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With what may be the final Ring of Honor PPV, Final Battle 2021 set for this Saturday 12/11 in Baltimore, PWInsider.com has reached out to current and former Ring of Honor perfomers, personalities and fans for their thoughts and memories of the promotion. Every day this week, we will be running memories and comments. Enjoy part three of a very special look back at Ring of Honor.
HC Loc:
"After spending several years hustling on the independent wrestling scene before getting a break in Extreme Championship Wrestling, only to be there to see that company, that dream, slip away, my career and, in fact, my life was left with a tremendous void. What's next? ECW was gone. WCW was gone. The WWE couldn't hire EVERYONE and a guy my size who hadn't, quite yet, made a huge mark in ECW before it closed, surely wouldn't be very high on their list of recruits.
Thankfully, my true break in the wrestling business was yet to come.
The Era of Honor Begins. I was involved in the very first match, on the very first show in Ring of Honor history, reprising my "Extreme Official" role from ECW to set up an angle and subsequent feud with Homicide. Later that same night, during the aforementioned angle, I would be the first person to shed blood in an ROH ring. I'm very proud of that fact. Wrestlers are weird like that.
From there we were off to the races. I recruited my friend and brother Tony Devito and The Carnage Crew was born. We were given the task to teach and we loved it. Our feud with Special K was probably the biggest example of that as those were our guys to bring up. Guys like Dixie, Izzy, Deranged, Azrieal (phenomenal talent...still going strong) and a very young Jay Lethal.
They listened. They learned, and, guess what? They made us better too! As much as we may have been considered the veterans, I can say I learned a ton from everyone else there as well. The style, and the physicality in the ring was changing to more of what we see some of the best in the world do today and ROH was at the forefront.
I was eventually touted as the first locker room agent for the company, helping some of the guys with their matches and doing whatever I could to help the show. Ring of Honor was my heart and soul. I remember, on our off days, going to the training school and building what would become our stage/entrance ramp.
Remember the Scramble Cage? I built the platforms that the boys stood on in the corners and you can still see the outlines of them in my garage from where I spray painted them, but neglected to lay down a drop cloth. Oooooops!
After the company was faced with a major controversy, I was called upon to write an open letter to the fans on behalf of the locker room to be posted on the Ring of Honor website to help rally us all through it.... that was one of the biggest compliments I've ever been given.
Anything for those fans. Anything for that locker room. ANYTHING for Ring of Honor. ROH was home.
The greatest moment of my in ring career was holding the ROH World Tag Team championships with Devito, not because we were going to hold them for a record length of time and not because we were the very best to ever hold them - that would be the Briscoe Brothers and there is no room for debate on that. It was my favorite moment because I was with my best friend in New York City in the company I helped build. My Home.
I had great moments before Ring of Honor. I had great moments after I left. Hell, even at 47 years old and 27 years in the business, I'm still determined to make great moments in the future but Ring of Honor was everything to me. During our run there, I had the word "HONOR" tattooed down the center of my back and its still there today."
Matt "HC Loc" Knowles was a major part of Ring of Honor from 2002 - 2005 in the ring and behind the scenes. He operates the Fighting Arts Pro Wrestling Institute in Upstate, NY and is still wrestling all over the country for independent promotions. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram at @hcloc1.
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Maria Kanellis-Bennett:
"[Ring of Honor meant] immense opportunity and it meant freedom. There's a promo that I did and I cut it on the Briscoes and I think ODB had joined at that point too and at the very end of it, I said, I built this sh**. I just remember like feeling in that promo, such creative freedom that I had never felt before in my life. Without it being the Briscoes that we were across the rings from, and without it being ODB and just what a bad-ass she is, it wouldn't have given me the credibility to move forward as a manager, and so that's just, that's just my story.
There's hundreds of stories like that from Ring of Honor, that took someone that was just right there on the cusp, but had this fear of being who they truly, truly wanted to be. Then they became that in Ring of Honor and they took it wherever they went from there, but to me, that's what it meant. It's true creative freedom. True opportunity where yes, you may fall on your face, but that doesn't mean the end. It just means one more thing along the path. So that particular promo, of course, when the boys have won the title, the magic ends. Eddie and Sara Del Ray was just so much fun and lo and behold, Sarah, became what she became over at WWE and at NXT.
So it was like, you know, the, these moments in time of walking out with Adam Cole and having the whole group of the Kingdom there. When Matt Hardy handed me the, we called it the title of love, and giving me that respect of like, okay, now you will take this spot over. Just all those little moments are what builds to a career and you can't get them in a lot of other places. You can get them here in Ring of Honor, but I'm hoping that it is like that.
As far as the women's division, the entire last set of taping, just, it just hit me a little bit differently. It was family. It was reminiscing about everything. Um, you know, you could just see the excitement in the girls' eyes. So many of them were like, 'You guys have got to do something else. You guys gotta do something else.' I'm like, 'I don't know what that is right now.' I don't know what's available, but I definitely keep them in my heart and in my mind, as I move through to the next phase of my career."
Maria Kanellis-Bennett has competed in front of the camera and worked behind the scenes launching and guiding ROH's Women's Division over the last year-plus.
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Jason Clevett:
"Ring of Honor came around shortly after WWE decided that websites were no longer worthy of their media time, even ones like SLAM!Wrestling that were affiliated with the Sun family of newspapers. Swinging in the opposite direction ROH saw that the future was in the online connections – message boards, interviews with online journalists, and creating a community. Ring of Honor was the first “big time” indy show that I went to, at the Rexplex in New Jersey Wrestlemania 20 weekend. It was a long way from the legion halls in Canada I was used to.
Shortly thereafter I was on their distribution list for DVD's which I would excitedly watch and review. I started getting interviews from their talent – people like BJ Whitmer, Nigel McGuinnes, Bryan Danielson and more were offered for interviews. ROH also gave me the opportunity to be invited backstage at their 2007 Wrestlemania Weekend events for interviews and to shoot ringside.
It was that relationship with fans and media that made Ring of Honor special. I only saw 6 live Ring of Honor shows, including the iconic Hammerstein Ballroom, but they still stand out as some of my best memories."
Jason Clevett is a longtime writer for Slamwrestling.net and is a well known reptile educator featured in Animal Planet's Scaled.
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Rust Taylor:
"Ring of Honor just always been kind of like a real big dream I'd always wanted to kind of be a part of Ring of Honor, to put my footsteps in there. When I first got into wrestling, I want to say started watching Ring of Honor and the first talent I sought out was Paul London. He was the first guy that kind of captivated me. It just opened my eyes to everything that independent wrestling can really be. After Paul London, it was Bryan Danielson, and Samoa Joe, and his matches with CM Punk. It was all through Ring of Honor over the years. It was all the work they were doing with Ring of Honor over the years that was really opening the eyes to the rest of the world, to this amazing talent that was on the independent wrestling scene. To imagine an independent wrestling scene without Ring of Honor, that's something that sounds pretty weird."
Rust Taylor returned to Ring of Honor this fall after a run with WWE NXT and will be competing this Sunday at Final Battle.
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Shane Hagadorn:
"Simply put, Ring of Honor Wrestling changed my life. No hyperbole, not one bit of overselling, its existence, quite matter of factly, changed my life at its very core.
Whether it was later in 2002 or early in 2003, when I first discovered ROH via reviews from Black Tiger or Rolling Germans, then acquiring some nth generation video tape courtesy of trading with those same reviewers, it opened up my eyes to a whole new way to present pro wrestling.
It was the same feeling as when I finally discovered ECW with Living Dangerously '99 and bore witness to Jerry Lynn versus Rob Van Dam and Yoshihiro Taijiri versus Super Crazy. I told myself that if this fledgling promotion came anywhere reasonably near my home in East Lansing, MI that I would make the trip to the event no matter what.
That opportunity came in August 2003 when ROH debuted at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds in Dayton, OH for the event that would be known as WRATH OF THE RACKET. That evening, while a relatively inconsequential event in the grand scheme of ROH save Jim Cornette's debut, would prove to be a life-changing moment for me.
See, on the chairs and bleachers there were flyers emblazoned with the face of CM Punk, a wrestler I knew from a few odd local indy shows in addition to his ROH work, and advertising "the ROH Wrestling School coming soon". In that moment I decided that no matter what, if & when this school actually existed, I would sign up. I didn't care that it necessitated a move 700 miles from my home (I nearly dropped out of college in 1998 to go to the Texas Wrestling Academy so wasn't the first time contemplating this) and I didn't care that I wouldn't know a soul there. I was being spoken to by this flyer, and swore to myself I would follow through.
That's just what I did on November 1st of 2003 when me and my father packed up a U-Haul and drove east with no place for me to live, no job, and no clue what I was in store for. Suffice to say it was the best decision of my life because, that choice to make ROH the center of my existence at that point, would in turn lead to me meeting my closest friends, it would lead to me meeting my wife which then led to the birth of our son, and would also bring me to where I am today professionally.
Ring of Honor changed everything for me; from the place I lived, to the people I in my life, to bringing me to the family my wife and I have created. Sure the wrestling was awesome and I got to see people like Kobashi, Great Muta, Jushin Liger, Kojima, Misawa, and KENTA live, just to name a few, but what really matters to me when I look back on my decade with the company, as well as the nineteen years of its existence, is everything else ROH brought to my life away from the ring."
Shane Hagadorn was one of the first ROH Dojo graduates. He now works for All Elite Wrestling and co-hosts An Honorable Mention, a podcast that looks back at Ring of Honor's seminal moments, talents and overall history.
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