The Hardcore Spirit of ECW Is Still Going Strong in MLW

When Extreme Championship Wrestling closed its doors, promotions rushed to try and capture the essence of extreme in an attempt to cash-in on the rabid and hungry ECW fanbase. While some of the more tryhard companies came and quickly went, others who captured the spirit and heart of the original ECW, rather than trying to mimic its style completely, have survived and flourished.

The mid-nineties were home to some of the absolute best and absolute worst professional wrestling had to offer. Growing up in the northeastern United States, I was a WWF kid through and through since birth. Our cable providers didn’t carry any of the channels which would have allowed me to watch WCW and my main exposure to it was trying to decipher what was going on during pay-per-views as observed through the scrambled pay-per-view channel.

I have some fond, yet confusing, memories of listening to Halloween Havoc 1992 and trying to parse together what was happening as Sting and Jake Roberts engaged in a Spin The Wheel, Make The Deal Match.

Growing up with my WWF blinders on, I don’t know if I would have been old or wise enough to understand just how bad 1995 WWF was if I hadn’t been exposed to Extreme Championship Wrestling. I still have a hazy recollection of the day a friend of mine, whose family had a satellite dish, showed me my very first snippet of ECW.

As I remember it, Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge cut a promo while smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. In my still-forming brain, my first thought (which I may have expressed out loud, I’m not sure) was that these two would have been fired if they pulled something like this on WWF TV!

Nonetheless, through this friend, I was able to see an entirely new corner of the professional wrestling world which had, until this point, only been available to me through photographs in the wrestling magazines available at our local grocery stores.