ECW debuted on PPV in 1997, so this part of the series will focus on the time period between that debut and their first show on The Nashville Network.
April 13, 1997 – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Terry Funk def. Raven {ECW World Heavyweight Championship Match}
From Barely Legal. Funk had just defeated The Sandman and Stevie Richards in a Three Way Dance to earn this shot. He was half conscious when Raven started in on him. This is really more a match between Raven and spacial awareness, as he has a hard time figuring out where to set up the tables he finds at ringside. Reggie Bennett interferes on Raven’s behalf as Raven goades Tommy Dreamer who is on commentary. Big Dick Dudley attacks Dreamer and Raven beats up the referee. But then Dreamer throws Dudley off the balcony, gets to the ring to hit Raven with a DDT, and Funk gets a roll up for the win at 7:21. A take on this is what Vince McMahon used for his title win, but it’s a weird way to get the belt on an actual professional wrestler. Also, McMahon didn’t botch the finish like the referee (or Raven) did here. For the most part, this was manic and exciting. If you take the storyline out of it you’ve got nothing. But that’s not what ECW was about. **¼
August 9, 1997 – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Sabu def. Terry Funk {ECW World Championship No Rope Barbed Wire Match}
From Born to be Wired. One really disturbing thing that I liked in this match was that when Sabu’s bicep got punctured, his manager Bill Alfonso gave him tape and he immediately started taping it up, even as Funk hit him with a neckbreaker onto a chair. He sold while taping up his arm, because it was important enough to supersede trying to get the edge in the match. It helped that the dude was really bleeding from his bicep, as it’s hard to no-sell a dangerous injury that really happened. It was smart in general to have Alfonso, Rob Van Dam, and Tommy Dreamer interfere so that the long stretches needed to set up violent spots wouldn’t be as glaring. The finish saw Funk and Sabu get wrapped together in barbed wire, so Sabu leveraged himself on top of Funk for the win and the title at 20:43. This was at times hard to watch, but relatively competently executed and did in parts resemble a wrestling match. I’ve seen plenty of this ultraviolent crap where it’s clear nobody is trying to win, and while this didn’t have any nearfalls until the end, it did at least look like both guys were trying to win the match and hurt each other rather than just set up ridiculous spots. This aged better than you might assume it would. And there’s some symmetry, as Sabu wins his second title four years later from the same guy he lost his first title to. ***¼
August 17, 1997 – Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Shane Douglas def. Saby and Terry Funk {ECW World Championship Three Way Dance Match}
From the fourth Hardcore Heaven. So Sabu was a transitional champion, only holding the title for one week for the second time. You’d think he’d been ECW champ for more of its history given how much ECW fans bafflingly revere the guy. The crowd is very quiet during this match, making Bill Alfonso’s whistle blowing all you really hear. It’s a major drag. The match was boring, but it had something that most ECW Championship matches I’ve seen to this point didn’t have, and that’s near falls. Things started picking up when a guardrail came into the ring, as the wrestlers stopped failing at wrestling and started doing what they know how to do, which is take bumps hard objects. There was an interesting spot where Funk had a sleeper on Douglas and Sabu had one on Funk, and Douglas only survived because Funk started to pass out and let him go before Douglas’s arm could drop a third time. That’s way too advanced a spot for this match. From there things went full ECW, and the crowd finally woke up when Sabu blindly put Alfonso and Todd Gordon through a table. Sandman then attacked Sabu, allowing Funk and Douglas to eliminate him. The crowd liked that, showing they literally only cared if someone was interfering. Why have the matches go this long when the future Jordan Petersonite fans don’t care about the ring work? They do like Dory Funk Jr running out to chase Francine away. Anyway, Douglas beat Funk at 26:37 with a Belly to Belly Suplex. Had this begun with the guardrail spots, I’d be more forgiving. But it just dragged on forever, going back and forth between boring brawling and overbooking. **½
October 25, 1997 – New York, New York
Bam Bam Bigelow def. Shane Douglas {ECW World Heavyweight Championship Match}
From Extreme Championship Wrestling #235. This was the culmination of Bigelow and Rick Rude’s plan to turn on Douglas and hurt the Triple Threat. Chris Candido and Sunny couldn’t stop the match from happening. And how do you like this, it’s an actual heavyweight wrestling match! And what do you know, the ccrowd stayed hot for the whole thing. Bigelow fought through all of Douglas’s low blows and got the win with a powerbomb at 6:50. I enjoyed the hell out of this spicy little match. ***¼
November 30, 1997 – Monaca, Pennsylvania
Shane Douglas def. Bam Bam Bigelow {ECW World Heavyweight Championship Match}
From the fifth annual November to Remember. The crowd is behind the heel Douglas near his hometown of Pittsburgh. Being four times longer than their last match and having a pro-heel crowd didn’t do this matchup a lot of favors. I liked that it was another actual wrestling match, but it was too long by a great stretch. The crowd may have liked Douglas, but they didn’t like him enough to cheer for his low blow comebacks. It was poorly paced and just dragged on forever. Douglas hit a Belly to Belly Suplex through a table for the win at 25:02. This company had no idea how to handle interference, as Joey Styles said that if Candido and Lance Storm had interfered then Douglas would have been disqualified, but Francine’s blatant interference, which led to nothing, meant nothing. **
January 10, 1999 – Kissimmee, Florida
Taz def. Shane Douglas {ECW World Heavyweight Championship Match}
From the inaugural Guilty as Charged. Taz created the FTW title because Shane Douglas dodged his challenge for over a year, and unified it with the ECW Championship here. This match started out promising, but then a long stretch of it was Douglas and Taz brawling through the crowd doing not much of anything while some of the ugliest wrestling fans you’ll ever see chase them around trying to get on camera as much as they can. After a couple minutes in the ring, Sabu runs in and attacks both guys. That nonsense goes on for a while, as Sabu makes the actual wrestlers in the match look like goofs while he nearly botches and delays all of his moves. Remember, this was Taz’s big coronation after years of being ignored, but the focus was so much on Sabu and also interfering Chris Candido & Sunny. Taz got the win moments after Candido’s turn with the Tazmission at 22:15. *½
After this, ECW debuts on TNN and tries to prove itself as a national presence alongside WCW and WWE. But it turns out the company was run by a guy who didn’t know how to run a company and bitterness against the network seeped into the product. Next time, we look at the championship through the demise of ECW.
From Diamond Ring Kensuke Office Changes. They emphasize that Nakajima beat Dragon Gate wrestler Kenichiro Arai 
From Dynamite 131. This is a qualifying match for the Owen Hart Foundation tournament. Joe debuted at ROH Supercard of Honor, saving Jonathan Gresham from Jay Lethal (whose soul searching apparently led him to turn heel) & Sonjay Dutt after the main event. And now that ROH and AEW are the same thing, that seems worth mentioning. Caster’s pre-match rap was cute. This was real squashy, with Joe needing only two minutes to put Caster down with the Muscle Buster at 2:52. Lethal & Dutt pop up on the big screens and Lethal says he’d been trying to get a hold of Joe during his difficult soul searching time, and Joe never picked up. They have a present for Joe next week. N/A
From Dynamite 132. Jay Lethal & Sonjay Dutt were in the front row cheering on Joe. Sarcastically, probably, as they brawled with Joe at ROH Supercard of Honor XV. 
From Rampage 39. 
From Dynamite 137. 
From Dynamite 138. This is a 
From Double or Nothing. 
From PWF York Cougar Football Fundraiser. I didn't know that this match happened until over a month after the fact. This started out as a non-title match, but we'll get to why I've listed it as a title match in a moment. FTR have Mick Foley in their corner while their opponents have Bill Behrens. I’ve never actually seen Behrens do an on-camera gig before. He's holding a tennis racket, presumably as an Umaga to Jim Cornette. But it's confusing because there was actually a tennis player named Bill Behrens. They announce this match as having a 20-minute time limit. Only 11 minutes in, they say there are three minutes remaining. Until then, this was as run-of-the-mill as a modern FTR match gets. But the announcement snapped everyone out of their heat-on-Wheeler funk and forced them to go for desperate pins. They announce ten seconds remaining a couple of times, but no one can get the roll up pin they're looking for. The 20-minute time limit expires at 1
From NXT UK 183. McGuinness started by essentially saying that Fraser is going to pee or poo himself during the match. Unnecessary. Had Shawn Michaels been game to have a good match against Vader, this is what it would have looked like. Actually, a more appropriate and modern analogue is Brock Lesnar vs. Seth Rollins from SummerSlam. Much like that match, Frazer used quick strikes and avoided his larger opponent’s signature big move to stay alive. Here it was the powerbomb whereas there it was suplexes. Here, Frazer also successfully damaged WALTER’s knee, which slowed the big man down and made it hard for WALTER to hit the powerbomb. Unfortunately for Frazer, WALTER was able to bide his time and clothesline Frazer’s legs out from under him. An inevitable powerbomb followed and won the match for WALTER at 14:02. I hate to say this because I’m happy that he’s healthier, but the way WALTER has slimmed down has taken some of the magic away from his aura. At least for me it has. That said, dude can clearly still go as well as ever in the ring. ****
From NXT 659. Strong was feeling it here, which is thanks in large part to the crowd being maniacally loud from the get go I’m sure. His whole game was fast and devastating stick and move attacks. That worked pretty well, as WALTER was dazed from time to time. But as with all good WALTER matches (which is pretty much all WALTER matches), everything WALTER does is devastating here so it takes very little for him to take back control. And eventually he did just that and hit the powerbomb for the win at 9:46 (shown of 12:18). After the match, WALTER gets on the microphone and says that his name is Gunther now. I did not think WALTER would be a victim of the renaming curse this far into his run. What will they rename Strong?! ***¾
From NXT UK 185. Andy Shepherd helpfully announces from inside the ring that the reason for the stipulation is that the feud has gotten so violent that it wouldn’t be safe to have fans around. Devlin says during the match that it’s because he thinks Dragunov could only muster the energy to win if he had the crowd behind him. I like that explanation a lot more. The only real reason I could think of to do this without fans is that there was a scheduling conflict with one of the wrestlers for the regular TV taping date and they needed to get this thing filmed. We just had such a long stretch of empty arena NXT UK episodes that I can’t imagine anyone was dying to get another taste of it. This aired the day after Adam Cole vs. Orange Cassidy in a match that was also no disqualification and falls count anywhere, and this served up everything I felt was missing from that match. Now you might say, “Brad, Cassidy is not the same kind of character as Devlin or Dragunov, how could you expect the same level of violence or intensity?” To that I say, when Cassidy started his match by breaking his own sunglasses and rapidly punching Cole, he was indicating that level of violence and/or intensity. And instead the match was mostly wacky. Anyway, this was not wacky. It was stiff and intense and featured weapons that made sense and spots the didn’t take forever to set up. Dragunov got in trouble when his eye injury acted up. Devlin took control and beat the crap out of him. I wasn’t wild about how meek Dragunov was when Devlin was zip tying his hands, but I did like that in the end it turned out to be an error on Devlin’s part anyway because Dragunov’s finisher requires no hands. And indeed, a bound Dragunov jumped off the steel steps (which had been brought into the ring) and hit the Torpedo Moskau on Devlin for the win at 21:43. NXT UK is still sneaking in these dope matches that no one is watching. Y’all should watch them. ****¼ 
From AAA Triplemania Regia. FTR come out with Vickie Guerrero. This was supposed to be explained at an earlier AAA taping but FTR and Guerrero all missed them. AAA is notorious for having this kind of luck/being incompetent lately. FTR is also wearing Eddie Guerrero tribute tights, with American flags on one side and flames on the other, I suppose to pay homage to his Gringos Locos and Latino Heat gimmicks. This match mostly sucked, but one cool spot saw FTR tie Pentagon’s mask to the ropes and force him to unmask with his hands over his face to stop them from climbing the ladder. That would have been a very meaningful moment to lead up to the Lucha Brothers winning the titles back, but unfortunately instead it led into nothing. He just got his mask back and the match continued on in its lame, derivative way. At one point, Pentagon was the only man standing, but instead of climbing the ladder he grabbed a table from the floor. So the titles mean enough to him that he’d unmask to stop his opponents from winning, but not enough for him to get the titles when he had a clear path to do it? Vickie powered Pentagon, causing him to voluntarily jump through the table and Harwood grabbed the belts at 12:12. This was abysmal. *
From AEW Full Gear. Silver was hamming it up a lot more here than he was the year before in New York. That said, this had stronger just-a-match vibes than the aforementioned match. After Silver ripped out Cassidy’s pockets, Cassidy turned up the heat and these guys put on a middle of the row undercard match. Not bad by any means, but nothing memorable either. Cassidy hit the Beach Break rather out of nowhere for the win at 9:42. **¾ 
From the second Honor Reigns Supreme. The commentators sold this as Gresham getting a big shot against a top ROH guy after being an also-ran in the Television Championship division for a while. This was terrific. Both guys did a fantastic job selling their respective targeted limbs, and Gresham in particular played the role of the tenacious underdog perfectly. He didn’t just watch to see where Lethal would have trouble executing his finisher because of the damage he’d done to the former ROH Champion’s arm, he pressed the assault whenever he could, taking out the arm to make sure the Lethal Injection would never come. But what he couldn’t do was stop Lethal from battering his knee and ultimately winning with a Figure 4 Leglock at 17:54. ****¼ 
From the second Masters of the Craft. Columbus has way more Gresham fans than Concord did. That’s a neat little advancement to the plot, innit? They both went after the same limbs that earned them dividends in their previous match. And then they went ahead and built an incredible match out of that story. At first it seemed as though Lethal wasn’t going to be able to get Gresham’s leg to give out. But about halfway through the match, Gresham’s knee was in trouble. Gresham was able to escape the leglock this time by using the momentum of Lethal pulling him away from the ropes to shift to an armbar. But Gresham’s focus on the arm bit him in the ass. Lethal went for the Lethal Injection and collapsed again, but when Gresham went for a roll up after that Lethal cut back on it for the win at 18:27. This is one of the best American examples that I've seen of a match building on the match that came before. Rather than try to outdo the maneuvers from their first meeting for the sake of a big crowd reaction, they adjust their game plans in logical ways that, to me, were just as exciting. I think this match is slept on, by virtue of the fact that I’ve never heard anything about it before watching it. ****½ 
From ROH Wrestling 364. In real life, 
From Death Before Dishonor XVII. Gresham and Lethal had been teaming, but Gresham grew frustrated and started heeling. Ultimately, he turned on Lethal. It took them a little while to get there, but once they got into a groove this was exactly what I wanted from this match. It was back to their old tricks, with Lethal targeting the leg to set up for the Figure 4 Leglock and Gresham targeting the arm to block the Lethal Injection and set up for his Octopus. In the end, Lethal tried the cutback trick that worked for him in Columbus, but Gresham countered to a pin and then put on the gnarliest Octopus for his first win over Lethal at 17:20. This is the best kind of wrestling series. And none of it felt stale because it was a year after they’d wrestled last and because they found ways to energize the old tropes. And that’s not to mention Gresham busting out what I can only describe as a sumo-style assault. Gresham and Lethal make up after the match. ****
From ROH Wrestling 500. During the pandemic, ROH made the most of their empty arena shows by kicking them off with a tournament to crown a champion for the revived Pure Championship. Gresham won the tournament, and this was his fourth defense of the title. Lethal and Gresham were still allies here. In an interesting move, the other match on this milestone episode was two other partners fighting in Jay and Mark Briscoe. They cut to a commercial break about six minutes in, though the action didn’t get beyond (admittedly fast-moving) mat wrestling until the 10-minute mark. That had me thinking this was going to go long, but things took a different turn. Both guys had abused the other’s shoulders, and Lethal used that to his advantage best. He forced Gresham to use his first rope break to stop a pin, and his second to escape a crab. Then, he used the failed Lethal Injection to bait Gresham into a crossface, forcing the champ to use his final rope break. But he made the mistake of giving Gresham a breather and was quickly caught in a head scissor takedown giving Gresham the winning pin at 14:06 (shown of 16:40). For an empty arena match, this held my attention. It was totally different than their previous matches while still using a couple elements from the rivalry to elevate it just a bit. Not essential viewing, but if you’re working your way through their series you shouldn’t skip it. ***¼ 
