BRM Reviews ROH Survival of the Fittest 2017: Night 2

[Big Red Machine]

ROH Survival of the Fittest 2017: Night 2 (11/18/2017)- Dallas, TX


KINGDOM PROMO- dull
O’Ryan was bad, Vinny was okay. Taven and O’Ryan droned on about “conspiracies” as they had been doing for months and would continue doing for a year and a half and it never went anywhere.

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 2017 FIRST ROUND MATCH: Jonathan Gresham vs. Vinny Marseglia (w/T.K. O’Ryan)- 1.75/10
Matt Taven was on commentary for this match, along with the usual Ian Riccaboni and Colt Cabana. Gresham had control until Marseglia faked an injury to get Gresham’s guard down. It was one of those annoying bits that everyone but the babyface, the announcers, and the referee saw coming, which made them all look like crap. Colt Cabana decided that the best way to respond to this was to laugh.
Despite this, Gresham had control of the match shortly thereafter. They went back and forth a bit, including Gresham hitting two straight Shoot Star Presses, where it was clear he barely made any contact with Vinny, and had to stretch his arms out to touch him at all. Gresham won with a takedown into la magistral and a seemingly random moment in the match. This is almost certainly the worst match I’ve ever seen Gresham have.

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 2017 FIRST ROUND MATCH: Flip Gordon vs. T.K. O’Ryan (w/Vinny Marseglia)- 5.75/10
O’Ryan jumped the bell on Flip to get the advantage. Flip overcame it (and Marseglia trying to interfere) and won. The fans taunted the Kingdom with chants of “0 FOR 2!”

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 2017 FIRST ROUND MATCH: Cheeseburger vs. Matt Taven (w/the Kingdom)- 6/10
Cheeseburger’s opponent underestimated him and they teased the Shotei a lot. Basically, it was every Cheeseburger match ever. They did a very good job with the Octopus Stretch spot at the end where you could almost buy the idea that Burger might win.

STREET FIGHT: Karen Q vs. Deonna Purrazzo- 7.5/10
Madison Rayne was on commentary for this match, scouting her opponent for tomorrow night, Deonna Purrazzo. At one point Ian Riccaboni said he didn’t understand why these former friends were now enemies. Normally I’d rage at an announcer for this, but in this era of ROH, my guess is that Delirious never let them have a chance to cut a promo and explain it, and probably never explained it to the announcers, either.
At one point Karen taped Deonna’s arm to the ropes so she couldn’t get out of the corner, and Tod Sinclair came over and tried to untie Deonna. That’s bullsh*t right there. If Tod thinks that Deonna can’t defend herself, he should call for the bell first and award Karen the victory due to stoppage.
Other than that, this was a great brawl, despite Colt Cabana’s atrocious commentary and Madison Rayne not actually adding anything insightful, either. These two had excellent intensity, and really sucked me in to believing that they hated each other, just watching this as a random one-off match years later, not having seen any angles to draw anything from. The finish was wonderfully brutal. Watching this match got me annoyed at how much ROH missed by pushing the likes of Jenny Rose, Mandy Leon and a f*cking LATE-FORTIES SUMIE SAKAI instead of these two.

FOUR CORNER SURVIVAL MATCH FOR THE ROH WORLD TAG TEAM TITLES: Motor City Machine Guns(c) vs. Silas Young & Beer City Bruiser vs. the Dawgs vs. Rey Cometa & Esfinge- 6.75/10
Both Silas & BCB and the Dawgs had been pinned cleanly by MCMG within the past five weeks. In the case of The Dawgs, it was in a title match. Rey Cometa & Esfinge had only had one previous match in ROH, which was last night, when they beat the Dawgs, and yet somehow these teams are all getting a title shot.
Ian Riccaboni tried his absolute best to save this, saying that this was originally supposed to be just Rey Cometa & Esfinge getting the title shot, but both Silas & BCB and the Dawgs pointed to ONE SINGULAR WIN they had each gotten and successfully argued to ROH management that this somehow merited another title shot. Colt Cabana claimed that Rey Cometa & Esfinge getting the title shot was necessary for the relationship with CMLL. I can accept that, although it doesn’t paint CMLL in a very good light.
MCMG and the Luchadors started off with some great action, but someone decided that we should interrupt that for BCB and the Dawgs to do gaga and comedy. More comedy ensued when we got a situation where both Silas and BCB were tagged in, and no one knew what to do. This, in my mind, is inexcusable. It’s the sort of thing that the company rules should have covered, and thus there is no excuse for the announcers and referee (and really most of the wrestlers, too) to not know what to do. And before you say that it’s silly that a promotion would come up with contingencies for rare occurrences, I will remind you that there is absolutely no excuse to not have a contingency in place for this, considering that this very situation was a relatively famous angle in the WWF during the Attitude Era boom period.
All of the other teams won’t let them tag out… so of course Silas and Bruiser figure out to do exactly what the New Age Outlaws tried to do, which was have one of them pin the other. And, of course, everyone else slid into the ring and dove on the pile to break it up, but because there were six guys diving and they were trying to make sure no one got hurt, it looked goofy, and the fans all started to laugh, because that’s what you want in a world tag team title match.
Everyone fought on the inside of the ring until it cleared out, leaving just the Luchadors and Silas/BCB in the ring, and we got a double-sunset flip into a pin, and the referee started counting… even though we were less than one minute removed from a spot whose whole premise was that the two legal wrestlers were the two men currently being pinned.
BCB and Silas took over, isolating Esfinge. Eventually Rhett tagged himself in and he worked over Esfinge for a while until Esfinge was able to make a hot tag to Rey Cometa, who ran wild. MCMG appeared to have completely disappeared at this point. Even when there was a pint o be broken up, they weren’t coming in to break it up. They finally showed back up at about the point where the match became a bunch of people running in and doing stuff (although I will give them credit for actually keeping track of the legal man during all of this). This wasn’t bad, but any match that goes almost twenty-four minutes (especially a title match) should be a lot better than this.

JOSH WOODS vs. MARTY SCURLL- 4.25/10
At this point Marty Scurll was fully immersed in his horrible cartoon character phase, which started when he joined Bullet Club, and would last until Cody, the Bucks, Adam Page, and Kenny Omega left ROH and New Japan. As a result, the majority of the first third of this match was spent with Marty pantomiming and/or being made to look like an ineffectual goof by Woods constantly getting the better of him. The we moved into him doing things like running the whole way around the ring just to do a back-rake in order to get “heat,” except it just gets him cheered because there is a large portion of the modern wrestling audience that is, to put it as gently as I know how, f*cking stupid. This was not the end of Marty’s cartoonishness and/or general idiocy in this match, but I got tired of recording it all. When there was actual wrestling going on Woods outwrestled Marty, but way too much of the match was Marty being a clown.
Even worse, there was a point where after some cartoonish heel tactic or another, Woods fought back and started to outwrestle Marty again and got him in an arm-bar… and all of a sudden Marty starts playing the role of the babyfaces and calling for the people to get behind him and lend him the morale support he needs to fight through the pain and power out of this submission hold.
Marty eventually pinned Woods with a handful of tights, but even though Woods outwrestled a big star for most of the match and said star had to cheat to beat him, this match didn’t do anything for Woods because the match was laid out so that Marty was the guy who was going to get to do all of the stuff that the fans were going to cheer.

ROH TV TITLE MATCH: Kenny King(c) vs. Scorpio Sky- 8/10
If you’re wondering what Scorpio Sky did to earn this title shot when wis ROH record at the moment stands at a 0-10. The answer is that he is a substitute for the injured Frankie Kazarian (although it would have been nice if Ian could have actually said Kaz’s name when telling me this instead of just talking about “the injury last night in the main event” and making me have to go look up who was in that match and then compare it to tonight’s card. Hell, at the moment I’m actually on 99.9% sure it was Kazarian. Stephen Amell wrestled in last night’s main event, too, and he isn’t wrestling tonight, either).
As for what Kazarian did to earn this title shot… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯?
Since his most recent singles title shot (against Cody two months ago, which he earned via winning a battle royale), he is 1-2 as a singles wrestler, with that second loss coming in the elimination finals of a world title #1 contendership tournament (the Soaring Eagle Cup, whose footage has still to this day not been released).
So Sky lucks into this third title shot in ROH, despite an astounding 0-10 record (and that doesn’t count losing an ROH World Title match to Cody at WrestleCircus’ The Cody Rhodes Summer Circus Show, which is part of ROH’s continuity because the angle was that Cody was going around defending the title in other promotions even though ROH officials didn’t want him to). I wish I could be that lucky. Instead, I still have a few more shows from 2017 to finish up, and at this point I’m pretty certain it’s one of the worst years in ROH history. Hmm… ranking ROH’s various years seems like it could be a fun article to write.
And if I ever right that article, one of the reasons 2017 will be at the bottom, is that it is the year the roster size started to get out of control, which eventually became a huge detriment to trying to make any story on TV feel important because they kept trying to feature so many people that an angle wouldn’t be followed up on for six weeks. It had started a bit in 2016 and would certainly get worse in later years, but 2017 is the year where they should have figured out who wasn’t working out (T.K. O’Ryan, Will Ferrara, Vinny Marseglia, Bully Ray, Shane Taylor, Sumie Sakai, Colt Cabana) or who wasn’t ever going to be able to be more than a bit player and didn’t need to be schlepped around the country to every show (Beer City Bruiser, Cheeseburger) and just cut bait (and if someone like Taylor and Vinny eventually showed their potential, then you bring them in when the act is polished and ready, you don’t keep them around to flounder around on the undercard until they finally start showing how good they can be). But not only did they not do that, but they also started to bring in these midlevel veteran names who were fine hands but weren’t going to draw and didn’t have much upward mobility (Madison Rayne, Best Friends, Bully Ray again).
I am going on this tangent because Scorpio Sky had always come across to me like he fit into that last category. He was a good veteran worker, but he wasn’t going to draw, and he was just another midcard name that would have to be featured. And even with everything he has shown in AEW, I still do think that’s true for where ROH was at this point in time and who they had on their roster. But after seeing this match, I can at least understand why they thought that bringing Scorpio Sky in might work. He and Kenny King had an awesome match here, and Scorpio didn’t look out of place at all going up against a tremendous athlete like Kenny King, matching him feat for feat.


POST-MATCH SEGMENT- good
Kenny King cut a great babyface promo calling out a bunch of people who had been giving him some trouble lately: Silas Young, Shane Taylor, and Punishment Martinez. Taylor came down the ramp. Martinez came through the crowd, and they saw each other and started brawling. Security tried to break them up. Kenny grabbed a mic and said “look at these dumbasses fighting each other.” That’s the sort of line that should feel completely heelish, but Kenny King might be one of two people in the whole world who could have made it work as a babyface line (the other being Becky Lynch, and she was about a year away from being able to do so).
Silas Young charged down the ramp and dove onto the two brawling hosses. Then, with all of them brawling at ringside Kenny charged and dove onto them, which was important because otherwise Kenny would have looked like a coward. The brawl continued until security broke it up, and the segment ended with Kenny King standing tall and posing with his belt.

JAY LETHAL & DALTON CASTLE vs. YOUNG BUCKS- 8.5/10
There was some great wrestling in this match, but the crowd more interested in seeing Dalton Castle kiss people, including an unwilling Jackson. The crowd cheered this act of sexual harassment. That crap out of the way…
Holy sh*t was this a hidden gem! This match was f*cking awesome! The Bucks wound up more in the babyface role because that’s what the crowd wanted, but they were smart enough to not have Lethal and Castle start cheating just because they were thrust into the structural role of the heels. It just came across like a match where instead of the heels isolating one of the babyfaces, the babyfaces managed to isolate one of the heels.

TEXAS DEATHMATCH FOR THE ROH WORLD TITLE: Cody Rhodes(c) vs. Christopher Daniels- 5/10
Before this f*cking DEATHMATCH, Cody thinks Daniels is going to kiss his stupid ring. That’s past arrogance to the point of being a clown.
On commentary, Ian and Colt are not sure if there are disqualifications in a TEXAS DEATHMATCH! Even if it didn’t have “DEATHMATCH” in the title, they should have known because ROH has done one of these already, and there were no DQs in that one. I include this not to bury Colt and Ian (although I do think it’s very bad when the announcers don’t know the rules), but rather to emphasize just how bad this was, because Colt and Ian- who were not sure of the rules- seemed to understand them a hell of a lot better than Daniels and Cody did.
I’ll say this upfront: I think “you have to pin someone in order to initiate the referee’s ten-count” is a dumb rule. Part of that is because it just feels dumb to me, but another part of it is that I don’t like (lacking a better term) “wasting” the idea of a pinfall. Pins are supposed to be important. Fans have been educated by all of the time we have spent watching wresting to understand that being pinned means that we should move that person down in our mental hierarchy of the roster, if just ever so slightly. As a result, I don’t see why you would do a match where you need someone to be pinned in order to create the possibility of a false finish.
If you wanted to protect the wrestlers by not having them get pinned, you could kick out, like Cody and Daniels did in this match… but that doesn’t work because- as Ian and Colt pointed out- there is no kayfabe consequence to being pinned, and, in fact, there is a benefit to doing so, which is that the opponent has to leave you alone for the referee to apply the ten-count. In this match, kicking out is mistake… and it was one that Daniels and Cody made very often. They even did a ROLL-UP. Why would you ever go for a roll-up in a match like this when you know it won’t lead to the other guy getting beaten… but they did one… and even worse, they had the guy getting pinned kick out!
Then there were the face-heel dynamics. This feud started with Daniels as the clear babyface and Cody as the clear heel. Most crowds had decided for reasons that baffle me to this day that the guys who were doing all of the cheating should be cheered in Ring of Honor, so Daniels and his buddy Kazarian were kinda-sorta turned heel and Bullet Club was kinda-sorta-not-really turned face. This is confusing enough already. Now throw in the fact that Cody was doing his “kiss the ring” thing, which is CLEARLY a heel spot, and the announcers are talking about what a role-model Daniels had become, and I’m assuming that I’m supposed to cheer for Daniels.
Well, the crowd decided that they liked Cody better because Bullet Club, so Daniels cut a promo turning himself heel. While I’m sure Daniels felt this audible was saving the match, as Cabana pointed out, giving a speech in the middle of a deathmatch for the world title is pretty stupid. There were also a few other times (including the aforementioned roll-up spot and a few other kickouts, when Colt pointed out that what they were doing was kind of stupid, and while he shouldn’t have been doing that, it’s kind of hard for me to be angry at him, because I was having the same thoughts.
There were also no “false finishes” in this match. I’m not saying that you can’t have a match without any false finishes- or even a main event-level match without any- but to do that, you create that drama from other, similar sources. For example, instead of having someone get hit by a finisher but kick out, you tease the finisher, and the wrestler avoiding being hit with a move we think will probably end the match does pretty much the same thing as having the wrestler be hit with that move but then defy the odds and kick out. With these rules, though, you really can’t do that, because the requirement for a pinfall means that you have to go through a secondary step (the pin) before the potential for a nearfall activates. Likewise, kicking out of a pinfall (even after a finisher) doesn’t create the drama of a false finish, but there is a whole other that has to occur before the finish (the ten-count).
For most people, I’m sure this match is most remembered for the finish, which saw Daniels get powerbombed through a flaming table (and then pinned and then not able to answer a ten-count). For me, though, that moment was marred by the stupid-ass crowd. The fans, who had been cheering for Cody so much that Daniels decided to turn himself heel, saw Daniels grab some lighter fluid with the clear intent to burn Cody alive… and started cheering and chanting “FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!” This crowd came across as people who were there to do their chants and pop for the stunts, not watch pro wrestling.
Combine all of the above with the fact that the first half of this match felt more like an exercise in milking the crowd than in having a professional wrestling match, and you’ve got yourself yet another Cody Rhodes ROH World Title main event stinker. And this one was even more of a shame than usual, because Cody’s program with Daniels was the only extended program he had as champion


This was quite the mixed bag of a show, with everything either exceeding expectations or being disappointing, with no real middle ground. That being said, if you asked be to choose between thumbs up and thumbs down, I’d have to do with thumbs down, because the disappointing matches were the matches the show was theoretically built around: the SOTF qualifiers and the big grudge match world title main event, and that’s the stuff that has to deliver (especially the big world title grudge match main event).