This week is ECW week on the WWE Vault YouTube Channel. From its humble beginnings as Eastern Championship Wrestling to its metamorphosis into Extreme Championship Wrestling, the company was undoubtedly a trailblazer in its heyday.
While I knew of ECW through the pages of Pro Wrestling Illustrated in the early nineties, watching the promotion was a bit harder. On free-to-air TV, there was either WCW Pro or WWF Superstars. Usually, they were on Saturday Morning or after midnight on Sunday. My local video store mainly carried WWF home videos or DVDs (later, they would stock some WCW).
It wasn’t until my local Big W store started selling ECW DVDs that I saw the magic of the promotion. ECW wasn’t anything like the other promotions. There was no Titantron or screens of any type. There was no padding on the concrete floor on the outside. This wasn’t your mum and dad’s (or grandma’s if they watched wrestling like mine) promotion.
The promotion would strike somewhat of a working relationship with Vince McMahon and the WWF, which saw an ECW invasion on Monday Night Raw in the 90s. As part of that relationship, a number of WWF wrestlers contracted at the time, such as Brakus and the Can-Am Express (Doug Furnas and Phil LaFon), would be sent to ECW.
World Championship Wrestling raided ECW during the 1990s, signing Luchadors such as Rey Mysterio Jr. (as he was known back then), Juventud Guerrera, and Psychosis. Later, big names such as Raven, The Sandman, Mikey Whipwreck, and Mike Awesome would also move over to the Atlanta promotion. Some would return after not being used properly, while others would stay in WCW until Vince McMahon brought it out.
ECW is a promotion that will long live in the hearts of wrestling fans, with “EC-Dub” chants still being heard throughout the arena. Please do yourself a favour and head to the WWE Vault channel to watch some of the classics they have uploaded, such as the one below.