TNA – ROH – Destination America

I didn’t start this blog to talk about wrestling news. There’s all kinds of places for that kind of stuff and I find backstage rumors and their ilk my least favorite part of following wrestling. Sometimes there is something worth talking about though, and today some news dropped that was big enough to change today’s post from being about NXT to being about a promotion I never talk about: TNA.

It was announced this morning that the cable channel Destination America, the channel in which TNA Impact airs, has also bought the syndication rights for Ring of Honor’s weekly show, and will be airing it before Impact on Wednesdays. This is the biggest wrestling news since the WWE Network was officially announced, and is full of implications. On the outside, this seems great. More wrestling to more televisions is never bad, and Wednesday has suddenly become the best night of wrestling on TV with ROH, Impact, NXT, and Lucha Underground all airing. People who watch Ring of Honor might stick around for Impact, and people who watch Impact might turn in early for Ring of Honor. Win/Win, right? Maybe not.

Daniel Bryan

One thing I intended to do when I started this blog was profiles on wrestlers. I like thinking about their pasts, where they are currently, what they might do in the future, and what they mean to me personally. I haven’t yet written one, but with news that one of my favorite wrestlers is on the shelf indefinitely, I think it is time.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Bryan Danielson changed how I watched and view professional wrestling. In college I discovered that there were people, on the internet, who loved professional wrestling as much as me. And from these people, I learned about Ring of Honor. I’m not going to claim to be the biggest Ring of Honor fan. I was actually pretty casual about the whole thing. I like staying up to date on matches and stories, and it was hard to do that with ROH. There was no weekly TV show, only faceless people on the internet telling me “such and such is the best wrestler anywhere” and “you need to watch this match to be a wrestling fan.” Even I though could go back and watch some of their classic matches, I found it hard to get too excited about the product. There were a few exceptions. The CM Punk vs. Samoa Joe trilogy hooked me, but it was someone else who made me seek out every one of his matches.