This past Sunday night I settled down in front of my television to watch the British premiere of a brand new wrestling promotion. The card was very entertaining, some great promos, a battle between two former world champions, a hardcore icon beating the hell out of a useless character, and a very entertaining battle royal.
Oh, and the promotion just happened to be called Extreme Championship Wrestling.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve learned that wrestling fans, internet columnists and magazine writers are indeed an impatient bunch, whose expectation levels are sometimes set way too high at times.
It seems that whenever people hear the letters E, C, and W put together into a cohesive sentence, they hark bark to the mid-nineties. They expect innovative booking, five star matches every day of the week, and they get a picture in their mind’s eye of a group of wrestlers flipping the bird to Ted Turner and Vince McMahon, telling them where they can stick their brand of professional wrestling.
Oh, and the promotion just happened to be called Extreme Championship Wrestling.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve learned that wrestling fans, internet columnists and magazine writers are indeed an impatient bunch, whose expectation levels are sometimes set way too high at times.
It seems that whenever people hear the letters E, C, and W put together into a cohesive sentence, they hark bark to the mid-nineties. They expect innovative booking, five star matches every day of the week, and they get a picture in their mind’s eye of a group of wrestlers flipping the bird to Ted Turner and Vince McMahon, telling them where they can stick their brand of professional wrestling.
And having read the various comments from fans and experts alike about the re-birth of Extreme Championship Wrestling, it seems that the majority of you were expecting the same thing to happen when the new ECW made their bow on the Sci-Fi Channel in America.
But what a lot of people seem to be forgetting that the wrestling world today is a totally different kettle of fish. It really is hard for some people to fathom just how different the wrestling world of 2006 is from the wrestling world of 1996. There’s no doubting the fact that Paul Heyman and his bunch of merry men were very innovative back then, and did a hell of a lot to influence the wrestling business back then. But back then ECW was virtually existing on a shoestring budget. Back then the goal was to please the fans, to get people talking about the ECW product, and to put on the best matches they possibly could. It seemed that actually making money was way, way down on the to do list, while making a tidy profit was way up on the to do lists of Ted Turner and Vince McMahon.
Back then ECW was more or less controlled by one man, a man who wasn’t shackled down by corporate types in Armani suits, a man who wasn’t told to make a massive amount of money from gate receipts and merchandise sales. ECW was run by a man who just wanted to put on great wrestling shows for the fans. He didn’t have any suits to answer to.
So is this what 21st century ECW fans wanted today? We they so naïve as to expect the same thing 1996 non-corporate values from a brand now run by the biggest corporate promotional machine in the history of the modern world? It seems so.
Today’s ECW fans were expecting the proverbial moon on a stick. They wanted Paul Heyman and his bunch of merry men to once again flip the bird to Vince McMahon, forgetting that it’s actually Vince McMahon funding the whole thing in the first place, forgetting that it’s Vince McMahon getting ECW valuable airtime on Raw and on pay-per-view, forgetting that it’s Vince McMahon who got them the national and international coverage the likes of which ECW never had when it was in syndication and on the former TNN.
They forget that although Vince McMahon wants good booking, he also wants good television ratings and pay-per-view buy rates, and good merchandise sales. McMahon wants to please the fans, but he also wants to please his share holders as well.
But the fans want instant results. They want their old ECW back, forgetting that this ECW is ECW in name only. Sure, there’s a few old familiar faces working for this brand, but there’s a few new faces as well. And what a lot of die hard ECW fans seem to forget that the old ECW didn’t suddenly become innovative overnight. It took quite a while before Paul Heyman actually got his hands on the book, and began to give the fans what they wanted.
So while 99.999 percent of wrestling fans, writers and experts were writing off the new breed of Extreme Championship Wrestling before it even got off the ground, this writer, this life long wrestling fan, is sitting in front of television awaiting the next instalment this Sunday night. This fan is going into this new experience with an open mind, and not with a “well, this is going to be s**t” attitude. Why? Because it makes things far more entertaining.
And if you, the wrestling fan, the internet columnist, the magazine writer, and the smart mark, were to follow my example, you wouldn’t be so damn negative all the time. Besides, if you don’t like the new breed of Extreme Championship Wrestling, what’s stopping you from watching or doing something that you actually do enjoy?
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