Ring of Honor

Rob Feinstein ran RF Video, a Philadelphia company that sold wrestling tapes. When ECW folded in 2001 the label lost its main supplier of new footage, and the answer was to promote shows of its own. Ring of Honor’s first card, The Era of Honor Begins, took place in Philadelphia on February 23, 2002, with Eddy Guerrero against Super Crazy on the bill and a locker room of independent wrestlers who would spend the next few years redefining what the word meant.

The pitch was the Code of Honor: shake hands before and after the match if you respect your opponent, compete cleanly, respect the officials. It borrowed from Japanese wrestling and it was as much a marketing position as a rule. It told fans the company would sell matches, not angles, and in 2002 that was a distinct product.

The ROH World Championship was created in 2002. The early holders — Low Ki first, then Bryan Danielson, CM Punk, Samoa Joe and Homicide among the standouts of the first years — set the standard the promotion traded on for the rest of its life. Joe’s long reign and Danielson’s later one are the two most cited, and the Danielson–Punk–Joe trio went on to main-event WWE and AEW in the following decades.

For most of the 2000s, if you wanted to see who WWE would be signing in three years, you bought the ROH DVD.

Around that core the company built a calendar: Final Battle every December, Supercard of Honor each spring from 2006, and Death Before Dishonor in the summer. The 2005–2006 storyline with Combat Zone Wrestling, which began when Chris Hero challenged Danielson at CZW’s Cage of Death, put the two Philadelphia companies in each other’s buildings and drew for both.

In March 2004 Feinstein resigned after being caught in an internet-based sting operation. Doug Gentry bought his stake and later sold it to Cary Silkin, who owned the company through its most influential years and kept it independent when that was not the easy choice. Under Silkin ROH reached television for the first time with a weekly series on HDNet from 2009 to 2011.

Silkin sold on May 21, 2011 to Sinclair Broadcast Group, the largest owner of local television stations in the United States. That gave the promotion a syndicated weekly show, Ring of Honor Wrestling, on Sinclair stations from that autumn, and a corporate parent with the patience of a broadcaster rather than a promoter.

Sinclair’s ownership ran eleven years, with the company operating out of Maryland where the broadcaster is based. The relationship with New Japan Pro-Wrestling grew through the decade and peaked on April 6, 2019 with G1 Supercard, a joint card at Madison Square Garden and the largest event ROH ever staged. Honor Club, the promotion’s streaming service, launched in 2018.

The same year as the Garden show, the ground shifted. Cody Rhodes and The Young Bucks left to start All Elite Wrestling, and with them went a portion of the audience that had made ROH the second-biggest promotion in the country. The pandemic did the rest. In October 2021 Sinclair announced the company would go on hiatus after Final Battle that December and release its roster from contract.

Tony Khan, the owner of AEW, announced on March 2, 2022 that he was buying Ring of Honor; the sale closed on May 4. The promotion returned on April 1, 2022 with Supercard of Honor XV and has since run as AEW’s sister brand, with its headquarters listed in Jacksonville, Florida and weekly programming on a relaunched Honor Club. Its titles are defended on AEW television as well as on its own cards.

The wire’s view is that the company has had two lives. The first, from 2002 to roughly 2019, was as an independent that mattered — the place where the best wrestlers in North America outside WWE worked, and the standard by which every other indie measured itself. The second is as a developmental and secondary brand for a national company. Both are real Ring of Honor. Only the first was independent wrestling, and that is the one this archive was built to cover.