ECW ECW WRESTLING at the Mid-Hudson Civic Center

11/7/98 in Poughkeepsie, NY

by Mike Lorefice (M.L.Liger@juno.com)

If you think I go to ECW just to complain or want it to be a bad show you couldn't be more wrong. I wanted this to be a good show, really badly in fact. I went to the show with Chris Martinez, who drove four+ hours to get to my house (well, actually it turned out to be five due to the wonderful directions given by the Maps page on Yahoo), so I certainly didn't want him to come all that way to see a bunch of guys stink up the joint. I enjoyed myself because he was tres cool, but the only good wrestling either of us saw came from my overworked VCR's.

ECW wrestling has degenerated to being bad indy wrestling. It seemed like the nightly total was 1000 high spots, 999 of which were rolled out. There was no build, no psychology, no transitions, no carry over selling if they even bothered selling at all, and on and on. Every guy on the show has some good spots, but no one knew how to work any of them in or make them have any meaning. They could also get pops and/or cheap heat by doing the things that we all know work in ECW, but in every other aspect this was the lowest form of wrestling. These guys did not bust their ass tonight. No one mailed it in, but the matches were short and often had a lot of wasted time. None of the matches really had any substance, and the only two matches that somewhat resembled "major league" wrestling were Taz vs. Mikey and Van Dam vs. One Man Gang. Of course, had Jerry Lynn, Chris Candido, & Lance Storm would have wrestled, there might have been some more passable wrestling, but this only further shows how thin the talent in this company is.

This show should have drawn the worst of the ECW shows at the Civic Center because they haven't had tv here since the end of August. Instead, the crowd was up from the last show by a couple hundred to 1,500 or perhaps slightly more. The most probable reason for this is that the pro wrestling industry as a whole is way over in this area (I know, no surprise) for the first time in a decade, so the fact that it's cool to like wrestling and buy wrestling merchandise (lots of stores that would never have even though of selling wrestling stuff, especially WCW, which I swear the vast majority of the people I knew up to the point when Hogan joined WCW had never even heard of or at best knew that "the other league" existed but didn't know anything about it, are now stocking shirts, framed pictures, and who knows what else) is much more important than having a show on at 2:00 A.M. on a Saturday night that many ECW fans don't even watch. Of course, seeing the building was relatively full, they could have fit another seven or so rows of $30 seats on two sides different sides and there were certainly empty seats in all areas, Dreamer decided to emphasize that the WWF had about the same amount of people when he sat in this building and watched Roddy Piper bust a coconut over Jimmy Snuka's head. When you have a building that only holds a little more than 2000 people, if ECW only had 500 and WWF sold out you could still say it was about the same number of people, but I'm willing to bet that percentage wise the WWF show killed this ECW show. I wasn't at that particular show, but my recollection is that the WWF tapings in the 1980's would just about always be legit sellouts, while for this show we bought our tickets 30 minutes before the show started and they didn't have the "extra" rows seats set up so it wasn't like they anticipated needing them.

The crowd was really hot, especially early in the show. The swearing got the biggest pops on the show. The gimmick spots got the second biggest pops on the show. Chris was sickened by these two facts. The wrestlers themselves were not all that important, so long as they "gave the fans what they wanted to see" or the fans could at least yell at them to do so. The heat died some as the show went on with Dreamer not getting any heat until everyone came out to join him. A lot more people than normal left early even though the show ended an hour earlier than normal due to not starting really late (perhaps Heyman forgot to set his watch back on 10/25?) and not having an intermission. Don't ask me why they left because at ECW shows "a good time is always had by all." Luckily, the six drunks behind us were among those who left in the middle. This crowd seemed more "normal" than the ECW crowd is stereotyped as, but these guys behind me were the epitome of disgraceful wrestling fans. Only one of them knew what ECW stood for, but that one of them possessed this "knowledge" was the best thing you could say about them. First, they actually wanted to make people move out of their general admission seats because for some reason the Civic Center listed seat numbers on the tickets and perhaps they corresponded with the seats these guys had, but I think they all took GA to mean row G seat A because they kept asking everyone where row G was. I thought these guys didn't know any words other than bar, get laid, this isn't wrestling where is the trash cans and blood, "hey Dick" (one guy literally said this 100 times during the Dudley's match), and show your tits (which they truly believed Bytch would do), and their favorite move the "Chinese gas pedal" (which is supposedly when you spread your opponents legs and punch them in the organ Helmsley wants everyone to suck). However, when Mahoney came out they all stood up and screamed every word in AC/DC's Big Balls. Luckily, after they saw their man Balls and got their blood, which due to watching "Exposed: Pro Wrestling's Greatest Secrets" they now "knew" occurred when the referee handed the wrestler a blade (apparently they didn't think there was anything funny about guys coming up bloody after they had been outside the ring and nowhere near the ref for a period of time) they headed out to the bar to try to get laid. The only other notable fan around me was this elementary school kid, who kept standing on his chair and doing crotch chops while, of course, yelling "suck it." The crowd overall was tame. None of the wrestlers challenged the audience to a fight or had a run in with them even though they actually brawled through the crowd (a first for the Civic Center). This must have been a surprise to the Civic Center, who went so far as to force me to throw my pens in the garbage when I entered the building because I could use them for a weapon. I guess they figure no one would waste their time writing about such a bad product?

FBI vs. Tommy Rogers & Chris Chetti. The wrestling in this match was pretty good, but they spent as much time playing to the crowd as they did wrestling. The crowd was really responding, but I guess it was because they were starved for wrestling. They kept playing to the crowd forever, and somehow it worked since it was early in the show and the fans. Chetti was probably the best wrestler on the show. He did some awesome spots, as usual. The problem was that his moves lacked impact. His execution has improved and he wasn't missing his spots, but he'd do a perfect springboard or climb up then barely hit the opponent with his actual move. Rogers did a good job of working the crowd, "exposing" that Smothers & Rich weren't really Italians before the match, but didn't do any notable wrestling. FBI did their "comedy." Their offense wasn't clean and lacked impact. One Fantastic spot was Chetti allowed Rogers to avoid a double suplex by catching him across his shoulders and letting him slide down to his feet. The finish, which was really well done, came when Chetti was pinned after Rich hit him with the flagpole in midair to stop his triple jump moonsault. This had potential, but never came close to reaching it. *1/4

Blue Meanie & Super Nova vs. Ulf Hermann & Amish Roadkill. The wrestling in this match was Aguila-esque. Everyone but Meanie did a great spot or two, but beyond that everything looked like it came from guys who hadn't even graduated from wrestling school. Roadkill did an awesome diving body press where it looked like he jumped 3/4 of the way across the ring. Hermann really only did two spots, but both were nice. Nova got stuck in the turnbuckle after missing a dropkick in the corner, so Hermann neckbreaker dropped him out, which looked really good although it isn't as cool as Rina Ishii's version because she does the neckbreaker drop off the middle rope. Hermann then gave Nova a pumphandle slam like Bryan Clark used to finish with when he still resided in Three Mile Island. Meanie didn't do anything good, but at least he made fun of the worst move in wrestling, The People's elbow. Meanie & Nova pinned Hermann with their Blue Light special. How fitting that they call their finisher this, considering the caliber of their work. It's pretty laughable that there is a "big uproar" that Nova was left out of the worthless PWI 500 because the guy has never shown anything anywhere. I mean, he has a couple decent spots and was kind of funny when he was in the BWO, but he hasn't shown any signs of developing into anything but a spot wrestler, not that at this point he even has more than a few spots. Nova, and Meanie as well, are incredibly green or as Michael Smith would put it, "they are greener than Flair's teeth." This is not to say that Nova is worse than the other 500 guys because PWI ranks guys that are beyond awful, retired, old enough to collect Social Security, and so on, but every year PWI leaves out a ton of better wrestlers than Nova. Even though PWI claims they have certain criteria, the only thing consistent about their rankings is that they consistently make no sense based on any standard anyone other than they can think of. Why complain about Nova when he is the most insignificant of the zillion flaws their lists have had over the years? 3/4*

FTW Title: Taz vs. Mikey Whipwreck. This was the best match on the show. Storm came out and complained he hadn't received the title shot that ECW promised him and said he was going to get it tonight or something like that. He was expecting a real champion, so of course that meant Taz came out to defend his bogus belt. However, Storm said the FTW title doesn't mean anything in Canada, but it might mean something in NY so he gave Mikey, who is from Buffalo, the title shot. Storm and the thankfully implanted Tammy Lynn Bytch stayed at ringside and interfered on Mikey's behalf. The downside of having no TV, and apparently these fans didn't order the PPV because if they did it wouldn't have mattered that there was no TV, was that the majority of the fans didn't know Mikey was a heel when he came out. It was a good idea for ECW to turn him if it will allow him to alter his style to one more suitable for his health, but I didn't see any such alteration in this match. Mikey was quite good there though. He was mainly dominated, taking nice bumps, as always, on Taz's typical big suplexes. The problem with the match was that it was too short. It appeared to be developing into a good match, and this was the only match on the show you could say that about. Unfortunately, Taz basically no sold two of Mikey's WhipperSnappers in a row and caught Mikey, who was celebrating hitting his big move, in his katahajime to retain the title. Poor Mikey. He not only lost the match, but, in Huckster like fashion, Taz killed his finisher dead. **

ECW Tag Titles: Buh Buh Ray & D-Von Dudley vs. Balls Mahoney & Masato Tanaka. When Gertner barely had anything to say (for him) we knew we were in big trouble. This was a joke of a match. Everyone brawled at once. Tanaka was outside the ring almost the whole match. He did his swinging DDT, but that was about the only wrestling move he did. Chris and I both wanted to see Tanaka even though ECW has ruined him, but we after the match we both felt like we hadn't seen him. The only thing anyone cared about was the dueling chair sequence. D-Von did The People's headbutt, which would have come off better if Meanie hadn't poked fun at the spot earlier. The whole match was basically chaos. A few teams in ECW over the years, for instance Public Enemy, could pull these matches off and even on occasion make you think you saw something incredible (spot wise of course), but most of the guys who try have no talent and do a match with no positive aspects. This was pretty much the same thing you see on tv, but without the Heyman editing to make it look marginally passable. Just plain bad. Tanaka was pinned after a Dudley death drop. 1/4*

Sabu vs. Danny Doring. This was one of the more exciting matches of the night even though it was a glorified squash. It was a weird match in that Sabu sold a lot more for Doring than you would expect, but at the same time it didn't seem like Doring did any offensive maneuvers. It was mainly Sabu doing his spots, and Doring would avoid some of them, but never really get on track offensively because he really has no offense. One of the few things Doring did were two dropkicks in a row, but they were pathetic because he's lucky if he gets up high enough to hit Sabu in the chest with them. Sabu really toned his offense down. He was taking a longer time on the top rope than normal on his springboards, but he didn't miss any of those so I'm not complaining. He did one of the worst top rope Frankensteiners I've ever seen, but in general his execution was good. Of course, this was Sabu trying to carry a poor inexperienced wrestler, so it wasn't going to be good. They teased Doring putting Sabu through the table Sabu had set up from the apron to the guard rail, but Doring wound up being put through it in the spot of the match. Sabu won with a nice diving Arabian facebuster, which perhaps I shouldn't call a facebuster since Doring was lying on his stomach when Sabu did the move. This was one of Chris' favorite matches on the show, but he still basically said these matches don't even rate in comparison to matches like Misawa vs. Kawada 6/3/94 & Chigusa vs. Lioness 2/26/87. *1/4

TV Title: Rob Van Dam vs. One Man Gang. It's pretty sad that ECW has stooped to using some of the worst rejects from the leagues they love to make fun of. Gang has always been and always will be horrible. He hasn't really conformed to the ECW style, although he did use a chair shot, which in his case isn't a good thing simply because 80's WWF style is about as bad a style as you can find. Van Dam busted his ass to make this a good match, but he isn't good and Gang sucks. Van Dam is like a bad version of Michaels. He takes big bumps to put his opponent over, but then he makes quick comebacks where he doesn't sell the previous damage and just rolls out a bunch of high spots to show his opponent up. To make things worse, his transitional moves are nonexistent. Gang dominated the match since he was jobbing. At one point he screwed up a powerbomb, releasing Van Dam while he was still rolling up, but this wound up looking pretty impressive because of Van Dam's bump. Gang bled, probably hardway. Like Sabu, Vam Dam didn't do nearly as many spots as normal, although he did a cool version of his rolling thunder that I never saw before where he finished it off with a senton. He also put Gang through a table. Finish saw Gang & Bill Alfonso fighting over a chair. Alfonso, perhaps, let go and Gang's momentum turned him so he ran right into Van Dam's diving Van Daminator. I didn't get the idea that this was a favorite of most people in attendance. *1/2

Justin Credible vs. Tommy Dreamer. This was one of those matches that defies and all logic. Yes, I have seen this done in ECW before, but that doesn't mean it becomes acceptable and certainly it doesn't become good. Dreamer wasn't over, and the match wasn't good. The only notable Dreamer vs. Credible spot was Credible crotching Dreamer on a guard rail that was set up in the ring. Things picked up when Rod Price & Jason, who had been ordered to the back before the start of the match, came out to save Chastity from being Death Valley bombed. New Jack & Kronus came out with his trash can to help even things up, which led to Big Sal E. Graziano coming out. Finally Spike Dudley, who was easily the most over guy on the entire show, came out and started acid dropping everyone. New Jack, Dreamer, & Spike pinned guys, and none of those guys were Credible, but the match ended anyway. After the match, New Jack got on the house mic and said that the state athletic commission told them they couldn't swear, so he described the beating the faces just put on the heels as kicking their booties and giving them some boo boos or something like that. In any case, it made no sense coming at the end of a show where several guys had already "defied the commission" by swearing. Some nice spots at the end, but the match was one long illogical sequence. 1/4*