Top 10 ROH Stars of All Time
By Tim Sherry
9. Samoa Joe
Compared to the rest of this list Samoa Joe’s sampling size in Ring of Honor is much smaller than the others. He only wrestled 138 matches but he made them count. In that span he went 86-45-7 (cagematch.net) and that included a staggering 645 title run with the ROH Championship. That run lasted about 21 months and after finally losing it he’d follow it by capturing the ROH Pure Championship just 5 months later and held onto that for 112 days.
Ring Of Honor is also where Joe showed that he was one the brightest stars in the business as he put on masterpieces over and over again with the some of the rosters elite. It was in ROH where the Joe/AJ Styles feud took off after their red-hot War of the Wire 2003 match, he got a taste of the infamous Briscoe boys as he battled Jay in a classic at At Our Best in 2004, he’d meet his technical counterpart in Bryan Danielson with their brilliant chess match at The Midnight Express Reunion, but it was his trilogy with CM Punk in the second half of 2004 that proved that Joe was quite possibly one of the best in the world. The middle bout of their 3 match series was universally praised including being on of Dave Meltzer’s vaunted 5-star match ratings. They were really just that good.
Like many other ROH stars, Joe used his success to move on and he went on to become one of the best wrestler’s in TNA history. Now with the WWE, The Samoan Submission Machine has a legitimate chance of becoming the first man to ever hold the world titles in ROH, TNA, and the WWE. That would truly be one of the biggest accomplishments in pro wrestling history and there has never been a more deserving guy of such a massive honor.