The Week In Hardcore 9.02.06
Posted by Sam Caplan on 09.02.2006
All the usual results, news and opinions on the Extreme Third Brand, plus I've got a little something to get off my chest about the release of Kurt Angle and what people have had to say about it.
ECW On Sci-Fi Results: 7/25/2006 (1.9 Rating)
-Hardcore Holly defeated Rob Van Dam by DQ when Van Dam attacked Holly with a chair (5:50)
-CM Punk defeated Stevie Richards via submission to the Anaconda Vice (4:17)
-Paul Heyman pinned Sabu in an Extreme Rules Match (8:39)
Storyline Developments
-After their match, Van Dam chased Hardcore Holly out of the ring and into the crowd with the chair.
-Rene Dupree is riding an exercise bike, and plans to become the most extreme athlete in ECW.
-Big Show came out to the ring and said that he's the most dominant athlete in ECW history, and challenges Degeneration X to a handicap match next week.
-Shannon Moore tells us to fight the power. The funny thing I have come to realize after all these weeks of Shannon Moore promos (whether he was coming or not) is that these aren't his own thoughts. See, Shannon isn't sentient, at least in the sense most people think of the word. Rather than forming his own thoughts and opinions based on outside stimuli, he just repeats stuff he reads on bathroom walls at train stations and hears from insane sidewalk conspiracy theorists. One example is an email I got from a female correspondent who waited around after the show to try and rope in Shannon for a fun evening. When propositioned by this woman, Shannon merely said "Government is expendable. People are not. Sean likes man sex in all holes." and then walked away. He's an interesting fellow.
-Matt Striker comes out to tell us how smart he is and uses a bunch of words he thinks nobody is going to know. (In case anybody was wondering, ossified means inebriated, a reprobate is somebody without morals, and a pariah is an outcast) He then runs down the Sandman for being all three of these things, and says he's better than Sandman because he's smarter. Sandman comes out to kick his ass, but Striker beats him up with a chalkboard and a stapler. These may be two of the most imaginitive foreign objects I've ever heard of, I hope he actually uses them in matches.
-Balls Mahoney is about to tell us about how he likes to put his balls on the walls, but Kelly Kelly Kelly Kelly Kelly Kelly Kelly Kelly Kelly Kelly Kelly Kelly Kelly comes out and shows him her tits. Thankfully, he didn't return the favor by showing her his balls. At least not on camera, and that's all that counts.
-As you might imagine, Paul Heyman didn't beat Sabu cleanly. Instead, he basically had Big Show and his security Bashams beat the piss out of Sabu (and taking the occasional cheapshot himself). Rob Van Dam came out to try and help his buddy, but Big Show and Hardcore Holly beat him up and Holly gives him an Alabama Slam through a table, allowing Show to give Sabu the cobra clutch backbreaker and toss Heyman on top for the win. Is there anybody on the planet who didn't see that coming once they heard it was Extreme Rules? Just for kicks, Show chokeslams Sabu through a table, too.
ECW Top Five (As voted by...ME!)
All rankings are based on what happens on TV. House shows do not count. If it didn't happen on TV, it didn't happen.
ECW Champion: Big Show
1)Test: Although he was on the losing end of the tag match last week, he still himself has yet to be beaten in ECW.
2)CM Punk: The winning streak continues, and he lucks out and moves way up the list thanks to a lack of anyone else doing anything special lately.
3)Sandman: Seems to have wrapped up his feud with Test and Mike Knox last week, and has now transitioned into a feud with the much more entertaining Matt Striker.
4)Hardcore Holly: He beat Rob Van Dam this week. Sure, it was by DQ, but he did beat him, and his involvement with Van Dam and in the main event seems to indicate that he's going to be a key player going forward.
5)Sabu: He's on a bit of a losing streak, having lost twice to the Big Show and now also to Paul Heyman (which, while unfair, was legal within the context of the rules).
Hardcore Backstage News
This week's rating for ECW On Sci-Fi was a 1.9, the show's lowest rating yet. [pwinsider.com]
Pretty much everyone is of the opinion that this rating is the result of two things: Raw not being on in its usual time and place, and with summer coming to an end, a lot of people are on vacation instead of watching wrestling. But even still, it pulled a higher rating than anything Impact's ever done. That must make the folks in Orlando feel great.
Negotiations to keep ECW on the Sci-Fi Network following the initial 13 week trial period have concluded successfully. The show will remain in the 10PM Tuesday night timeslot, with a replay to be added. Negotiations were greatly aided by the fact that ECW On Sci-Fi typically drew nearly a full ratings point more than what was originally projected before the show even debuted. [wrestlingobserver.com]
This is great, great news. While I personally had no doubt that ECW was going to be resigned, this was really good news because, now that ECW On Sci-Fi is here to stay, they can start spending time building new stars instead of relying on Big Show and guest stars from Raw or Smackdown to pull a rating that they've actually been able to maintain, for the most part anyway, for the last few weeks without guys from Raw and Smackdown. The fact that Sci-Fi Network execs were so pleasantly surprised by the rating, which reportedly outdraws just about everythinng else on the network, would lead me to believe that it wouldn't be out of the question for ECW On Sci-Fi to eventually be expanded to a 90 minute or two hour show. Say what you want to about Vince, but the relaunch of ECW has gone not as well, but actually better than they probably hoped, and it looks to be quickly overtaking Smackdown as the #2 brand.
Ponderings Of A Stu-Man
Just one thing for the Ponderings this week, but it's something I really want to get off of my chest. Yes, it's about Kurt Angle. I said pretty much everything I had to say about the actual situation last week, but a lot of stuff's been written about him since then that I don't agree with, and I decided to speak on it here.
I've heard a lot of people saying the usual stuff (the release is what he needed, let's hope he can get his life back together, Vince is a swell guy for doing this/Vince is a terrible person for doing this, yadda yadda), but what most people usually end up closing their thoughts on Angle with is something like "this may have saved his life." I think this is empty, simpleminded crap from people who fee like they have to say something like that in order not to look like a prick. I don't play that. Is the release a very good thing for Angle's physical well being, as well as probably being good for his personal life as well? Absolutely, I have no doubt about that. I was a bit shocked at first to hear that they actually did it, but I absolutely believe that this was the right decision.
But save his life? Where are people pulling that crap from? True, he was so physically broken down that he could very well have had something give out at a bad time during a match and wind up severely injuring himself or somebody else, but that's not what people are talking about. They're talking about the painkillers. Yeah, I suppose it is possible that he could overdose on painkillers one night and not wake up, but I have to believe that his body would have broken down to the point where he wouldn't be able to perform long before that happened, painkillers or no. Dynamite Kid is a perfect example of how Angle would have ended up. For those unfamiliar with the tale, the short version is that he took massive amounts of painkillers to mask the pain that resulted from his high impact wrestling style, and after a while his legs just stopped functioning. Turns out that since he was on so many painkillers, the injuries just kept piling up without him knowing about it until it was too late. His body broke down a bit more every day, and he never had any idea, and now today he's living in some unknown location in England, penniless and confined to a wheelchair. He is, however, very much alive, albeit crippled. So I think the most you could say about this decision is that it saved his physical well being, I wouldn't go so far as to say it saved his life.
But the thing that's bothered me the most coming out of this whole situation is that people are comparing it, as usual, to Eddy Guerrero. "It's a good thing that Angle was released, or he could very well have wound up like Eddy Guerrero." Fuck you, all right? This is exactly what I was worried was going to happen almost from the moment I found out Eddy dropped dead. You know, I think it's really terrific how people can sit there and tear WWE apart seventeen times a week over the fact that Eddy (who seems to have become the Hurricane Katrina of wrestling news reporting) is still a part of storylines almost a full year after his death, yet they can't wait to throw his name out there every time we discover that a wrestler has some kind of substance abuse problem. I think that anybody who brought up Eddy's name when talking about Angle's situation is a hypocrite for doing the very thing that they say is so morally reprehensible for WWE to be doing each week, and ought to be ashamed of themselves for even bringing it up if they really think of themselves as being that righteous. And if you have doubts about whether or not Eddy would look at Rey, Chavo, and Vicki on Smackdown each week and would "want it that way", maybe you should think about the fact that he now seems to have become the poster boy for what could happen to anybody and everybody in the business who has some kind of problem, and whether or not he'd "want it that way" either. For crissakes.
Extremist Of The Week: Hardcore Holly
Yeah, I know he's Hardcore Holly and everything, but he's made a big impact since debuting on the brand last week and is being booked better than he ever has been before, including his run with the Hardcore Title in 1999. In addition to feuding with Rob Van Dam (one of the centerpieces of the brand), he also seems to have allied himself with ECW Champion The Big Show and the man in charge, Paul Heyman. Let's hope he gets something out of what could very well be the final big run of his career, and be remembered as more than the guy who beat up the kid on Tough Enough and got his neck broken by Brock Lesnar. Let's also hope he can stay focused by getting away from the porno movies for a little while. Are porno movies covered by the Wellness Program?
Csonka has the ECW On Sci-Fi Report, Dunn has the ECW eXperience, and Dan Zurbruegg, whose name I was very happy to spell corrrectly on the first try, has the ECW On Sci-Fi Evaluation.
O'Dog and Dave Martell face off in Fact Or Fiction where, among other things, they discuss whether or not Chris Benoit should be brought to ECW when he returns, as well as whether or not Kurt Angle will return to the company as a wrestler.
Mike LaFave continues his excellent plan to rebuild Smackdown over with the second of three parts this week.
Csonka has the 3Rs. I really don't need to say any more about it, or even bother linking to it really, since it's Csonka and that's the only column anyone reads on Fridays anyway. Except of course for...
Michael Weyer, who shines the spotlight on the icons of the 80s, Hulk Hogan and Ric Flair.
And hey, speaking of Hogan, there's this week's That Was Then, in which I talk about the last true dream match, Hogan vs Austin, and how I would approach it if it were to happen at next year's Wrestlemania. I've been getting some great email from this one.
Extreme Outlook
Both Rob Van Dam and Sabu now appear to be pretty far from the ECW Title picture, having been diverted into feuds with others and because of repeated losses. How long will it be until one or both of them is back in contention? And until they are, who will step up and challenge the Big Show?
It is unlikely that Big Show's next challenger will be the Sandman, who seems to have gotten himself into a feud with Matt Striker. Will Striker be able to use his smarts to overcome the ECW Original, or will he become another notch on Sandman's Singapore cane?
Shannon Moore spends yet another week cutting promos instead of actually wrestling. When will he finally get into the ring, and who will it be against? Same with Rene Dupree, who will he wind up feuding with when he debuts? CM Punk, perhaps? Punk has been on quite a roll, but has yet to be tested. Will Dupree be his first prolonged feud?
What's next for Test and Mike Knox? After suffering their first loss last week, they seem to have disappeared, at least for this week. Are they still going to team up, or will they go their separate ways now? And what of their conqueror, Tommy Dreamer, who also didn't appear on TV this week?
Banging Out
That's it for me, folks. I'll be back here next week with the usual news and results, and of course my own thoughts on everything ECW. Until next week, this is Stuart "F'N" Carapola, signing off. Thanks for reading.
All feedback can be directed to stuwrestling@hotmail.com
