-PPV in Delirious-booked ROH, you won’t be shocked to learn that the man Kenny was scheduled to defend his title against tonight, Chris Sabin, hadn’t done anything even warrant being in the discussion for a title shot. In fact, he hadn’t won a singles match in OVER EIGHT MONTHS. Even worse, despite this, he had actually been on the losing end of two #1 contendership matches for singles titles in that time frame.
But let’s ignore Delirious’ laziness for the moment. Let’s pretend that Sabin actually had done something to earn this title shot, and now poor Sabin isn’t getting the title shot he earned because the champion was injured and couldn’t compete. How about letting Sabin cut a promo telling us how disappointed he is that he didn’t get the title shot he earned? That would make the title seem important.
But of course we won’t get that. This is Delirious booking. Poor Sabin doesn’t even get his title match rescheduled. In fact, the fact that Sabin was supposed to get a shot at the TV Title is never mentioned again; not by the company, and not by Sabin. So how important can this TV Title really be if someone was supposed to get a title shot but has it taken away from him through no fault of his own, and he doesn’t care enough to say anything? And how important can the title be if a supposedly worthy challenger has to have his title shot cancelled because the champion was injured and the company makes zero effort to reschedule the title shot?

CHRISTOPHER DANIELS & DALTON CASTLE SEGMENT- good
Daniels comes out and says that says that even though he lost to Cody last night, his destiny is still to become the “world heavyweight championship.” There is no heavyweight in the name of the title, and never has been.
He says that Dalton Castle is a goof who can’t beat Cody for the title, and who certainly can’t beat him. Dalton comes out with a sequined microphone. Daniels had actually done the “and if Dalton was out here right now, I’d say that to his face” bit, which was what prompted Dalton to come out, so I was terrified that he was going to go full cartoon and backtrack, but instead Daniels pointed out that he was 2-0 against Dalton, including a successful ROH World Title defense at Supercard of Honor XI earlier this year. He tried to goad Dalton into putting his Final Battle ROH World Title shot on the line… and Dalton said that he has been on a roll lately and Daniels just wrestled a Texas Deathmatch last night, so he’d be fine to put his title shot on the line tonight.
Daniels tried to back-track and say that he couldn’t do it tonight. The said that this was the last show before Final Battle, so it would have to be tonight if the title shot was going to be on the line, which doesn’t actually mesh up with the way they’ve played the TV continuity. But whichever way you go, either the wrestlers don’t know an important thing that they should know, or the announcers don’t. Neither one is good.
Dalton says he’ll let Daniels got to the back to get changed, and he will go to the back and finish his Yoga session. He turns to leave, but Daniels attacks him from behind. Todd Sinclair had come out in anticipation of the match when it looked like it was going to happen, so we got…

DALTON CASTLE vs. CHRISTOPHER DANIELS- 6.75/10
Daniels was in his street clothes for his, while Dalton was in his gear. Do wrestlers do Yoga in their gear? It’s not like Dalton was scheduled for a match that was coming up. And that, by the way, is its own issue. Obviously when you’re doing these stupid multi-day Survival of the Fittest tournaments, you can’t announce the card for the final night without giving away the results of the preceding night (or, in the case of this year, nights), but there is no excuse to not have a card kayfabe booked by the time tonight’s show starts.
You have all of these big names who you paid to come here tonight anyway (in case they had won their qualifier) and you’ve had a whole day (or, for the guys who wrestled their qualifiers on night one, two days) to book matches for them. Hell, you actually DID book matches for some of them (Lethal vs. Woods). Are you telling me that if guys like Rhett and Daniels hadn’t grabbed microphones and decided to come out here and run their mouths, you were going to pay guys like Marty Scurll and Dalton Castle and the Briscoes to show up and not wrestle?
The match itself was… fine, but certainly not the type of performance that would inspire fans going into Final Battle that Dalton was a guy who care live up to the in-ring standards expected of an ROH World Champion.

YOUNG BUCKS vs. THE KINGDOM (Vinny Marseglia & T.K. O’Ryan)- 7.5/10
Standard Young Bucks stuff for this era, with the Kingdom being competent athletic opponents, but no one who they could really do anything particularly unique or special with. The Kingdom were also a little too cartoony to come off as real threats to the Bucks.

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 2017 FINAL: Silas Young vs. Shane Taylor vs. Flip Gordon vs. Matt Taven vs. Punishment Martinez vs. Jonathan Gresham- 8/10
The first few minutes were quite great, even if they mostly ignored the tag rules. Then, after a very well executed series of dives, Taven got Flip in the ring, and had his cronies come out. They kept passing him weapons that he tried to use and Sinclair kept catching him, which just made them look like idiot (and we all know that f*cking axe will never get used like that, so why even have it)? Then Sinclair turned around to deal with the cronies and Taven just kicked Flip in the nuts… and Todd apparently saw that, too, and disqualified Taven. This could have been good if there was any sort of storyline that it was playing into, but there wasn’t. It was just a DQ in a big main event match for no reason. Then we wasted another minute in an already too-short SOTF finals on Taven throwing a temper tantrum.
Taylor and Martinez were particularly good together, although Taylor was unfortunately the next man out, eating a double superplex from Silas and Martinez, then a 450 from Flip and a Shooting Star Press from Gresham… and then one of those stupid pins where both guys pin someone even though there can only be too legal wrestlers at a time.
Then they did a spot where Gresham got on Flip’s shoulders and tried to chokeslam Martinez, which made both guys (especially Gresham) look like morons. Gresham then got chokeslammed and eliminated. Even making it to the finals, a spot like that makes him look worse coming out of this than if he hadn’t been in it at all, or had lost in the first round after a good showing.
Now it was Flip’s turn to disappear while Silas went after Martinez. They did some stuff, Silas won their “spot” and Martinez rolled to the outside, at which point Flip reappeared. They did their spots, then Martinez cycled back in, and eventually he eliminated Silas. Flip and Martinez had a good final segment, but at this point it was clear that the match was all about Martinez. He kicked out of everything Flip had (including two 450 Splashes) came back, hit his big moves, and won.
I’m not going to tell you that this wasn’t an awesome main event, but I will say that it absolutely did not feel like Survival of the Fittest, and thus Martinez’s win didn’t feel like the major elevation it should have.
The first reason this didn’t feel like Survival of the Fittest was the length. All of the online sources say that this went forty-six minutes, but it absolutely did not. It was twenty-six (and cagematch.net was also wrong about the times both the Daniels/Dalton and Woods/Lethal matches, saying they went over twenty when they only went twelve). That would make it the shortest Survival of the Fittest match up until this point other than 2010 (where the eventual winner was injured so they had to rush things… and that still went almost as long as this one) and the one that was done on TV in 2012 and had to fit within the forty minutes or whatever that ROH had, (including entrances and post-match). And those matches were back in the days when this was a one-night tournament. In addition to wrestling a qualifier that usually went in the eight-to-twelve-minute range, the wrestlers then had to come back out and the winner would have to go another thirty or even forty minutes. It truly felt like the winner had been the toughest and had the best stamina and outlasted all of his rivals. This just felt like a random six-way.
The other thing that made this feel like just another six-way and not like a Survival of the Fittest final was the fact that they didn’t use tags and basically wrestled it like any random six-way, with people just hiding on the floor until they were needed. Having the wrestlers wait on the apron and always be ready to tag in at a moment’s notice serves the same non-kayfabe purpose of giving the wrestlers time to rest, but does so in a way that keeps them in the forefront of your mind. They feel more present and thus it feels like they’re in there for a long time, as opposed to when someone is out of sight on the outside for five minutes at a time.


This was a disappointing show from Ring of Honor. Just too much careless crap in the booking and cartoonish stuff in the match, and not enough good wrestling. A pointless three-night Survival of the Fittest proves that Delirious’ lazy booking can ruin even what should be an easy win.
Hold #712: ARM BAR!

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