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[1997-02-22-ECWA-Super 8] Ace Darling vs Cheetah Master


Loss

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  • 3 weeks later...

I think this is the first Super 8. Well, I didn't expect to see Lou Albano and Sir Oliver Humperdink here. Nothing match, but an interesting piece of trivia. Ace Darling wins.

Yep:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECWA_Super_8_Tournament

 

I'm pretty sure a number of the DVDVR readers went to it, in the days before there was a DVDVR board.

 

Pretty amazing that they still are running them. 17 straight years. 17 of anything in pro wrestling is pretty amazing.

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There is an interview with the guy that runs ECWA and he goes over the setup and choices made for each of the first 13 or 14 Super 8's...

 

Interesting listen as he goes into detail about each year and why certain guys were picked...

 

Cant think of his name right now or who did the interview....may have been RF come to think of it.

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There is an interview with the guy that runs ECWA

Jim Kettner

 

ECWA's one of the companies that really got hurt by the rise of ROH. I remember buying a few of their tapes back in the day, they'd have really shit undercards with bad ass main events with Low Ki, Danielson, SAT, etc... so when ROH started cherry picking the top guys there was no more need for them...

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For the back half of the 90's and early part of the 2000's, one of the most interesting themes will be the plight of the indies. This is the perfect starter to that. I remember these guys being hyped in PWI along with Mr. Oh La La. Cheetah hits a huge dive which his manager Albano cant be bothered to even watch. Match had good heat but not a lot to it. I hated the slipping on a banana peel finish that allowed Darling to pick up the win.

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  • 2 weeks later...

For the back half of the 90's and early part of the 2000's, one of the most interesting themes will be the plight of the indies. This is the perfect starter to that.

Yea, the US indies haven't had much to offer on the yearbooks thus far but you can see that changing in 1997 beginning with this match from the first Super 8 tournament and continuing with the APW and IWA-MS stuff from 1997. It will be interesting to see how much more time is given to US indies as the 90's wrap up and especially in the early 2000's once ECW and WCW go out of business.

 

The tournament was actually pretty stacked, even in hindsight. Cheetah Master and Ace Darling were pretty big indie names at the time, Kidman would go onto big things in WCW (he already started with them but wasn't being used as more than occasional enhancement talent), Devon Storm was a big-ish indie name already who had future success, and Lance Diamond would have a solid tag team run in ECW & TNA. It is pretty impressive when you look back at the early ECWA tournaments and see just how many guys they featured early in their careers who went onto big things in wrestling.

 

This was an okay, compact match.

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Man, this match was kinda nothing. Oliver Humperdink is unrecognizable (at first I thought it was Bert Prentice), and Albano just wanders around cluelessly, not reacting to anything. This is still an interesting time capsule, as we have a very ROH-esque card set-up, but with old Northeast stalwarts like Albano hanging around and a very kid-centric audience that cheers babyfaces (Cheetah Master is over, no question about that) and boos heels. Both guys were talked up in the Apter mags and Darling had cups of coffee in the Big Two, but he didn't particularly impress here. Still, the Super 8 was sort of the first of its kind so it needed to be represented.

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  • GSR changed the title to [1997-02-22-ECWA-Super 8] Ace Darling vs Cheetah Master

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