To celebrate Ring of Honor’s 15th anniversary, Place to Be Nation and Voices of Wrestling teamed up to present The Honor Roll: ROH’s 50 Greatest Wrestlers Ever and an offshoot poll ROH’s 10 Greatest Non-Wrestlers.
The nomination process back in June 2016, with discussion carrying through into the open voting period of this past February. In full, we received 111 ballots for the ROH’s 50 Greatest Ever poll and 42 ballots for the Non-Wrestler offshoot.
Criteria for the Top 50
There were no set criteria for the Non-Wrestler balloting. Our nomination list included managers, referees, announcers, authority figures and even former owners! In the end, 37 different non-wrestler performers received votes.
As part of the polling we asked voters to share when they started following the product. Here are the results for the Top 50 poll:
- Early years (2002-2003): 42
- Golden years (2004-2008): 45
- HDNet era (2009-2010): 8
- SBG era (2011-present): 16
The scoring here had the top 10 weighted, with the remaining 40 working backwards as such: 50th place = 1 point, 49th place = 2, etc. The top 10 weighting was as follows:
- 1st – 65 points
- 2nd – 60 points
- 3rd – 57 points
- 4th – 54 points
- 5th – 51 points
- 6th – 49 points
- 7th – 47 points
- 8th – 45 points
- 9th – 43 points
- 10th – 41 points
- (11 = 40, etc, etc)
In the results you’ll see the total number of points, the high vote, plus the number of ballots the performer appeared on.
For Part one of our reveal, we’ve cut down our list from 166 to 101. A note to voters: if you’re #50 is missing, it could be a case of using one of your slots for a tag team (Young Bucks for example, although there were other teams that got votes). Those members were broken out next to each other on the ballots. The ties here were wrestlers that had identical ballots.
Tie breakers used were # of ballots, and then if still tied, whomever had the highest vote.
For Part 3 of our reveal, we reveal wrestlers who finished 50 to 26. Find more from The Honor Roll project: Part 2 (100-51), Part 1 (166-101), Top Ten Non-Wrestlers.
50 Dalton Castle
Total points: 538
Number of ballots: 45
Top 20 votes: 2
High vote: 14
49 Tommaso Ciampa
Total points: 560
Number of ballots: 41
Top 20 votes: 3
High vote: 11
48 Chris Sabin
Total points: 653
Number of ballots: 52
Top 20 votes: 3
High vote: 12
47 Kenta Kobashi
Total points: 681
Number of ballots: 47
Top 20 votes: 6
High vote: 12
46 Doug Williams
Total points: 844
Number of ballots: 52
Top 20 votes: 6
High vote: 8
45 Jerry Lynn
Total points: 886
Number of ballots: 63
Top 20 votes: 7
High vote: 10
44 Delirious
Total points: 912
Number of ballots: 71
Top 20 votes: 3
High vote: 10
43 Amazing Red
Total points: 956
Number of ballots: 55
Top 20 votes: 6
High vote: 15
42 Rocky Romero
Total points: 1035
Number of ballots: 69
Top 20 votes: 2
High vote: 11
41 Brian Kendrick
Total points: 1045
Number of ballots: 68
Top 20 votes: 6
High vote: 10
40 BJ Whitmer
Total points: 1082
Number of ballots: 77
Top 20 votes: 2
High vote: 15
39 Naomichi Marufuji
Total points: 1098
Number of ballots: 59
Top 20 votes: 6
High vote: 13
38 Necro Butcher
Total points: 1186
Number of ballots: 73
Top 20 votes: 6
High vote: 4
37 Bobby Fish
Total points: 1363
Number of ballots: 82
Top 20 votes: 5
High vote: 12
36 Steve Corino
Total points: 1591
Number of ballots: 84
Top 20 votes: 9
High vote: 14
35 Jack Evans
Total points: 1653
Number of ballots: 88
Top 20 votes: 8
High vote: 2
34 Matt Sydal
Total points: 1776
Number of ballots: 96
Top 20 votes: 10
High vote: 6
33 James Gibson
Total points: 1789
Number of ballots: 88
Top 20 votes: 14
High vote: 6
32 Paul London
Total points: 1934
Number of ballots: 80
Top 20 votes: 20
High vote: 3
31 Jimmy Rave
Total points: 1952
Number of ballots: 89
Top 20 votes: 20
High vote: 6
30 Michael Elgin
Total points: 2013
Number of ballots: 92
Top 20 votes: 17
High vote: 10
29 – 28 The Young Bucks (Nick & Matt Jackson)
Total points: 2432
Number of ballots: 96
Top 20 votes: 24
High vote: 2
27 Alex Shelley
Total points: 2517
Number of ballots: 105
Top 20 votes: 25
High vote: 7
26 Colt Cabana
Total points: 2641
Number of ballots: 103
Top 20 votes: 37
High vote: 9
To talk about the results and the project in general, you can sign-up for the Voices of Wrestling forum here. The Honor Roll sub-forum is located here. Follow us on Twitter at @voiceswrestling and @Place2BeNation.
