Right off the bat, it’s important to point out that I never watched the original ECW. You may now instantly dismiss what I have regarding on the Hardcore Justice PPV as the ramblings of someone who just ‘doesn’t get’ ECW. What I do know is that a lot of people feel really passionate about the original ECW because of its willingness to experiment with different styles of wrestling (as Tazz helpfully points out at the start of the show): Lucha, MMA, Japanese and, most famously, hardcore styles. So passionately do the fans and performers feel about the original ECW that it has been deemed worthwhile (and obviously profitable) to have two ‘last hoorah’ PPVs to commemorate and pay homage to something a lot of people clearly hold very dearly. Having watched Hardcore Justice I think it’s safe to say that whatever it was people fell in love with back in the 90s, this probably wasn’t it.
......this is hardcore?
Almost as soon as the show had begun, the idiocy of this PPV became apparent. Taz starts the show paying tribute to ECW and emphasising how it wasn’t all mindless hardcore wrestling. That’s all well and good, until you remember that mindless violence was the basis on which TNA had been trying to sell this PPV. Not once did TNA mention diverse styles. They were far too busy talking about flaming tables, barbed wire and ‘doing hardcore properly’. And sure enough, the first three matches didn’t feature any of the violence we had been lead to believe would characterise this hardcore extravaganza. Also worth noting is that apart from the Tommy Dreamer and Raven match, there was no story behind any of these matches. This really hurt the PPV since entertainment value rested entirely on the wrestling ability of the performers and considering the average age of the wrestlers in this PPV would make the Soviet Politburo look like trendy hipsters, you can see how that might be a bit of a problem.
Talk about not knowing when to go gracefully, eh comrades?
The event wasn’t totally horrible, by any means. C.W Anderson and 2 Cold Scorpio put on a decent wrestling match and, unlike a lot of other guys on the card, they weren’t shambling caricatures of wrestlers. The crowd were sure into this match, although their reactions are hardly a reliable gauge of quality since they had a tendency to proclaim anything ‘awesome’ ‘hardcore’ or even the very definition of ‘wrestling’. As long as the coffin dodgers in question had some affiliation to ECW, they could have literally emptied their bowels in the middle of the ring (as opposed to metaphorically doing so) and the fans would still have lapped it up. Case in point: Team 3D versus Axl Rotten and ‘Kahones’ in what I’m reluctant to even call a match. It was simply embarrassing watching these guys lumber around the outside of the ring hitting each other with trash can lids and, bizarrely , replica Al Snow heads. No one was expecting a good wrestling match from these guys but they were so decrepit they couldn’t even deliver good hardcore. The Raven/Dreamer match was similarly handicapped by the dinosauric pace that can only be expected from two wrestlers possessing the speed and manoeuvrability of tectonic plates, but it was elevated by the long-running rivalry between the two and an admittedly impressive barbed wire crossface spot, which is one of the few in the show that actually deserved the subsequent gushing from the crowd. The main event, RVD vs. Sabu, was another solid performance, but it felt a lot like they were simply going through the motions and neither really delivered anything unexpected. That, along with the painfully obvious result, made the main event rather forgettable but not a bad match by any means.
Now this is hardcore
Perhaps if you’re susceptible to feeling nostalgic watching these guys go at it one more time, you might get more enjoyment out of this PPV than I did, but I have a hard time believing anyone could see this as anything other than a waste of time. If the point of this show was to pay homage to the diverse wrestling styles that according to Taz made ECW great, then it failed miserably. The only wrestling style pioneered at Hardcore Justice by these ‘innovators’ and ‘revolutionaries’ was the embarrassing to watch, immobile style of wrestling. And even then, you can see it done better for free elsewhere.
Credit to http://www.tnawrestling.com/ for the images
