Dead Wrestling Company Of The Week: Extreme Championship Wrestling

All of Deadspin’s “Dead Wrestler of The Week” articles bring back some awesome childhood memories, but this particular feature on the now-defunct ECW really hit home.  When the outfit formerly known as Eastern Championship Wrestling started making stops around the Midwest in the late 1990s, they occasionally appeared at The Odeum Sports and Expo Center, a small multi-use facility a mere 15 minutes from my childhood home.

During the brief period in which ECW’s profile began to surge but before it reached a level of success that could arguably be considered mainstream, I was a 14 year-old kid with plenty of free time and a brother who just got his driver’s license.  I don’t remember how, exactly, we first got hip to Hardcore TV, the company’s flagship late-night program, but we were both hooked.  We watched it every week and were in the crowd every time the operation rolled into town.

While I was not necessarily on the edge of my seat as one bearded 300-pounder threw another through a flaming, thumb-tack covered folding table because I appreciated the Dostoevskian symbolism of it all, I would like to believe that I was drawn to ECW by more than just primal blood lust.  Even though the violence at these events often reached cartoonish levels, the whole enterprise seemed more authentic and resonant than anything that was taking place anywhere else in professional wrestling, even as the form of entertainment was experiencing a third wave of popularity and enjoying more exposure than ever.  At an age when one’s cultural literacy is defined almost completely by what shows you watch on TV and what music you listen to on your boombox, few things manage to be simultaneously counter-cultural and accessible - and not “accessible” in the abstract definition of the capacity to be appreciated, but “accessible” in the literal sense that they were available to a suburban adolescent.

By the time I was autonomously cognizant of music, Kurt Cobain was already dead, Eddie Vedder was feuding with Ticketmaster and non-sensical crooners like Gavin Rossdale were the torch-bearers for the mass-appeal sludge that began appearing under the “alternative rock” flag. So ECW was my grunge, it was my punk, it was my departure from middle-America’s mainstream.  But, yeah, the blood was pretty cool, too.