Matt Sydal is looking to win more ROH gold and ride the wrestling wave as long as he can.
Sydal spoke with WrestleZone Managing Editor Bill Pritchard about his return to Ring Of Honor coinciding with the Pure Championship being reinstated. Sydal’s opening round match in the ‘B Block’ is against a familiar face in Delirious. The two have known each other for their entire careers and debuted in ROH as opponents sixteen years ago.
The tournament match marks Matt Sydal’s first ROH appearance since facing Marty Scurll on May 12, 2017 at War Of The Worlds in NYC. As one of the longest-tenured wrestlers in the bracket, he says there’s a lot of takeaways in the ROH Pure Tournament, specifically noting that there are parallels between the ROH he first broke in with and the current roster and tournament participants.
“People throw around the ‘honor’ word a lot but when I first started in wrestling, when I was training in 1999, it was only about respect. That’s all there was to get. There was no money in it—when I first got to Ring Of Honor nobody was there because they were paying people [a fortune]. We were there to earn respect and that mentality is very much alive in the current Ring Of Honor. Guys aren’t there because they want to be stars or they want to be on TV, they want to earn people’s respect with their wrestling ability and that’s what this Pure Tournament is going to showcase.”
“And clearly I will be showcasing the most because I’ve been working at this longer, harder than everybody and I’ve been working on reinventing myself so that every time you see me in the ring you see something unexpected, you see something original, you see my creativity at large.”
The winner of the match between Sydal and Delirious will advance to the Block B semifinals against Jonathan Gresham, who defeated Wheeler Yuta in his opening match. Sydal says there’s a ton of talent in the bracket and he hopes to stick around in the division (title win or not), and named Gresham as the one opponent he does hope to square off with before it’s all said and done.
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