Head To Head, One Night Stand, and Beyond

Well, a week has passed, and ECW is now officially back in operation. And it isn't even just a rebranding of OVW (which is still alive for the forseeable future) -- it's a dedicated brand extension.

It's beginning, however, wasn't particularly mindblowing. In fact I was mightily pissed off when the satellite feed went down five minutes into the 'Head to Head' special last Wednesday night and didn't come back till almost 3am, meaning that I stayed up half the night to see only half the show. And even at that it was nothing special. So my hopes weren't too high for One Night Stand.

Which was a good thing, since the show wasn't a patch on last year's card. For one, Tazz's 'match' with Jerry Lawler was a joke -- you can't introduce a man as 'the human suplex machine' and then not have him throw a suplex! In addition, the Rey Misterio/Sabu match had a bullshitty ending, despite the sick-looking table spot that led to it (it snapped at the end, not in half, so it looked like a blown spot -- good work on that one, at least). And Balls Mahoney and Masato Tanaka were only given a few minutes to do their thing, boiling down the 'extreme' quotient of the show a little too much.

But of course it wasn't all bad. The WWE vs ECW tag team match was a spot-fest beyond: Terry Funk hit the barbed wire hard and bled -- as good ol' JR says -- like a stuck pig, and I don't think Mick Foley has been that close to fire (WrestleMania XXII excepted) since the King of the Death Matches tournament in 1995.

Kurt Angle, too, was phenomenal in his match with Randy Orton, feeding off the energy of the ECW crowd and giving them a real 'wrestling' match to boot. Orton was cleary out of his league, so he wisely stuck to selling for most of the bout -- although whenever he did get the upper hand, he was obviously enjoying the venom the crowd directed his way. It's usually better to play the heel, after all.

And Rob Van Dam beating Cena for the title was what everyone wanted. Even Cena seemed to be fine with it, getting into the hostility towards his character -- he's the man we all love to hate now, and he's finally getting used to it.

The celebrations continued last night with the premiere of ECW's new weekly show on the US version of the Sci-Fi Channel. It'll be shown over here on Sky Sports this Sunday so I'll have to wait until then to pass judgement, but from the photos posted on the ECW website, it doesn't really look like ECW.

Sure, the entrance area is there, and it says ECW on the canvas. But the ringside barrier is WWE-safe, and the ringposts are SmackDown! silver, which only brings home the notion that the 'new' ECW is a B-show to the B-show.

Top that off with the fact that the ECW website is obviously a sub-site of WWE.com -- hell, it doesn't even have its own domain -- and you have a bit of a mish-mash that's going to take some time to gel into a truly unique prospect, rather than just a pool of hardcore guys to feed into the main brands for higher ratings or more pay-per-view buys.

More Thoughts on the 'New' ECW

Things have moved on considerably since my last post on this topic, but more with a whisper than a scream.

The ECW revival finally begins tonight -- ahead of One Night Stand II this Sunday -- with the 'Head to Head' special on USA Network (it starts at 2am here on Sky Sports, so I'm in for a late night). Considering the gravity of the whole situation for many wrestling fans, the build-up has been pretty low-key by WWE standards, even compared to last year's One Night Stand. It isn't even the main storyline on Raw: that belongs to Triple H's 'road to Damascus' feud with Vince McMahon, which as everyone knows will culminate with the revival of those other '90s renegades Degeneration-X at the end of this month.

In fact, the whole 'head to head' concept has pretty much come out of nowhere storyline-wise. And that's not a good omen for where the McMahons want to see the brand taken.

Something else that I've noted is the sheer number of old-school ECW mainstays who have been signed to be a part of the 'new' ECW. Now I can see the business sense in that -- not counting last year's event, ECW has been defunct for six years, so it would be stupid to relaunch it without any of the faces that helped popularise the brand as a force to be reckoned with.

But on the other hand, doing what they're doing is slightly anathema to what ECW was and what it did back in the day. Aside from the extreme action that was its calling card, ECW made a point of pushing the types of wrestlers who couldn't make it in the big leagues at the time, and did the same for grizzled veterans of the Big Two who found their careers in the doldrums. Johnny Polo is a great example: he was pretty much a nobody, barely hanging on at the tail-end of the WWF's golden age of managers -- but in ECW he became Raven, capturing the zeitgeist in an instant. And there was Aldo Montoya, another WWF mid-carder/jobber going nowhere fast -- but with a little spin from Paul Heyman he became Justin Credible, someone that ECW's fans were thrilled to see in action.

Over in WCW, there was Robbie V, known for wrestling barefooted and not exactly setting the world alight -- but in ECW he was Rob Van Dam, the 'Whole Fucking Show', and is still one of the most popular stars employed by the WWE today. And of course, there was Steve Austin: released from WCW in the worst manner possible (he was forced to drop the US Title to Hacksaw Jim Duggan in less than a minute) because Eric Bischoff didn't know what do to with him, he found a home in ECW where he could exercise his natural wit and charisma, and sewed the seeds for the biggest stage in his career -- he moved on to the WWF within months and, after an initial misstep as 'The Ringmaster', he became 'Stone Cold' Steve Austin, won the 1996 King of the Ring tournament, an uttered the catchphrase that sold a billion t-shirts.

The point I'm making is that ECW's bread and butter wasn't really in 'hardcore', but in pushing or creating its own new stars, whether out of new talent just emerging from the indies or veterans of the Big Two who were never given a chance to live up to their potential. The hardcore stuff was an adrenalin rush, for sure, but you can ask any regular at the ECW Arena -- that wasn't the only reason ECW sold tickets. Where talent was concerned, Paul Heyman had a gift for turning crap into gold. I can't count the number of times he repackaged WWF and WCW rejects, only for the big boys to snatch them back as soon as they could after Heyman laid down the ground work.

The 'new' ECW that we're about to get our first glimpse of tonight -- last year's pay-per-view notwithstanding -- is a very different prospect. It's almost like a tribute show to the original ECW, with the same old characters doing the same old shit. Please don't get me wrong; as someone who could only read about ECW back in the '90s it's exciting to finally see these guys do their thing in the ring. But it's also slightly sad, because it's like nothing has changed in the last six years -- when the original ECW was all about change, and looking forward to the future.

I don't doubt for a second that Paul Heyman is thinking exactly the same thing. He knows getting the veterans, the ECW faces, back in is just a part of the initial strategy; to draw in the marks, so to speak. Then, once he's got an audience to play with, he'll do what he really wants to do -- that's to give us something different in the ring from what we're used to, and push the kind of developmental talent that won't find a place on Raw or SmackDown! no matter how good they are. Give him a few months to work out the kinks, and we really will have a 'new' ECW.

At least that's what I'm hoping for, anyway. As long as the McMahons leave him to do what he does best (this time he doesn't have to worry about the money) I can see it happening, and I can see it becoming a huge success. But if Vince calls the shots and turns it into a travelling tribute show? Well, let's just say there probably won't be a One Night Stand III.