In Memorabilia Lane, We’ll Discuss the Significance Some Kind of Collectible
(T-Shirt, Poster, Action Figure) has on us and its Relation to Wrestling.
Question: Can a pebble can turn into a boulder?
Answer: YES! YES! YES!
On a Sunday March 4th, I was at the Hammerstein Ballroom ROH’s 10th Anniversary Show. Before any ROH show – or any Wrestling show at the Hammerstein for that matter – it’s customary for the crowd to do warm-up chants, which usually means waves of “Cena Sucks” Chants.
This Afternoon, there was only one Chant: “YES! YES! YES!” which appropriately summed up how far ROH has come in its 10 years. The WWE Champion, CM Punk, and the WWE World Heavy Champion, Daniel Bryan aka Bryan Danielson, are 2 of ROH’s greatest alums. “YES! YES! YES!” These wrestlers have gone from the independent circuit to the top of the most popular promotion in professional wrestling.
The chants of “YES! YES! YES!” were heard throughout the entire show. In a stroke of brilliance, ROH played “The Final Countdown,” Daniel Bryan’s theme in ROH, during the Intermission; “YES! YES! YES!” continued. There was only one instance when it wasn’t uttered: for El Generico, we used “Si! Si! Si!” instead.
The next morning, this showed up on BarbershopWindow.com:
This was an instant purchase for me (it’s still available in Barbershop Window’s Overstock Bin). And what I though was a given for just the ROH crowd in attendance, seeing the audience at RAW a few weeks later revealed that this shirt was a movement. By Wrestlemania 28, practically every other person in Miami was wearing a YES! YES! YES! t-shirt.
Collectively, Daniel Bryan, BarbershopWindow and the Wrestling Audience forced the hand of the WWE to create their own YES! YES! YES! shirt.
While it’s not an accomplishment on par with having both top champions be ROH stars but it’s still a feat. It’s a sign that Daniel Bryan, once called as a “boring bland nerd” by the Voice of the WWE , is marketable and (hopefully) profitable in the WWE environment. The faith earned throughout the independents, from the ROH days, were cultivated in the WWE.
It’s a fair complaint that the WWE’s YES! YES! YES! shirt is a rip-off of BarbershopWindow.com’s YES! YES! YES! shirt, I look at it his way: We have a choice in how we can show our support. That doesn’t happen very often.
And yet, another pebble started rolling. On the same day that the WWE released their YES! YES! YES! shirt, another independently created YES! YES! YES! shirt appeared on RedBubble:
Thank you Steve-O for creating a third option. Arguably, it’s the shirt the WWE should have created, since they are the only company with proper rights to the likeness of Daniel Bryan. But where they’ve misstepped, the Wrestling Community was there to correct. To that, I say “YES! YES! YES!”
Three Man Booth 