The SmarK Rant for ECW Wrestling on TNN – 03.17.00

The SmarK Rant for ECW Wrestling on TNN – 03.17.00

Congratulations to Jag for winning a season of Big Brother so long and dull that I was longing for the relatively brisk pace of a 7 hour Wrestlemania by the time it came to an end after 100 days. Thanks a lot, writer’s strike.

OK, so I kind of gave up on this show a while back after the last PPV, but honest to god real people have asked me to go back and try it again in between bingeing 1984 WWF. And for some reason this show still has the issue on the Network where the audio is only in the left channel. Not gonna lie, the New Jack bump on that show really turned me off continuing for a while.

We open with a minute of the Impact Players beating Nova and Chris Chetti for whatever reason.

Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ

Your hosts are Joey Styles & Joel “I make the women sore and they keep coming back for more” Gertner.

In a departure, they play highlights of Living Dangerously over the opening theme song and even Joey can’t sell this turd as being worth ordering the replay.

Rob Van Dam joins us backstage, trying to teach Super Crazy how to do promos and taking all the credit for Crazy winning the TV title. Rob says “Carrying around my TV title” about 17 times to really hammer the joke home. And then Crazy goes on a rant about RVD in Spanish and a sympathetic Fonzie quips “Try riding with him for two years, daddy” for a funny payoff.

The Sandman v. Angel of Da Baldies

All three Da Baldies gang up on Sandman and Angel cuts a promo on him while beating him down and that gets two. Sandman slugs back while Joey and Joel have a bizarre conversation about Mexican bodegas in New York and racist Jews. So Sandman goes to the back and retrieves some guardrail from the dressing room. Back in the ring, as there’s just NOTHING happening in this match, and Angel puts the boots to him in the corner and runs Sandman into his own guardrail, only for Sandman to reverse it and put Angel through it. But then Sandman misses a legdrop and hits the guardrail and the Da Baldies run in with a kendo stick. Sandman gets that and hits Angel a few times and gets the pin at 6:00. This was probably one of the worst matches to ever air on this show, with Sandman doing embarrassing punches while Angel takes ridiculous bumps like a clown, so that’s a strong start. -**.

Meanwhile, Cyrus admits that he’s killed territories before, and he’ll kill this one too, but first he’s going to keep it alive for a bit longer so that the Network can play with it like a cat playing with a mouse and torturing it. Also apparently nobody messes with Rhino.

And then we cut back to the announcers, who insinuate that the Network executives like to have gay sex with Rhino. OK so clearly the relationship was beyond repair at this point.

Steve Corino joins us in the ring, wondering when he got heat with the office and got forced into wrestling New Jack.

New Jack v. Steve Corino

Ice Cube and Xzibit are touring Canada in February and my wife wanted to go to the show here in Saskatoon, so I’m kind of hoping he does “Natural Born Killaz” as a part of his set. Maybe Xzibit will renovate some cars too, I dunno. Anyway, they do some stuff and then go into the crowd and New Jack jumps off a high place and the crowd thinks this is neat. However, New Jack knocked himself out AGAIN, and security had to literally carry him back to the ring and put him in place so they could go home. And then Rhino and Tajiri run in and take out New Jack and put Corino on top for the pin at 4:00. Another atrocious “match”. -***

You know, for a while there I had been enjoying this show, so it’s good to know that we’re back to the same pointlessly violent smoke and mirrors crap we all know and love.

Meanwhile, Raven and Francine are a thing now, so that’s nice for them.

ECW World title: Mike Awesome v. Masato Tanaka

Oh hey, time to play the Masato Tanaka card again I see. Look, Heyman has basically been running this match for four months now by this point, it’s time to give it a rest. Maybe Awesome needs a change of scenery. We get a chair duel to start and they hit each other with sick unprotected shots, and Tanaka gets a powerslam and dropkicks Awesome to the floor. They brawl out there and take a break after Awesome drops him on the guardrail. Back with Tanaka hitting a missile dropkick for two, but Awesome hits him with a spinebuster for two. Big splash gets two. Powerbomb gets two. Frog splash gets two. Yet another table shows up in the ring and Tanaka gets hurled through that for two. Running powerbomb gets two for Awesome. Tanaka makes the comeback with the roaring elbow while the Judge takes the ref, which allows Raven to run in and DDT the ref. So then Awesome powerbombs Tanaka through a table on the floor, and Tommy Dreamer runs in to save Tanaka and walks into a DDT from Raven like a moron. And then yet another table gets set up and I guess the match is a Sportz Entertainment Finish at 9:00 or so. This was just Awesome and Tanaka doing a bunch of their usual spots with no real match behind it.

Obviously there were a bunch of extenuating circumstances behind the scenes, what with Heyman losing his mind and getting kicked off TNN and all, but this show was a complete mess. And it was only gonna get messier right away.