I'm a week late, but I went to the ROH show in Chattanooga. It was decent, but not having been to an ROH show since the last Danielson tour, pretty fucking depressing overall. It's one thing to see the talent level dwindle on TV, but live, it really hits you that this company resembles very little of what it was four or five years ago. The Fish/Coleman and especially O'Reilly/Alexander matches were pretty good, but also helped by the fact that every match before was horrid. Fuck's sake, Cheeseburger worked in two separate matches.
Also, Meltzer mentioned that the 300-ish crowd was due to the fact that there was no advertising. This is absolute bullshit. Sinclair owns the local ABC affiliate, and they ran ROH spots every hour on the hour for at least two weeks before. They had radio spots, newspaper articles - basically the extent of what a media "blitz" could constitute in Chattanooga. The reason people didn't come is because they don't know anyone, and nobody sees the TV show. I can attest to that - I have about 250 people who work for me and I invited a bunch of them to the show, and I got the same response from at least 15 of them "Why would I pay 20 bucks to watch guys I've never seen?" In a related story, the local dirt indie brought back Robert Gibson for the umpteenth time last week, and probably made money off the show.