McXal's Reviews

This week we continue our look back at Jonathan Gresham's 'Champion's Journey', as he tours around the world looking to preserve the legacy of Ring Of Honor by defending the World Title (represented by the iconic original belt) against all comers. This week we'll see him travel to Europe to defend his belt...

We begin with more interview footage taped with Gresham at Terminus. He puts over Cody Chhun as being a competitor who, like himself, 'possesses the spirit of the [ROH] originals' and enjoyed defending the belt against him at DEFY in February. We don't get much footage of a match which is listed at going more than twenty minutes, which is a shame because what we did see looked rather good. 

From there we go international. Gresham defended the belt in the UK, but presumably ROH weren't able to get the footage from Progress to show that. Instead we see him in Denmark for Bodyslam!, defending the World Title against Emeritus; a masked competitor I've not seen before. It is hard to judge from the brief highlights we see of course, but I wasn't as into this as I was the Chhun match.

Unfortunately from here the episode goes downhill. The interview footage and touring defences are gone, and ROH now opts to air a huge portion of the 2020 Pure Tournament final again. This is the second or third time this has been featured on TV and comes off as a colossal waste of time. I wonder if part of ROH's deal with all the promotions they've featured is that they wouldn't show full matches on their show - because I'd much rather have seen the full versions of the defences against Gray or Sabin last week, or Chhun this week than re-running this again.

Full highlights of Jonathan Gresham vs Jay Lethal for the ROH World Title from Final Battle 2021 are shown

The show ends with Gresham pondering his 'Champion's Journey' thus far, and whether he now truly feels like the ROH World Champion. He believes he is the 'only man' who can lead this company into the future, and he will prove it by defeating Bandido at Supercard Of Honor...

Tape Rating - * - Last week was an enjoyable episode. This week we got an enjoyable first fifteen minutes, then Sinclair drove it off a cliff. Putting the Pure Title finals on TV for what I reckon to be at least a third time sucked. But to end with putting highlights of Gresham/Lethal on TV for a third time in less than three months is laughably poor. For a company with the richness and depth of back-catalogue that ROH has to call upon this really is inexcusable. Either it shows the complete contempt and lack of knowledge/respect Sinclair has for their back catalogue, or it is complete laziness that they just keep airing the most recent stuff possible so they don't need to dig any deeper into their archives. I really do like the concept of the 'Champion's Journey' episodes. It's just a shame it couldn't have been done properly - with more match footage, more interviews from Gresham and less repeated footage we've already seen multiple times over.