The Hardcore Spirit of ECW Is Still Going Strong in MLW
Hardcore History
From the first moment I saw ECW, I was hooked and knew I was seeing something unique that both intrigued and terrified me. As a kid, all I wanted in life was to be a professional wrestler but as I became familiar with wrestlers like Taz and Sabu I trembled at the thought at what type of insanity would go down at ECW’s House of Hardcore wrestling school. After all, these weren’t wrestlers the way I had always thought of wrestlers. These were something else entirely.
ECW, for better or worse, began to form so much of who I would become as I grew up. I started to see how sterilized WWF programming was and sneered at the attempts to take someone like “The Franchise” Shane Douglas and turn him into a ridiculous college professor. As WCW Monday Nitro launched in the Mall of America, I scoffed at how silly it looked compared to the real stuff I was watching in the Land of Extreme.
Some nights, I can still hear Joey Styles yelling about “High Incident!”, “The Battle of the Bam Bams!” and “the night Kimona Wanaleia danced atop the ECW Arena!” as the Extreme Warfare commercials replay in my mind. As a kid who wasn’t old enough to work and whose parents would absolutely refuse to pay for ECW videotapes, I was never able to order anything from ECW and instead had to rely on getting my fix by setting my VCR to record Hardcore TV each week.
The memories I have from this period of time are so visceral, and Extreme Championship Wrestling as a whole took a 12-year-old kid who had grown up loving everything the WWF could deliver and began transforming him into someone who would scour every magazine and, eventually, every Usenet newsgroup and internet message board to find more and more wrestling from outside of the mainstream.
These days, the way I look for and devour professional wrestling is still heavily influenced by the way I felt when I first began watching ECW. As a kid, I would have never thought that there would come a day when I wouldn’t watch the WWF, but here I am as a grown man with a canceled WWE Network subscription and several hours of my time each week that I can fill with all sorts of other things outside of the realm of WWE programming.
ECW gave me a feeling that I – a quiet and shy kid – could actually fit in somewhere because they were offering something that directly appealed to me, which I didn’t even realize was something I wanted until I had it right there in front of me.
It was for the freaks and the weirdos and the people who didn’t want to run alongside everyone else living their lives happily conforming to the status quo. It bred an entire generation of those freaks and weirdos who would grow up to carry on that spirit, be it as wrestlers or fans.
That generation is thriving in independent wrestling today.