76. ECW: One Night Stand 2006
77. ECW: Barely Legal 1997
ECW: One Night Stand 2006 was basically the kickoff to the ECW television program that ran on SyFy from June of 2006 until just last week. It took place in the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City where a large crowd of rabid old school ECW followers came out to cheer for their favorites while bashing the WWE's guys.
The highlights of this particular show included the match between Kurt Angle and Randy Orton. Both guys got in some offense and Orton looked good in the loss. Another was the 6 person intergender tag team match with Mick Foley, Edge and Lita taking on Terry Funk, Tommy Dreamer and Beulah. Lots of hardcore stuff in this one including a barbed wire baseball bat, a barbed wire board and a spot that involved the barbed wire baseball bat being lit on fire. Lots of blood flowed here. The main event saw Rob Van Dam challenging WWE's John Cena for the WWE Championship. Cena is typically the fan favorite but not so here. He was practically booed out of the building in this one. He was just torn apart by the ECW fans. He and Van Damn had a solid match though and it was interesting to watch Cena's reaction to the crowd. All in all, this was a pretty good show.
ECW: Barely Legal 1997 was the first ever ECW pay-per-view event. They had quite a difficult time getting to that level as they were pretty controversial for the time. Most of their matches were wrestled under "Extreme rules" which meant that anything goes. There were weapons in almost every match and lots of bloodshed and carnage. Most pay-per-view providers didn't want to get their hands dirty. Eventually, ECW owner Paul Heyman convinced them to give them a chance.
I was never really a fan of old school ECW. While the violence was different from what the other companies were offering, it all started to blur together after a few matches. Same thing went with the profanity laden promos. They were novel at first but quickly grew old.
Since this was ECW's first pay-per-view, I was a bit interested in it. Overall, the show was meh at best. The best match on the card to me was Taz taking on his former tag team partner Sabu. The match was very physical but told the story they way it needed to be told. It also did so without being overly reliant on weapons or bloodshed. Good stuff.
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