Commissions continue again, this one coming from frequent contributor and unofficial director of CM Punk based programming, Kai. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi.
This was for Joe’s ROH World Title.
It’s a hard one to come at, not only because again is it a big famous match that I imagine not only has everyone heard about and read about a bunch already, if not having seen themselves, but also because it is the first of three matches I would describe in that sense.
Famously — or maybe less so now that the history of these things has been absorbed — this helped save Ring of Honor.
Not just on it own, of course, and it isn’t as if this was going to be the last show if this failed. But with the RF business, these spring and early summer of 2004 ROH shows were vital, and along with huge swings like the Homicide heel turn and the all-time great Generation Next angle, CM Punk and Samoa Joe — together and apart — are largely credited with saving ROH. Specifically, you can look at the anecdotes around this match, where ROH had no real plans on returning to Dayton after good but not great numbers in August 2003, January 2004, and here, but after the match, the demand was such that a return was scheduled for October, making it into the new stop along with Chicago Ridge (a lot previously tried out for Minnesota and Wisconsin to less success), which held firm for years, and led to Dayton being a regular ROH stop for the next decade or so.
That is to say nothing of the match’s quality, of course, which is exceptional.
I’ve mentioned a time or two before here that I believe that Samoa Joe as ROH World Champion is the greatest title reign of all time — emphasis on reign there, as maybe you can shout out a few as being better on a consistent match for match basis, but in a larger sense, nothing beats Joe in these twenty-one months — and I think this is the match where things really crystallize.
What I loved so much, on top of that for over half of that time that Joe was probably the best wrestler in the world, was the sense of strategy. The idea that Samoa Joe was, at the same time, this brute force monster that nobody could survive and at the same time a puzzle that nobody could solve like someone who was both 2000 Shaq and also (dealer’s choice of your elite smaller guards), but because of what pro wrestling can add to real athletics, the mystique got to be constantly added to with different approaches. Up until this point, guys like Homicide or Dan Maff or BJ Whitmer tried to brawl, while guys like the Briscoes and Paul London failed to straight up push the pace, or people like Matt Stryker who tried and failed to go to the leg, or AJ Styles and Christopher Daniels failed to simply outmaneuver and bomb him out. Even before he won the title, there are these lessons to take, as in February 2003, Bryan Danielson beat him through an attack on the legs and a quick pin (maybe this will matter later). There were general ideas floated, but this is the match in which the entire thing takes a leap.
Samoa Joe does not usually wrestle more than twenty two or twenty three minutes, and in this match as you may be aware, CM Punk attempted to extend him.
Certainly, I will admit, I suspect that this lands a lot better if you were watching wrestling at the time. While some things are timeless and it can be easier at points to put yourself in a place and time, there is nothing quite like living at a time when things were less common, and witnessing them, and at this point, while you had some outliers such a Bryan/London or the first ROH Title match or Punk/Hero in IWA Mid-South, it was far less common — especially as the sort of crutch and/or booking stunt that this series popularized — and so, at the time, the idea that when working slower early on, that they were preparing for an hour, it simply did not seem as obvious as it might now on a show when wrestlers are more withholding early on.
(Which is to say that for someone watching this for the first time in the 2020s, I totally get maybe not loving either of these in the same way, but for me, a large part of the viewing experience will always be tied to the unfamiliarity and novelty of it, even if I can accept the flaws. The only hour since these to hit in the same way — which is to say that the hour was not obviously heading in that direction within a quarter of the runtime — might be Okada/Omega II.)
Those reading this very likely know how it goes, even if that is just from celebrating the headlock strategy in their AEW matches, and talking about the sort of thrill that defies words that was seeing the play into it in Punk’s 2023 return and the immediate connection with the maybe ten to twenty percent of other people there who got it.
Still, there is nothing like seeing it again, and a real joy in the give and take of it.
Punk sticks to his headlock doggedly, even through Joe trying to break down the block. Still being something of an antagonist in ROH at large, he’s more annoying with it than he would be in later matches, offering up a slightly different approach in the sense that he is not aiming for applause or appreciation, instead as this semi-sneaky and fully annoying approach. Joe’s struggle is presented as that of the match in the first third or first half, the struggle to break through the block and finally rock this guy. When he does it, it’s not only a real victory for the viewer, but also feels like something that Joe has had to earn in a way that he has never had to earn something before, while at the same time being this BEAUTIFUL piece of comeuppance for Punk, thinking he’s worn Joe out enough to swing for the fences, eating shit and getting rocked, then later for he himself to be the one literally hurled into the fences when Joe catches him trying an over-ambitious rana off the apron and swing him into the railing.
What works so much about this is that, simultaneously, this is both a successful and failed attack by Punk.
Successful in the way that, clearly, Samoa Joe is out of his comfort zone. He beats Punk’s ass and shows that he can last, but there’s almost a “see, look” element about his last two-thirds of the match. Joe never really feels like he is going to win, and at the same time, punishes Punk enough that you can argue the very same except for one moment. Wrestling very rarely feels like boxing or MMA, in the sense that the champion has to really be beaten, but it does here with Samoa Joe, and it adds so much. Not only to the match or the longer term ROH narrative, in terms of the feeling of Samoa Joe leaving this match as someone who is not only unstoppable when moving but impossible to take down long term, but also to CM Punk, for being the first to push Joe here, but also being the first to (a) avoid being taken down by Joe, but also (b) to come closer than anyone, minus a spot of bad injury luck (imagine!), it feels closer to a victory than most wrestlers on the other side of a time limit draw ever experience.
The failure is obvious, because for every plot, he does not win the title.
CM Punk had the right idea, but was overconfident about it. Extending Joe was smart, but he thought he could beat him past twenty, got overconfident and far too ambitious at that point, and suffered. Even later, when he pushed through and got into a little leg work — what Stryker failed to achieve with Punk on commentary and what the last man to best Joe one-on-one did — the success was evident. He kept Joe away from the bombs for much of the match, wore him down, beat him up in his own way, and became the first Joe opponent ever for the title to avoid defeat.
An absence of failure is not a success — especially when Punk’s potentially sure win off of a Pepsi Plunge escapes him when he himself hurts his knee hitting it — but it also cannot help but feel like something on the other side of that line.
Joe keeps the title, but for the first time in the history of the title, it feels as though it may not actually represent the best wrestler in the company.
What matters just as much is everything to follow.
Homicide steals the (ill advised, hideous looking) new title belt, as part of his feud with Samoa Joe, leaving both men unable to go through with overtime. In a response, CM Punk delivers one of the best promos of his career (maybe not top twenty for him but top five for 95% of others), in which he proclaims the ROH Title the most important belt in North America, at a time in which — between guys like Triple H and Jeff Jarrett and JBL — that didn’t feel so insane to say, on top of saying it was because of Samoa Joe. The two embrace, hold up the old ROH Title that would become known as the real classic ROH Title, and even twenty years later, I have a hard time watching this and not feeling like I’m watching something special.
In the same way that Shane Douglas throwing down the NWA World Heavyweight Title nearly ten years earlier put the ECW World Title on the map, this feels to me like the moment where — all due respect to defenses in England or Canada or later Mexico or Japan — where the ROH World Title not only lived up to what Punk said it was, becoming a more than just another independent title, but also what he would say it was a year later.
This is their third best match, lacking the environment of the second or genuine perfection of the third, and at the same time because of all of the above, it is also their most important.
It’s the one that lets them have not only their two best matches, but also two of the best matches of all time. This is the one that not only makes the leap these two have taken in 2004 undeniable, but also that I think it’s also the moment where Samoa Joe’s Ring of Honor title run takes the leap from being a great reign to being — at this point, along with Kenta Kobashi at the same time as GHC Heavyweight Champion — one of the greatest title reigns in wrestling history, to say nothing of the next six months.
With really maybe only the Era of Honor Begins main event as its challenger, it’s also the most important match in Ring of Honor history, and fittingly, also one of the best.
Fuck anybody who tries to stop them.
HANDWERK 