ROH's "Huge Announcement"
So I received a press release from Ring of Honor booker Gabe Sapolsky this morning promising a "huge announcement" this Sunday on the company's official web site.
Unlike several wrestling promotions over the years, ROH isn't known for for failing to deliver on promises, so I would guess - and this is mostly speculation - that the announcement will involve the TV deal ROH has been working toward for several years now. I talked to ROH owner Cary Silkin a few weeks back, and he seemed optimistic that a deal would be reached sometime soon.
If that is the announcement, that's a tremendous bit of good news not only for ROH, but for wrestling fans. I know there are loads of wrestling fans that have long heard all the buzz about Ring of Honor, but have never been able to bring themselves to spend money to buy a DVD or a pay per view of a product they have never seen before. I was one of them before buying my first DVD in 2006, and I was instantly hooked.
ROH is to be commended for surviving - and even growing - with such an unorthodox business model, but I think it became rather clear over the last year that a television deal was an absolute must if the promotion wanted to continue its expansion.
Of course, the devil is in the details. A TV deal could mean a Thursday night slot on NBC right after The Office (I somehow doubt it) or it could mean a 2 a.m. Sunday night slot on some obscure cable channel that reaches only a small percentage of homes. Hopefully, it's somewhere in between, and the company gets good support from whatever channel picks them up. Ideally, that would include improving ROH's substandard production quality to give the product a more major league look.
Then again, I could be completely wrong, and the "huge announcement" could be something far less monumental. Maybe Goldberg is turning heel again.
http://weblogs.newsday.com/sports/sp...ent/wrestling/
