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On 5/14 on his Facebook page, Sapolsky commented on the Internet PPV issues Ring of Honor had with their 5/12 Border Wars IPPV, writing, "When the ownership and management of a company doesn't care or have enough respect for its employees and more importantly paying customers to spend enough money to have adequate equipment they can f*** off. When a company decides to go on the cheap and take a risk that something like a website will work instead of doing everything in their power to guarantee it will work they can f*** off. If the ownership and management doesn't care or respect it's fans enough to do this they don't deserve your support."
After receiving negative responses from some users of the Page, Sapolsky clarified his comments, writing, "It's too late to delete that other thread cause everything is out there, but to the people making all the negative comments do you realize I'm just saying we respect and appreciate your business and you deserve the best for your money? Yes, there are bumps in the road due to things out of control, but we never cut corners on things we can control and we always work our hardest to give you the best quality. I'm trying to serve you the best we can and I'm saying you should get nothing less. I take offense when you do."
Sapolsky received the cease and desist letter on 5/15, according to sources. There has been longstanding bad blood between the two sides stemming from Sapolsky's dismissal years ago, which led to the formation of DGUSA a year later as Dragon Gate had their own falling out with ROH when Silkin was the owner and opted to no longer work with them. Since then, DGUSA and sister promotion EVOLVE have been vying for the same online audience that was once the cornerstone of ROH's fan base and there have been regular attempts to run opposite of each other over the years.
Now, for those wondering why ROH would even respond to anything Sapolsky wrote, I am told that Sapolsky signed an agreement that he would not disparage the company when he was released as ROH booker in October 2008. ROH's side obviously believes that agreement is still in place. One DGUSA source, who was not Sapolsky, believed that the agreement could not be valid as there were distinctly different companies - Silkin's and Sinclair's. ROH was reorganized under a LLC when Sinclair took over the company a little under a year ago. In speaking to a legal source about the matter, I was told it all depended on the language of the non-disclosure form and whether that language covered ROH under ownership beyond Silkin at the time it was signed.
On yesterday's media conference call to discuss the iPPV issues, I asked ROH COO Joe Koff about the Sapolsky comments. Koff responded, "I'm not going to respond to his comments specifically because I'm going to consider the source of his comments. I can't refute or dispute perception. I can refute and dispute credible sources. I'm not going to get into that conversation about that. He makes a good point...I will tell you that this company is well financed and work with people we rely on for their expertise....and I think this was something that was unanticipated from our own analytics and our own analysis of what it was. The load was tested. We thought that we should be fine with what the normal number of buys are and how they come in through course of a day. And Mike, we were fooled, and I'm going to say that positively, even though it ended up negatively, at the positive response to this product and we did not anticipate that. And shame on us for not anticipating that. It's not a money issue at all. It really isn't a money issue. It just happened to be an unfortunate call on our part thinking [the server was] strong enough to carry the show. That's the way it happened."
Sapolsky declined comment when reached by PWInsider.com, but admitted he was "surprised" he was being asked about the issue.
However, several hours after declining to comment to PWInsider.com, Sapolsky responded to the cease and desist in vague terms, writing on the same Facebook page, "You stop yourself from saying something 1000 times, but the one time you take 30 seconds and write something out of anger it blows up beyond your imagination. If you are reading this the bottom line is all you really care about is great wrestling, good storylines and something compelling. We had two awesome EVOLVE shows last weekend....[lots of comments about the wrestlers working for EVOLVE over the weekend deleted for clarity of story at hand; complete post here] Our staff of Ivan, Bryan, Sean and Brandon among others, led by Sal, worked tirelessly to put on those two memorable events and great iPPV streams. I took the attention away from all that by losing my cool for a moment and lashing out with profanity. I can't make any promises in the future, but I'll remember this lesson. I ended up doing the last thing I wanted to do- take the attention off the wrestling that we all care about."
Obviously, we were unable to gain any sort of comment from Ring of Honor as this story is posted. Should ROH choose to comment on the matter, we'll have more on this tomorrow, but I was given the impression there would be no official statement made on the issue.
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