ROH star and former world champion Matt Taven recently appeared on the Wrestling Inc. Daily to hype this evening’s Final Battle pay per view and discuss a number of different topics, including his thoughts on ROH going on hiatus in 2022. Highlights from the interview can be found below.
Says he still has a little bit of time on his ROH contract:
“I still have a little bit of time under my current contract. There definitely are restrictions in some sense, but they’re letting us get back out there and do independents and get our names back out there. This is how I came up, this is how I made my name in the first place.”
Whether he saw the ROH hiatus coming:
“Yes and no. I’ve been in wrestling enough to know, to kind of look around and see the writing on the wall. Sinclair and Ring Of Honor had taken care of us during this pandemic. Five months’ time we were doing nothing for them or for the TV product or anything really in general. We were trying to film as much as we could at home. But you just know when you look around. You’re like, ‘man, they’re paying everyone their full salaries and getting nothing in return.’ That can’t last forever,” he admitted. “When we came back it felt good that, okay we can get back on our feet and we can really kind of pick up where we left off. But I think the uncertainty where we kept going from having a crowd to not having a crowd, I think that kept me on my toes of thinking, ‘anything could happen at any moment.’”
On ROH returning to the industry:
“I always kind of had my guard up, I would say, I didn’t think that anything necessarily caught me off-guard,” he claimed. “I was always just looking around wondering where things stand and we were told where things stand. With that being said, we were also told that there is going to be a future, we just don’t know what it is. When there’s an uncertain time like that, I just always put it in my mind like, ‘okay, this is the end. Whatever happens after this is a bonus,’ so you don’t get your hopes too high up or too low. It’s definitely a tough thing, but it is what it is. Such is the wrestling world.”
On the impact the COVID-19 outbreak had on ROH:
“I mean, we were told that we were amping up for a weekly live TV. Then the pandemic hit and everything in the world started changing,” he said.”We were fortunate. I can remember during the pandemic, thinking a call like this could happen on any day just because of the uncertainty of everything. You’re watching people outside of the wrestling world getting laid off left and right. You can’t help but think, ‘oh, could this happen to us?’”