Tag: ECW
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Tony Schiavone Receives a Telegram (1997 Week 4)
Two weeks ago, I wrote a little about “meaningless wrestling,” specifically how to pry something from a match whose worth to the larger context of professional wrestling’s rich history is the labor performed by the men and women who won it. This week, the thing I am most excited about is Tony Schiavone reading a…
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Dawn of the Sad Rafter Clown (1997 Week 3)
I watched a frankly modern amount of wrestling this week. Raw was an hour. ECW was an hour. WCW, damn them, ran a Nitro, a Clash of the Champions, and nWo Souled Out, a whopping six and a half hours of content strung along, like most WCW programming, on the idea that the arena and…
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Steve Austin “Wins” the Royal Rumble (1997 Week 2)
About a quarter of the way through an interminable tag team match pitting Goldust and Marc Mero against Hunter Hearst Helmsley and Jerry “The King” Lawler, I paused the episode of Raw and said “This is going to be hard” to myself. Not watching wrestling; watching wrestling is easy, even if it’s not great. What…
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The Greatest Year in the History of Our Sport (1997 Week 1)
I was nine years old when wrestling was cool. The thing is, I didn’t know it was cool back then; it was just wrestling, just something I watched. Now that I’m older, I still don’t know if it was cool. It was popular, but it was approached less like Nirvana or hip-hop than it was…
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Stephanie McMahon’s ECW Kangol Hat: A Review
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In Praise of Taz, the Human Suplex Machine
For my money, Taz is the best manager in professional wrestling. There are a lot of managers in wrestling at the moment, particularly in AEW, where Taz plies his trade as the hypeman for Brian Cage and Ricky Starks. In my recap of this week’s Dynamite, I noted that Taz, in a very short period…