ROH name recalls first Sinclair Taping: “one of those painful things I’ve ever been through in my life”
Ring Of Honor ring announcer Bobby Cruise recently discussed when ROH was initially purchased by Sinclair Broadcasting Group back in May 2011. Speaking on the latest episode of Tony Schiavone’s What Happened When podcast, Cruise revealed that the first taping at Chicago Ridge under the Sinclair banner was an awful experience:
“That first TV taping is one of those painful things I’ve ever been through in my life. We would do a match and have 15 to 20 minutes between matches, because we’d have a truck outside…we’d have people out there that weren’t familiar with the truck or weren’t familiar with producing what we were doing. It was pretty torturous. I thought to myself that ‘if is the way we’re going to do this, then we’re in for a lot of problems.’ So we started taping too in Baltimore because that’s Sinclair’s home base.”
First ROH Sinclair TV Taping
The first episode that aired under Sinclair was the September 24, 2011 broadcast. For reference, the following took place on that show:
- Dark match: Grizzly Redwood defeated Tony Kozina
- Dark match: Mike Sydal defeated Mr. Ernesto Osiris (w/ Prince Nana & RD Evans)
- Future Shock (Adam Cole & Kyle O’Reilly) defeated The Bravado Brothers (Harlem Bravado & Lancelot Bravado) (7:23)
- Wrestling’s Greatest Tag Team (Charlie Haas & Shelton Benjamin) (c) defeated The Kings of Wrestling (Chris Hero & Claudio Castagnoli) (w/ Sara Del Rey & Shane Hagadorn) to retain the ROH World Tag Team Championship (16:27)
Jake is the Head of Audience at F4WOnline, having previously worked as a Combat Sports, Gaming and Pro Wrestling writer, successful Editor in Chief and Sports Coordinator for NationalWorld. He has more than ten years of experience covering mixed martial arts, pro wrestling, football and gaming across a number of publications, starting at SEScoops in 2012. His work has also been featured on Wrestling Headlines, Wrestlingnewsco, HotNewHipHop, The Hard Times and Sportskeeda.
Previously, he worked as the Editor in Chief of 24Wrestling, building the site profile with a view to selling the domain, which was accomplished in 2019. Jake was previously the Editor in Chief for FightFans, a combat sports and pro wrestling site that was launched in January 2021 and broke into millions of pageviews within the first two years. He previously worked for Snack Media and their GiveMeSport site, creating Evergreen and Trending content that would deliver pageviews via Google as the UFC and MMA SEO Lead. Jake managed to take an area of GiveMeSport that had zero traction on Organic and push it to audiences across the globe. Jake also has a record of long-term video and written interview content with the likes of the Professional Fighters League, ONE and Cage Warriors, working directly with the brands to promote bouts, fighters and special events.
He previously also worked for PROGRESS Wrestling, as PR Head and Head of Media across the social channels of the company.