ECW Crossing the Line Again 2/1/97

I've spent the last year (and will continue to spend this coming year) watching all of the 1997 WCW for my book. I've been spending other time in 1997, listening to music and watching movies released in the year, as well as watching other pro wrestling from the same period. If it happened in the year I learned to drive, then I am spending some time every day consuming it. I thought this 1997 ECW show was really choice, with an absolute classic first time ever meeting between Terry Funk and Tommy Rich, a killer Dr. Death/Raven match, heel Ricky Morton, a terrible Eliminators match that goes 20, etc. 

1. Lance Storm vs. Balls Mahoney

ER: Balls Mahoney would have made a really great Bluto, and he throws two nice punches (an overhand right and a long uppercut right) and also wastes Storm with a short arm clothesline. His Foley-esque bump over the ropes (where his head almost got wrapped in them but instead he tumbled hard to the floor) looked really great, and he leans into every piece of soft offense that Lance Storm threw at him. Storm never hits hard, ever, but he makes up for it a bit by throwing his whole body into attacks. His spinning heel kick and tope and top rope clothesline at least ended with his whole body crashing into Balls. His leaping back elbow and flying shoulderblock actually hit really well, and it felt like he was making harder contact with those moves the longer it went on, like he was learning to throw harder to knock this guy down. Was Balls Mahoney actually this good in 1997? It feels like he might be. Am I going to go on a Balls Mahoney rewatch? I already am. I wish Storm had sold Mahoney's piledriver longer, but Storm's top rope spinning heel kick helicoptered right into Mahoney's head so whatever. I liked this. 

2. Ricky Morton vs. Big Stevie Cool

ER: Ricky is wearing his red tasseled confederate flag tights with glittered flares and folks he looks incredible. The red tights are the brightest, perfect color of red, the stars and stripes cross perfectly diagonally past his knees. It's so pro wrestling and so trash 

Morton hits a low knee and a snappy headlock punch, and throws a missed clothesline with the best form. I love when Ricky fights like an asshole. Morton punches more when he's an asshole and Morton always uses his punches in cool ways. Here he broke a wristlock with a straight right and then missed a fast follow-up fistdrop. Morton is so much of an asshole here that he soccer dives knee up into Stevie's nuts, and then drives his knee into them on a snug inverted atomic drop. Stevie looked good taking Ricky's offense, and the Stevie Kick is a good finish, but I wish this got a chance to keep going where it was going. Instead it was Ricky looking like a switchblade asshole for 5 minutes and then Stevie quickly going home with a Jackknife and kick. Great look at how good 1997 Ricky Morton was. Who has the Ricky Morton FMW footage? 

3. Dr. Death Steve Williams vs. Axl Rotten

ER: This is a 2 minute match, and when you hear that you probably assume it's going to be Dr. Death killing Rotten with a couple big slams and a neck breaking suplex or two. It got to that, but before that we got to see Dr. Death take a nice bump into the turnbuckles and sells Rotten's decent strikes, and then we get to see Doc punch Rotten right in the face and throw him with a backdrop driver. 

4. Dr. Death Steve Williams vs. Raven

ER: Man they go right at it and it is great. Doc continues throwing stiff jabs and then takes a sicko bump running full speed face first into the top turnbuckle on a missed charge. This man has a well paying All Japan gig and he's in Philadelphia taking unprotected chairshots and hitting a gusher. Dr. Death's sweat soaked shag is one of the great haircuts in wrestling history, and it swings over his face as he rolls off a table, just before Raven crashes through it off the top. Doc cashes in the receipt on those chairshots and Raven hits a far great gusher. Raven was an incredible bleeder and needs to be talked about more as such. He's one of our great bleeders. Dr. Death does get to throw Raven around, hitting a high powerslam and German suplex, and there's a great fight over a top rope suplex that ends in a sick snap Raven superplex. The bWo involvement is used well, as most of them are just crash pads for Doc to press slam Raven through. While Raven writhes around with Hollywood Nova, there's a perfectly done showdown between Dr. Death and Stevie. Dr. Death keeps taking Stevie Kicks and getting up for more, and you kept waiting for it to lead to Stevie getting snapped in two with a backdrop driver. When Doc caught a kick, you knew you were about to see a man die, so I dug that Stevie instead spun out of it and busted him in the chops with a great Stevie Kick. It was a really great sequence and both played up their characters perfectly, Stevie tuning up that band like a maniac and Doc knowing exactly what to sell and not sell. Williams was a really good bumper and good at taking offense, and Raven's DDT looked like it would finish a guy like Dr. Death after those three kicks. 

5. The Sandman vs. D-Von Dudley 

ER: There are too many great shots of Sandman's entrance here to count. His forehead his bleeding when he comes through the curtains, hair slicked back, dangerous eyes. You'd avoid this man in literally any public space you saw him in. And yet, carrying a beer with a cigarette hanging from his lip, he looks like undoubtedly one of the coolest dirtbags in history. D-Von Dudley had great punches in this match, because he just threw several potatoes at Sandman's pre-existing cut, giving every side of the ring a close up look at his knuckles hitting Sandman's crown. Sandman's offense has this artless Drunken Master flow to it. All of it looks like it would hurt, and a lot of it is among the ugliest version of that move you've ever seen. It's beautiful. The whole match jumps up a level when Sandman suplexes a table edge first into D-Von's leg and fucking ends him with the most drunk dead accurate Philadelphia Jam with a chair on D-Von's face. It's 5 minutes and goes out on a high pitch, segueing into a strong post-match. D-Von joins up with Bubba and they mess up Spike with what I assume is the first ever 3D, but New Jack comes out and wreaks havoc. Bubba smooshes him with a perfect blindside avalanche, Bubba takes a Flair Flop face first on an open chair, New Jack drops D-Von mouth first on an open chair and then makes the most charming little smile to the camera. Simple, hot segment that made a ton out of like 8 total minutes. 

6. The Eliminators vs. Rob Van Dam/Sabu 

I'm just going to assume that everybody had the exact same Eliminators experience that I did: we were all in our late teens when we traded for a 4 hour Eliminators comp, and then after watching about an hour of the Eliminators comp we all pretty much realized exactly what the Eliminators were and had no desire to watch any more. This match was 20 minutes long, and felt longer. The Eliminators can do cool things but they are cold in there, and the crowd reacts coldly to them. Nobody makes a real effort to connect with the crowd, but running through flipping moves used to be enough to get some clapping at the Arena. They just do not care, and it takes RVD's energy to finally snap people awake. This was icy cold and disjointed with that silent crowd, but Van Dam came in with the energy of a guy whose party tricks always connect with any room. There's a confidence they respond to when he comes in, a response he gets by getting obliterated by a double spinning heel kick or folded in half when Saturn suddenly knows how to throw a slicing clothesline. Sabu hurls his body at men more and more as we creep to 20, landing that triple jump plancha three rows deep, falling on the back of his head when Saturn sweeps his legs off the top rope, missile dropkicking Saturn off a damn ladder, and it all peaks with some horridly constructed mess with a ladder set up on a table and Sabu whipping his shins into everything/everyone in sight. 

My favorite part was when Kronus sold a big Sabu top rope splash/RVD top rope Jam, by just standing up to his feet at the same time they did and throwing a stomach kick. Kronus has the mental energy of someone wandering their way through a battle royal who doesn't actually know he's in a battle royal. It's like he had no clue that he had just taken any kind of offense, and it's kind of amazing? He'll take a wild backdrop bump to the floor and almost land on his head doing a corkscrew senton, but there's no chance this man every thought for one second about what a quality match layout would look like. I did love them doing Total Elimination to a ladder that was holding both RVD and Sabu, with them hanging in the air before dropping straight to the mat when the ladder is swept away. It's a perfect overly complicated dumb ECW spot. 

7. Terry Funk vs. Tommy Rich

ER:  Tommy Rich everyone. While Terry Funk is being clapped on the back, as Joey Styles was going on and on about Funk's singles run to the World title as if he was a kid with progeria who was graciously going to be allowed to score a soccer goal, here's Tommy Rich looking like such a fat asshole in the ring. The fans call him a fat fuck, he looks like a goon asshole, the perfect heat magnet. Rich starts the match by storming clumsily into the crowd to get RIGHT into some dude's face, letting Terry Funk sneak up on him and start the fight. Getting distracted by some guy in a hockey jersey and letting your opponent find and fight you is so much interesting than two guys meeting in the ring and then walking each other into the crowd, and Funk just started throwing left hands that made Rich bleed more with each shot. Rich is a full on menace in this, just a disgusting looking stuck pig of a man stumbling through the ugliest people you've ever seen. He hits such a perfect messy bladejob, sending streams of red everywhere down his face while the parts of his face that are untouched by blood have a sick purple hue. 

Rich wrecks his body in a few ways that would have looked cool from any man, but look incredible from a big fat slob. A sweaty guy spilling over his tights running knee first into a guardrail just looks better, and it lead to Funk taking apart his knee in ways that would cripple younger, fitter men. It's one thing for Funk to not work his left hands at this point, but there has to be a way to work hitting a guy's knee with a chair. If there is, Terry pretends to not know about it, and just bashes the shit out of Tommy's knee, then kicks his hamstring all around ringside. It's fucking great. The whole time - and the whole match really - Rich is reveling in the You Fat Fuck chants, spitting blood out through a cartoon grin. He shoves some dude off him in the crowd and almost accidentally hits his small girlfriend, presumably the only woman in the entire arena. Rich grins the entire time, except for those times when he would get suddenly unstoppably angry, the way a real asshole would behave. 

The man is thirsty for DDTs and hungry for hate. DDTs for Funk, DDTs for Jim Molyneux; he slowly hitches up the front of his tights while making full eye contact with some creeps. Tommy Rich looks like absolute shit while he spits blood up into the air and bashes at Funk's knee, still grinning and acting like an asshole. They're two of the only guys who have ever made kneeling and fighting ever look good. Nobody makes the sitting-in-chairs-throwing-punches look good, it's tough as hell to make kneeling and punching look good, but this is great. The spinning toehold finish would have worked in most settings, but it felt beneath the rest of the match because everything else was so legitimately violent. But this is one of the greatest ECW matches of all time, hands down.  

8. Shane Douglas/Chris Candido/Brian Lee vs. Tommy Dreamer/The Pitbulls

ER: This starts really great and then eventually goes on too long. Probably didn't need nearly 20 minutes from these guys, turns out. But when Candido starts things by baseball sliding THROUGH Brian Lee's legs just to kick Dreamer in the nuts, that is a fucking hilarious way to start things. The crowd brawl and bullshit in this was really good. The match settling into an actual match was fine, but the bullshit kept it high. Pitbull 2 took a lot of gnarly shots to the head while standing right next to the smelliest fans, then came roaring back into the ring throwing just as hard punches at Douglas. They bring a guardrail into the ring and do a bunch of great stuff with it. Candido gets thrown into it and springs off it straight a back elbow that bounces him over the top rope like a volleyball. Douglas gets tossed through the guardrail and then press slammed onto the busted railing. Holy shit. These guys taking some dumb bumps out here and it rules. 

As his contract states, Dreamer is dropped crotch first on a guardrail, just railing his balls the exact way he demands in every single match. Dreamer takes a lot of abuse in this. Douglas really drops him with vertical suplexes, with a big one through two chairs. Candido gets rocket launched onto Dreamer and does that thing where he bounces right up to his feet on the recoil. Pitbull 2 is bleeding real good and getting hanged with his own chain, and really this whole thing just gets derailed by the Rick Rude involvement. The one good thing - and it is an admittedly pretty big great thing - is that Rude comes out in a mask wearing a patchwork denim on denim pantsuit like something Richard Pryor would have owned. I'm stunned that he didn't also have a big floppy hat adorned with beer cap toppers. Rude looks walks out wearing a ensemble too garish for a Vince McMahon 1991 Prime Time Wrestling segment, and a man wearing this outfit in 1997 is far more shocking than any of the ways ECW tried to be shocking on any given show. I remember what people wore in 1997, and nobody was dressing like a pimp from a Fred Williamson movie. I don't know what Rude's involvement was supposed to be in ECW, but everyone in the ring hitting shitty Rude Awakenings seems like a lame way to peak this.