[1997-11-30-ECW-November to Remember] Shane Douglas vs Bam Bam Bigelow

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Last few minutes. Shane Douglas is a hometown favorite and Bigelow destroys him until Douglas pulls a flash pin out of nowhere to win the ECW title back.

[Kevin Ridge]

I tried watching the full thing but it was as poor as I Remember. They were pretending to be Hogan/Andre the Giant with Douglas going for powermoves but not being able to lift Bigelow. They stretch this out for 30 minutes. Lots of Bigelow doing a move and then just standing there and looking at the crowd. Dude, your title is on the line. Styles tried to spin it that Bigelow wanted to end Douglas' career more than anything. I wasn't buying that as there wasn't the built up hate in this feud to be going in that direction. Not good.

[Migs]

I'm about as big a Shane Douglas fan as you can find, but this is terrible. The ending is fun, and the pop is great, but Douglas playing plucky babyface in no way works. And it lasts forever.

[Cox]

For reasons having nothing to do with wrestling, I will always hate November to Remember '97. My friends and I drove from New Jersey to Pittsburgh for the PPV, only my idiot friend's van broke down on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, so we had no way of getting around town the entire weekend. We wound up piling into the car of a bunch of creepy dudes to get to the show. The show was fucking terrible. And then we had to take the bus all the way home. I wound up having a huge falling out with all of my friends over what happened that weekend, and the show left such a bad taste in my mouth, I never went to another ECW live show again and stopped watching their TV.

 

So...I guess you could say, I have nothing kind to say about this match or this show.

[soup23]

Shane has some terrible matches surrounded by iconic moments like this and The Night the Line was crossed match. This was pretty much nothing until the pop for the finish.

[PeteF3]

Good pop to end some horrible action. "BAM BAM BIGELOW IS GOING TO RID ECW OF THE FRANCHISE"--oh, shut the fuck up, Joey. The reaction at the end can't be denied but it's a little too late for Shane to be trying to play sympathetic babyface since his character has had not one ounce of sympathy the previous 4 years. Compare and contrast to Bret Hart at Canadian Stampede and Ric Flair at Starrcade '93.

[GFAllentown]

Woof, this one was a slog. Now I read somewhere that they used Flair vs Vader from Starrcade 93 as a template because of it being Shane's hometown. However that really didn't work until the very end as I dont think the crowd was into it until the finish because it was a very slow, methodical match for ECW.

 

Mitigating circumstance: Douglas got hurt at some point. Even still, this should have been 10 minutes shorter but the times on some of these early ECW were very screwy.