When being 'Extreme' is just too extreme for ECW!

Back in the 90s everything was extreme. It was one of those buzzwords that marketing geniuses used to make things sound more edgey and exciting. Want to make something sound more cool, call it Extreme, then it sounds like surfers and snowvoarders and other cool, young, youth-type things. If you want to make it even cooler, then why not remove the 'e' and call them Xtreme - not that's really hip!


However for Extreme Championship Wrestling, they were not relying on a cliche to make their name. In the mid-90s, the former Eastern Championship Wrestling was carving out a niche for itself strewn with broken tables (sometimes on fire), barbed wire and blood by the bucket load. The die-hard ECW fans will always tell you ECW was about more than just blood and guts, however it was the Extreme nature of the product that caught most fans attentions. For all the Guerrero vs. Malenko classics and high flying luchadores, it was the Rotten brothers tearing each other apart in a taipei deathmatch or Sabu and Terry Funk in a no ropes barbed wire match that got the majority of the headlines. However amid all this carnage there was one ever present constant. No matter how 'extreme' things got and how much blood was spilled, there was always a result. It may have not started as being an 'anything goes' promotion, but by the end an ECW wrestler couldn't seem to get DQed if they had gone out the back, picked up there rental car and drove it at their opponent at 60 mph. They would still have been expected to get out, hook the leg and let the ref count the 1-2-3.

So here we are in 2006 and after a brief hiatus, ECW is back. But as ECW fans we muct keep reminding ourselves, this is not the ECW of old. This isn't 1995 and the age of Funk and the Public Enemy, this is 2006 and the age of Vince MacMahon's vision of ECW. As such we have to accept a few changes; Kurt Angle and Big Show are now ECW wrestlers - OK. So is Test - OK? The old ECW stars are just just jobbers and will never win - right - oh, and there will be vampires and zombies - fair enough, I guess it is on Sci Fi. Oh, and we're going to have DQ finishes - now hang on! There really is only so much we can take!!

With the DQ ending of Batista vs. Big Show that now makes for the at FIFTH DQ finish of an ECW match (and two of those were title matches). Gone are the days of a bloody Sabu crawling through barbed wire to pin Terry Funk. This is ECW where you only use weapons when it's 'Extreme Rules' and for that you have to get Vince's permission before you can go and be extreme. After all, if all the matches were 'Extreme Rules' (as they all surely should be if this is Extreme Championship Wrestling) then WWE [un]Creative wouldn't be able to rely on the familliar crutch of DQ finishes for matches where they can't decide who they want to win - or rather who doesn't want to get pinned. Over the past few years, DQ finishes have become second only to ref bumps in my 'Most Hated things about WWE' list and now it is transferring to ECW - which is not a good thing. Sure, there are times when a DQ finish can add to a storyline, just look at Batista vs. Ken Kennedy for a prime example. However when you get screwy DQs every week then they lose all meaning. By building their story's around a 'Code of Honor', Ring of Honor have got to the point where DQs, ref bumps and count outs actually mean something in the context of their storys. For the most part, this is because they only have one or two of each a year. WWE on the other hand have 2 or 3 a week and as such they just become a tired old cliche. Add to this the inconsistency of refereeing as a result of poor storytelling and you have a minefield of inconsistent rule-making where heels won't get DQed for hitting someone in the face with chair, but a babyface will get punished for wearing the wrong colour tights. For those of us with an IQ which is in double figures, you can see why this might be a problem.

So please Vince, make the refs make sense and let the ECW guys do their thing without having to worry about DQs if they gt a little bit too rowdy and put someone through a table or hit someone with a chair. After all, this is what you brought the brand back for, to capitalize on this legacy of blood, barbed wire and brutality. Alas, at the moment you are making them come across like every other half-arsed brand that ever tried to make themselves cool by pretending they take things ' to the Xtreme' - at the end of the day, the fans just see right through it and you can't ever earn back credibility once it's gone, no matter how much money you chuck at the problem.