ECW broad­cast it’s last show tonight, and while I was sad­dened at the end of an era for extreme wrestling, I was glad to see it end. ECW was the antithe­sis of WWE and WCW. ECW gave us some very mem­o­rable and his­toric moments - such as invad­ing WWF the first time, Shane Dou­glas toss­ing the NWA belt in the trash, The Mass Tran­sit inci­dent and many oth­ers. ECW also intro­duced many of the iconic and leg­endary super­stars of today. Super­stars like Rey Mys­te­rio, Chris Jeri­cho, Chris Benoit, Eddie Guer­rero, Dean Malenko, Tazz, Mike Awe­some, Raven, Sand­man, Sabu and of course The “Whole Fuckin’ Show” Rob Van Dam. But after ECW went under, many of these super­stars went to the remain­ing 2 pro­mo­tions. Some flour­ished and oth­ers didn’t get far enough to make sig­nif­i­cant impact. However, their matches and mem­o­ries lived on as the var­i­ous pro­mo­tions heard that iconic chant “E-C-Dub, E-C-Dub,E-C-Dub” in every arena- keep­ing ECW alive amongst fans.

The sum­mer of 2005 saw a resur­gence of ECW, thanks in part to WWE cre­at­ing the One Night Stand PPV, which besides bring­ing nos­tal­gia to fans showed WWE that ECW was still alive but with a faint pulse. WWE saw dol­lar signs and in June of 2006 decided to hold another One Night Stand, but this time, it would lead to the rebirth of ECW on the SciFi chan­nel. For­mer ECW owner Paul Hey­man was put in charge of this new/old upstart brand and with that WWE’s ver­sion of ECW was born. Com­ing off the his vic­tory over John Cena at One Night Stand 2, it was a no brainer that The “Whole Dam Show” Rob Van Dam would be the re-launched brands’ Cham­pion.  Alas, the magic of One Night Stand slowly faded and WWECW became more and more preva­lent with each pass­ing week. Slowly but surely ECW Orig­i­nals quit or were released, and the mem­o­ries and super­stars of old were replaced with young WWE new­com­ers that needed a place to hone their craft. This was by many con­sid­ered the end, but to me this paved the way for a new gen­er­a­tion of wrestlers such as Monty Brown, Eli­jah Burke, Evan Bourne, CM Punk, Zack Ryder and Ezekiel Jack­son that would carry the flag of ECW in it’s final days with Tommy Dreamer still there as the last sol­dier fight­ing the good fight. Tommy Dreamer recently left the WWE and while he did say his good­byes, the fans knew that Tommy couldn’t carry this torch any further.

To me, ECW should have ended with Tommy Dreamer win­ning the belt one last time and retir­ing with the belt to put a happy end­ing on this leg­endary brand. But sadly that was wish­ful think­ing. ECW ended with it’s last cham­pion Chris­t­ian being defeated by Ezekiel Jack­son in an “extreme rules” match leav­ing Ezekiel as your last ECW cham­pion. I believe ECW died the day Tommy Dreamer left the WWE and what ended tonight was just another WWE brand.

Shed no tears for ECW wrestling fans, because the mem­o­ries we have can never be taken away. You can change the logo, the style and the wrestlers, but at the end of the day there was and will always be one ECW. The ECW that was owned by Paul Hey­man and had wrestlers like Dreamer, Sand­man, Funk, Cac­tus Jack, New Jack, Raven, Sabu and many oth­ers bleed­ing and wrestling for our entertainment.

Rest In Peace ECW.

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Too often I com­plain about the things I dis­like in pro­fes­sional wrestling, but instead of rant­ing and rav­ing about these things, I decided to write about how I would fix some things. Some of you may agree or dis­agree with my sce­nar­ios and are wel­come to comment.

Wel­come to the first col­umn of The Arm­chair Booker!

Let’s start with the num­ber one WWE show:

RAW

• Do away with the guest host­ing and either intro­duce a GM or some author­ity fig­ure to run the show.

• John Cena-Needs a heel turn to freshen up his char­ac­ter. Bring back the freestyles and street swag. Fans will enjoy the turn I’m sure. I would have also aligned him with Cryme Tyme for a solid faction.

• Bret Hart– Should have had the Hart Dynasty with him when he appeared on Raw and align DX with Vince. Would have ele­vated The Hart Dynasty and taken advan­tage of exist­ing beef between Bret,HBK & HHH.
• Bring in the other Dib­i­ase brother and make a Tag Team in Legacy. That way you could have the Dib­i­ase broth­ers for the tag belts, Cody for IC/US title, and Orton for the World Title. I’d call the Dib­i­ase broth­ers Money Inc. as an homage to their dad.
• Reunite the Colon Boithers, Car­l­ito & Primo, since solo they are struggling.
• Ele­vate Evan Bourne into a stronger mid-card feud with Swag­ger and MVP as your core guys.
• No more Hornswoggle!
• Would make San­tino a legit threat and cap­i­tal­ize on his pop­u­lar­ity by putting him in the IC/US title hunt as well.

Smack­down

• Cre­ate a sta­ble with Finlay,Drew McIn­tyre and Shea­mus. Have a vet­eran work with both of these young tal­ents and also cre­ate a tag team as well.
• Push Edge as your num­ber one heel.

• Con­tinue build­ing CM Punk’s Straight Edge Society.
• Move Khali to an enforcer role and limit his ring work.
• Build you Women’s Divi­sion around Beth Phoenix.
• Make Dolph Zig­gler, John Mor­ri­son and Matt Hardy your main mid-card guys for the US title, but ele­vate them into the main event often. This will allow you to both gauge crowd response and inject new blood into the main event scene.
• Chris Jeri­cho & Rey Mys­te­rio need to feud at the main event level.
• Keep and Kane & The Under­taker together and have them be the cen­ter of your Tag Team Division.

ECW

• Bring back the Hard­core Matches.
• Intro­duce a TV Title to give the mid-card guys a title to feud over.
• Shel­ton Ben­jamin needs some sort of mouth piece that can help him get over as a heel. I’d go with him, Zeke and Regal.
• Koslov needs to work on not look­ing so robotic in the ring.
• Align Baretta & Croft with Zack Ryder.
• Chris­t­ian needs to leave ECW in the Draft. Bring in a new vet­eran to carry the brand.
• I would move Char­lie Haas to ECW.
• Con­tinue push­ing Yoshi Tatsu.
• Use ECW to build new tal­ent and keep call­ing up new ros­ter mem­bers to keep the brand fresh.

This is just a sam­pling of how I’d change things. I am sure many of  you will have thoughts and sug­ges­tions of your own. Feel free to share them.

Matches con­sisted of two numb­nuts kick­ing each other in ter­ri­ble fash­ion while a ref­eree stops the action with every clean hit as the fight­ers score points.

Wasn’t a true test of skill or abil­ity, just a few clean hits landed being tal­lied until some­one kicked you in the chest enough times to become the winner.

Watch­ing box­ing was a man hug­ging fest unless cruis­er­weights were fight­ing, and even then, it was mainly bor­ing, long, drawn out fights that went all the way to 12 rounds.

So what could pro­vide all the fun of sports and the enter­tain­ment value of an inter­est­ing sto­ry­line as in movies, the­ater and TV shows?

Wrestling!

I’ve been a fan of wrestling since as far back as I can recall, though I was on and off dur­ing my later teen years, I’ve been a die-hard fan of Wrestling, mainly WWE , since Hogan was the man, through the Bret Hart vs. Shawn Michaels days, and now when guys like John Cena and Triple H are the top dogs and wrestling is way more enter­tain­ing than sports.

I’ve seen wrestling go through its ups and downs through­out the years from sto­ry­lines and episodes as bor­ing as life­time movies to epic matches and shows as excit­ing as big Hol­ly­wood blockbusters.

The point of this lit­tle col­umn, for lack of a bet­ter word, is to just point out a few com­par­isons between the wrestling when we were kids, and the wrestling we see on TV now and start-up a point of dis­cus­sion on them.

To begin, I’ll point out some big­ger issues right off the bat.

One of the prob­lems back then, in the 80’s, early 90’s, was under expo­sure, decent wrestlers were always knocked off air time in favor of less tal­ented, big name wrestlers, for exam­ple, Ricky Steam­boat was 10 times the per­former Hogan was, but also 10 times worse on the mic and charisma scale. Let’s keep it real, Hogan sold tick­ets, despite the fact that he really had the worst wrestling moves ever.

Steam­boat prob­a­bly couldn’t carry the show as well in that regard.

There were also less shows aired back then, Before RAW, I think on Sat­ur­day nights they had the main event, and on Sat­ur­day morn­ing they’d air WWF Super­stars which was mainly generic wrestlers get­ting beaten up by mid to low card performers.

You’d never see a major player there and no one cared for the “real” wrestlers, any of them that were really stand­ing out didn’t really get much air time on the big­ger shows, so they’d be off the radar faster than anything.

Now one of the main things that pisses me off is over­ex­po­sure of pro­gram­ming and writ­ers still under uti­liz­ing real talent.

But it’s not as bad as it could be, I guess….

With the pro­gram­ming, it’s ridicu­lous, on my last count, there are like four WWE shows a week, RAW, Smack­down, ECW and AM RAW on Sat­ur­day morn­ings, not to men­tion that there’s a PPV at least once a month, some months two PPV’s, such as Jan­u­ary and April.
It’s nuts.

It used to be that there was only five big PPV’s in a year, and those were HUGE events, not just beefed up episodes of their reg­u­lar weekly episodic pro­gram­ming shit.

There was the Royal Rum­ble, Wrestle­ma­nia, King of the Ring, Sum­mer­Slam, and Sur­vivor series, and these events were where titles changed hands, rival­ries were begun, ended and man­aged, and excit­ing moments were the norm.

Now it’s just a venue to exchange titles when needed, at the mas­sive and fre­quent costs of pay­ing customers.

I’ll have you know, titles used to be exchanged every now and then on episodes of RAW, I haven’t seen that in ages, last time was when RVD lost it to Edge after win­ning it from Cena at ECW One night stand quite a few years ago.

Now , never.

In the case of under uti­liz­ing tal­ent, it’s nowhere near as bad as it used to be, but you’ll notice that obvi­ously, the major play­ers are the main focus, guys like Evan Bourne show up for a 3 minute match and that’s the end of it for the next 1–2 weeks, no real push from the writ­ers, despite the stel­lar performance.

Guys like Randy Orton, Cena and Edge, while they do put on great shows, aren’t tak­ing the risks that the newer tal­ent is, and there­fore, are becom­ing tire­some to watch.

I do feel Wrestling has evolved, it still has it’s bor­ing shows as well as it’s great ones, and though there’s not much to watch in terms of brand name since WWE owns every­thing, and it’s either WWE or TNA, no more WCW, ECW, etc, just one or the other, it’s still good stuff , and has recently been get­ting a lot bet­ter in com­par­i­son to a few months ago.

I do wish they’d cut the damn PPV’s down, since you waste 40–50 bucks each month (or more) only to be dis­ap­pointed at how shitty the event was.

Aside from that, at least now there are tons of top guys, totally not like the hand­ful as in the old days, now we have top dog heels as well as top dog faces, so you aren’t lim­ited to either Hogan or Ulti­mate War­rior (Face) or who­ever their enemy was at the time.

Remem­ber the divas back then?

My god, now they are actu­ally hot, before they were pretty damn aver­age at best, if not down­right ghastly.

I also remem­ber for a time, all the main even­ters were lard asses like Yokozuna, Mabel, Tug­boat, Earth­quake, now it’s all about the jacked bodies.

I couldn’t get through an episode of raw with­out hav­ing man tits jig­gled in my face for half the show and win­ning the WWE title only depended on how fat and heavy a super­star was and whether or not the top Face can lit his fat ass, or be squashed under his weight.

It kind of sucked for a time dur­ing the 90’s because of that dis­gust­ing shit.

Get­ting down to the meat of it all though, I would def­i­nitely say it’s bet­ter today than yes­ter­day, but a few things need to be changed, as I pointed out above , and with that in place, wrestling can become even greater than ever.

That’s my take.

What’s the gen­eral con­sen­sus from the crowd, what sign are you hold­ing up on this subject?

Every few years, a group of tal­ented ath­letes rise through the ranks of the WWE farm sys­tem or are brought in from other pro­mo­tions that are all des­tined for great­ness. While I have not been impressed with the over­all WWE prod­uct as of late I do see wrestlers that will be major play­ers in the next few years. This will be the first of  many MTR posts that will exam­ine break­through per­form­ers from var­i­ous promotions.

10. Cody Rhodes - Cur­rent Legacy mem­ber, for­mer Tag Team Cham­pion, 3rd gen­er­a­tion per­former. Cody Rhodes cur­rently is the default mem­ber of Legacy that eats pin­falls and plays sec­ond fid­dle to Randy Orton and Ted Dib­i­ase Jr., but he does have flashes of bril­liance. I think that once Legacy runs it’s course, Cody will be a great US/IC Title con­tender. With the pres­sure of being a 3rd gen star rest­ing on his back, I am sure the son of “The Dream” will be around for along time.

9. Ezekiel Jack­son - Big Zeke got his start as a body­guard to the tal­ented yet under-utilized Brian Kendrick, but after see­ing him in action dur­ing tag matches and the over­all vicious­ness of his per­sona I knew a solo push wasn’t far off. My only gripe with Zeke is that his voice does not match his size and he’s seems ten­ta­tive on the mic.  His time paired with Regal and Koslov has done him well because has allowed his abil­ity to shine in the ring with­out the pres­sures of mic work. He reminds me of how Batista was in Evo­lu­tion and we all know how suc­cess­ful Batista became once he went solo. I see the same suc­cess for Zeke as well.

8. Yoshi Tatsu- Even though Yoshi has the typ­i­cal (and stereo­typ­i­cal) mar­tial arts gim­mick, I see that he has tons of poten­tial and is great combo of high fly­ing abilty and solid strik­ing. I see shades of Tajiri in Yoshi Tatsu due to the pop­u­lar­ity he is gain­ing with the ECW audi­ence. His music is kind of catchy too.

7. Dolph Zig­gler- For­mer Spirit Squad mem­ber and Mr. Per­fect replica. DZ exploded on the scene with a semi-cheesy gim­mick where he intro­duced him­self to every­one dur­ing var­i­ous broad­casts. I con­sid­ered him a com­edy char­ac­ter but I have to admit that his matches with John Mor­ri­son have been clas­sic. His gim­mick now is pretty close to the late Curt Hen­nig, which may not be the inten­tion, how­ever, that isn’t a bad per­former to take inspi­ra­tion from. He seems to be in limbo regard­ing his cur­rent sto­ry­line. Rumors are that he may be paired with Vicky Guer­rero since Eric Esco­bar hasn’t proven as pop­u­lar as they expected. If that proves true, we’ll see if Mr. Zig­gles can make the most of this pairing.

6. Kaval aka Low Ki– ROH & TNA leg­end Low Ki has signed with WWE and while I was sad­dened by his depar­ture from TNA, I know that he would be a great addi­tion to any ros­ter. Low Ki has great pres­ence and awe­some kicks & strikes. His foot stomp fin­isher is awe­some and I hope they let him use it. Rumors are point­ing towards a masked gim­mick that will have him feud with Rey Mys­te­rio. If uti­lized cor­rectly I can guar­an­tee Kaval will be a major player.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VsSzs4ATho]

5. Amer­i­can Dragon Bryan Daniel­son– For­mer ROH Cham­pion and one of the best tech­ni­cal wrestlers in the game today. As a fan of the late Chris Benoit, it’s great to see another tech­ni­cal mas­ter fol­low in his foot­steps. Bryan Daniel­son gets a lot of shit for his mic work but much like Benoit, his tal­ent does the talk­ing for him. Besides, I per­son­ally feel his pro­mos are intense and suit him. I look for­ward to some 5-star clas­sics from the for­mer ROH champion.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtL3mtHoMDI]

4.Ted Dib­i­ase Jr. –Cur­rent Legacy mem­ber, for­mer Tag Team Cham­pion, 3rd gen­er­a­tion per­former. Much like Cody Rhodes, Ted Dib­i­ase is also play­ing sec­ond fid­dle to Randy Orton. WWE seems to really have big plans for Ted, given the many times he’s been put at odds with Orton and the slow burn that’s lead­ing to a clash between these two super­stars. With his act­ing debut in The Marine 2, a face turn is immi­nent and should allow the fans to see the other of side of Dib­i­ase. We’ll see if a face turn will prove suc­cess­ful or if he’s des­tined to be a bad guy for­ever like his dad.

3. Hart Dynasty– Now I could have given all three super­stars their own seper­ate entries but I feel that this fac­tion together has tons of poten­tial given their sto­ried back­grounds. I hon­estly thought they would have been added to Legacy and later Orton and crew would turn on the Harts. Sadly right now they seem to also be in limbo. With the power of DH Smith and the quick­ness of Tyson Kidd, not to men­tion the techi­cal prowess of Natalya Nei­d­hart, I see this tag team doing major things in the com­ing year. (WWE are you listening?)

2. Kofi Kingston– I am sure many of you expected Kofi at Num­ber One on my list. Kofi has started on the path towards super­star­dom. With an active pro­gram going on with Orton and a ton of good matches under his belt, Mr. S.O.S is sky­rock­et­ing to the top. Kofi has a mar­ketable per­son­al­ity and tons of ath­letic abil­ity. I do feel his mic work is a bit sus­pect, but I am sure that in feud­ing with some of the major play­ers he’ll learn a thing or two.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpIf6_ADj-I]

1. Matt Sydal aka Evan Bourne– With one of the most beau­ti­ful fin­ish­ers in the Air­bourne Shoot­ing Star Press and years of action under his belt, this Raw super­star has star writ­ten all over him. His matches with Rey Mys­te­rio, Tyson Kidd and Kofi were all clas­sics. He is cur­rently being jobbed out on Mon­day nights, but I think that this kid has the tools to be cham­pion. Sadly I see him being kept away from World Titles due to his size which is unfor­tu­nate. I hope the bias toward smaller per­form­ers changes sooner rather than later because Bourne is way too pop­u­lar to go unnoticed.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pdlb3TeBD4g]

Hon­or­able Mentions:

• MVP
• Chris­t­ian Cage
• Zack Ryder
• San­tino Marella
• John Mor­ri­son
• The Miz
• Shea­mus
• Matt Hardy
• Drew McIn­tyre
• The Rip­per — Paul Burchill