Just over one month ago, Tony Khan stunned the wrestling world when he announced his purchase of Ring of Honor Wrestling. The founder of All Elite Wrestling was a steadfast fan of ROH Wrestling during the promotion’s rise in the first decade of the 21st century and now has control of its future.
While we still don’t know exactly what this future will look like, we can make some educated guesses based on Khan’s own personal philosophy on the wrestling business, as well as what we saw from ROH during their Supercard of Honor PPV broadcast last weekend.
First of all, I would not expect the new ROH to resemble a “developmental territory.” Khan has too much reverence for the history of the ROH brand to treat it as an afterthought or a place where only the less experienced wrestlers perform.
Instead, it’s more likely that Khan treats ROH as its own established territory, creating for himself and the AEW landscape a system that used to exist before the 1990s.
Anyone who has ever listened to Khan talk wrestling knows that he was an avid tape trader, essentially a wrestling historian, who gobbled up all of the old territorial footage that he could consume. With the purchase of ROH, Khan has the ability to create for himself a landscape that resembles the wrestling world that he grew up admiring.
“Vince (McMahon) Sr. was really cooperative,” Khan explained last fall. “He booked Andre (The Giant) out all over the country. He would work for AWA and would go to Mid South and work in Houston. Wrestling was much more collaborative before the mid-80s and it was actually one person that made the business less collaborative. I’m trying to bring some of that spirit back. When Vince Sr was running the New York territory, it was a much more collaborative thing.”
I would expect movement across the rosters in future years in an effort to keep stars fresh. One of the reasons that so many of the top stars in wrestling over the last decade have started to feel played out or stale is due to the fact that they’ve been working the exact same television shows, without much reinvention, for the better part of over a decade.
A separate ROH will allow stars from both ROH and AEW to move on and “work another territory” for anywhere from a couple weeks or months at a time, to even longer if desired.
Throughout wrestling’s history, this kind of movement has always been a positive. Whether it was people bouncing back and forth between WCW, ECW, and WWE back in the 1990s, or traveling the old territorial system prior to the 1990s. A change of scenery is a good thing for everyone, and it keeps a character fresh. Historically this has been a necessity in the business. The last 20 years with WWE as the only truly viable national promotion has been an aberration from the norm, stunting movement across the business. AEW changed that, and the future of ROH will open things up even more.
ROH can’t afford to be just a developmental system, nor should it be. Supercard of Honor showed us that the promotion can produce some of the best matches in the world if given an opportunity. Look no further than the fact that FTR vs. The Briscoes was arguably the best match of WrestleMania weekend.
Khan has already tried to recreate a system of movement across wrestling territories of sorts while working collaboratively with AAA, New Japan and IMPACT in the past (the so-called “forbidden door”). However, ROH will give him the same opportunity while also possessing total creative control without having to run plans through another promoter. The purchase of ROH gives Tony Khan the ultimate wrestling sandbox in which to experiment.
What do you think? What do you want to see out of the future of ROH? Let us know in the comments section below or drop me a line on Twitter @ryandroste.
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