Migs

In coolness of venue, this is the opposite of the hotel ballroom from the week before. These guys could have this match in their sleep, basically, but it's still fun. Nice to see Guido go over, and relatively clean (there's interference but it doesn't directly lead to the finish). Looking at these house show cards from around this time really gives a sense of how stale ECW was... not seeing very many fresh matchups.

I really like Spike, and the match is fun, but what exactly was this supposed to do in establishing Awesome? He can beat the guy he's twice the size of - terrific. Spike is never presented as a real threat, which was a recurring theme for ECW with it's champions for a while. Taz had PPV matches with Tajiri, Candido, and Bubba Dudley that were never in doubt. Most of RVD's TV title defenses completely lacked drama. Not sure what the deal was there. Fixing this might have been the only thing improved by Justin Credible's title reign.

I liked this about as much as the match with Spike (albeit this got a little less time to develop). Not sure if it's the shorter length, or accumulated injuries, but it worked in both matches for Sabu to work a slightly toned down style, with fewer high spots that required less setup. CW is someone who really got caught at the wrong place, wrong time, I think - he was in the WCW Power Plant guy, and if it had been 5 years earlier, he'd have made a great WCW mid-card guy. He could have had some darn good ten minute TV matches at Center Stage. As it stands, he never quite worked in ECW, despite the attempt to move him up the card later in the year.

Fun match, hurt a little bit by the way Guido doesn't come off quite on Tajiri's level (although his work is excellent). The dynamic worked better in the tag matches later in the year, I think, where the southern tag formula made Guido and Mamaluke come off better than in singles.

We have to be getting towards the end of Sabu's ECW run here. Pretty sure he doesn't make it to the next PPV. Don't recall seeing this matchup before, which is odd because it's a pretty logical pairing. This ended up being pretty fun, mixing some surprisingly good brawling with a couple of big spots. It's a relatively restrained match for these two - not sure if I'd prefer a more balls out spottiest from them, but I liked this.

We appear to be in a hotel ballroom? Not the hippest venue ECW ran, for sure. Interesting matchup on paper, but only decent in the ring. Never quite got a proper flow. Maybe a bit of a style clash. Crowd also felt sort of dead - there's no energy when they get to the near falls.

Never watched any Wildside back when it was running. I thought the announcers were actually pretty decent putting over the ongoing story and the match story with the ribs. Thought this was an interesting, if pretty basic, match. But AJ at this point was, interestingly, already able to do a basic TV match and mix some of the bigger high spots into it.

I liked this one less than you guys. Rhino was fine, but Awesome basically attempts to work his standard match with a guy who doesn't necessarily fit that match. Best match we saw from this show, but that's not saying much. Part of the weakness might also have been the booking - Awesome's a heel, but getting cheered for doing cool moves against another heel. Left the crowd a little flat, other than the stray "Let's Go Mike" screams.

Steve Corino would become my guy as this year wore on, although he wasn't there yet at this point. (Although I think this was after his promo about Dusty, which was pretty great.) Raven and Corino's crowd brawl is amusing - sort of felt like a precursor to the kind of brawls Raven would have in the WWF. Otherwise, not much of a match.

Seriously, why is Tom Marquez here? He literally never did anything related to these two guys on TV. Perhaps a tryout of sorts to see if he'd get included with the Tajiri/Crazy/Guido/Lynn group? Fan cams are always great at reminding you how shitty crowd brawling is for 80% of the crowd. Tajiri throwing candy was pretty amusing. Two crowd fights in one match? This crowd is the worst. Shit, make that three! Crazy and Tajiri are fine, but this one's not really worth checking out.

I feel like the Rumble is as open and as interesting as it's been in years, but there also feels like real risk that they could end up in a spot where I really don't care about any of the Mania matches.

Since I haven't been paying attention to their TV much in the past... do they always spoil weeks worth of TV on their website? Spoiler on the winner of the Decade of Excellence tournament: http://www.rohwrestling.com/news/challenger-set-roh-world-title-match-15th-anniversary-show

They also present the division in the worst way possible, where it gets it's own TV episode once every few months and then never gets mentioned. The angles thus have no flow, and it makes that episode of TV a huge bummer (because they're not going to progress any of the other stories at all).

The Kingdom won them at the last PPV, and all they've aired one taping's worth of TV since then (where the Kingdom won a squash). So, too early to tell.

DVD?

The CZW setup at this point feels exceptionally grungy and dirty and "underground." I kinda like the vibe. Blade's vibe is even worse than I remember - I recall the horrendous hair line, but not this club dancer look (I think he went to baggier clothes later). A little bit of wrestling at the start, but we get to Ki's dive really fast. And from there on we have a sprint. They try to shoehorn in submission moves, but they have literally no effect - the moves are just there to show off what they know. Not sure who to blame for this - is it that Ki hadn't developed yet, or that he's being pulled into a pure spottiest by Blade (who never got any good beyond being a spot guy)? Either way, this is sort of fun in an absurd way. Blade's crane kick from the ring post is particularly amusing. The Ki Krusher through the table is epic (as is the crowd reaction to it), and that they use it for a 2 count is quite the foreshadowing of how the indy style would develop. The finish is meh, but that's unsurprising. Bit of personal background - Ki's the guy I most want to rematch, because in '01-'02 he was my guy. He was on all the NY indy shows I went to, usually in the best match, and as he went national, I was a big supporter (and sure that dude would be a star of some sort - if not in the US, then Japan). So I want to see how the matches I remember hold up, and also where exactly it went wrong for the guy.

Interesting to compare this to Dragon v. Spanky. This is much more restrained, with a better structure. Less innovation, but very solid, and most things land well (with a couple of notable exceptions, like the sunset flip out of the corner). Really quite amazing to see them at this level this early. Punk's split legged moonsault was surprisingly competent, too.

Spanky's promo and music are so wonderfully 2000. I've been a little afraid of going back to this era because my memories are so strong and I wasn't sure how much holds up. Really good to see how solid this match was, at a time before both guys had any rep and were really early in the process. Cuts a good pace, shows off some of their stuff - very much a new generation studio TV match. As others have said, really curious to watch the development, as we get towards 2001 when both guys really develop pretty big reps as top workers.

Seeing ROH in March at Hammerstein. Given Cole's contract status, I would think all of his title defenses should be interesting...

There are definitely more tragic things than Cedric Alexander in ROH. But even though it seems we disagree about who ROH should push, there's definitely a lack of forward momentum for a lot of guys. It's way too easy to ignore ROH for six months and come back to find one angle has happened, and everyone is in the place they were before. ROH is in a very weird place as "corporate" indy wrestling, particularly as WWE has embraced some stylistic similarities in the ring. They can't let the top of the card turn over constantly, so I understand the idea of relying on guys who are loyal, and frankly, guys who (for different reasons) have almost no shot of going to WWE. You don't want to shoot someone up the card and then have them signed away as they're ascending. But that unwillingness to change up the top of the card and move angles forward quickly essentially puts a company in the position ECW was in towards the end. (Pulling the trigger on Taz too late = pulling the trigger on O'Reilly too late? I don't enjoy O'Reilly that much, but they got very little out of crowning him, similar to how ECW got very little out of crowning Taz.) The booking is stale and you're basically relying on people enjoying the style in the ring. But the thing is - ECW, with a better financial base, could have gone for a long time. They drew great crowds, even at the end, because people liked the style and had fun at the shows. Even with WWE co-opting parts of ECW's style and draining the uniqueness (just like has happened to ROH), they still had a loyal following who enjoyed the product. The booking was (almost) irrelevant. Of course, the company had a ceiling, but if the ceiling is profitable, the owners won't care. ROH is pretty smart about their touring - they don't burn out any city, which allows them to come back a couple of times a year to places and draw crowds that are there to enjoy the wrestling card (even if they might complain about the booking and not watch the TV). I guess what I'm saying is that there's not much motivation for ROH to be creative. They do fine, and probably as well as they can do given the constraints. That it disappoints people who remember it's glory days isn't something that's going to change.

Re: Cord Cutting - I pay $25 a month for Sling and get all the channels I actually use.