On Tuesday, I tuned in to the Sci-Fi Channel to watch ECW (why I don’t know). During the Tommy Dreamer/Sandman vs. Test/Mike Knox tag-team match, my wife wondered out loud why someone would allow a plywood board covered in barbwire into the ring. I told her that Tommy Dreamer was known as the “Innovator of Violence” and this was just a taste of what he was famous for. I began to think back to famous “extreme” wrestlers and famous wrestling families. Of course, extreme and the Funks went hand and hand. Terry Funk still bleeds and breaks for the fans of ECW. Other famous families came to my mind like the Von Erichs, the Harts, and the Armstrongs. But the more I thought about it, the most of extreme wresting family I have every known was my own. That’s right the true extreme wrestling family was the Kruegers. My brothers and I had hardcore matches long before the term hardcore existed.
My brother Ted was the ultimate heel. He was all of the “Nature Boys”, Rogers and Flair, and Rick Rude rolled into one. He was a blond headed blue eyed demon whose main pleasure in life was torturing his younger brothers. His finishing move was to pin his opponents down and dangle a loogey over their mouth. Much like a cat with a mouse trapped beneath his paws, Ted would smile gleefully at his terrified prisoner. When the loogey came inches away, the prisoner (I or my younger brother Phil) would convulse and struggle to no avail. Eventually he would suck the loogey up or it would drop on his victim’s face. He retired this move after he “accidentally” dropped the loogey in Phil’s mouth and he spewed vomit everywhere. That’s hardcore! I’ve seen Tommy Dreamer drink a bucket of vomit but I have never seen him make an opponent vomit.
I, the middle and most dangerous brother, was a tank. I would ram my opponents into the wall. I was the Rhino of our ECW. I once ran down the hall as fast as I could and did a flying flog splash on my brother that broke my parents’ bed. I know Brock Lesnar and the Big Show once broke a ring, but I destroyed a king size box spring. That’s hardcore! Three carefully placed cinder blocks were supposed to disguise the damage to our makeshift ring, but it didn’t work. I also liked to give cheap shots and pretend it was an accident so my opponents wouldn’t retaliate. I was a fan of Ric Flair and I prided myself on being the dirtiest player in our neighborhood.
Phil, A.K.A. “FrankenPhil” due to a horrible haircut by Ted, was the youngest. It took awhile for him to come into his own. Generally he was a jobber who got beat until he started to cry or yelled for help. As he got older, he became a monster. I once broke a broom handle over his head and all it did was make him angry. This was no hollow Singapore cane like Sandman uses, this was an American made piece of petrified timber! He would sometimes cross the line from hardcore to homicidal and begin to pelt me with a barrage of forks. I hope to never see Sabu do the same to Steven Richards. That’s hardcore!
This was wrestling at its purest and most demented. The kids in the neighborhood didn’t know what hit them when our matches began. We used anything available in our room. We destroyed some of the finest furniture Montgomery Wards ever made. I am not suggesting to any kids out there in computer land to wreck their house and be unsafe, I’m just stating the facts. At the end of a match no matter how much damage we did to each other, we were still brothers and we would still fight for each other. That’s all that the ECW is supposed to be…a bunch of morons pounding each other senseless for no other reason but the fun of it. It has been incorporated and assimilated and has no heart. The fans let everyone know this when Batista and Big Show went at it for the ECW World Championship and were met by a sea of boos. Two of the WWE’s biggest talents couldn’t get the same respect as a guy who gets beat up and bloodied everywhere he goes. Sure Batista and the Big Show will one day retire to their fancy mansions and hall of fame ceremonies, while Tommy Dreamer and the Sandman will probably still have to work to make ends meet. But to the ECW faithful, not the WWE fans who are slumming it, Dreamer and Sandman will hold a place of great honor. I am in no way, shape, or form considering myself one of the ECW faithful. I had, however, a great respect for a promotion that took wrestling down a different road and never asked anyone for directions.
Deep inside every wrestling fan who has every beaten their brother or friend with a wiffle ball bat, is an ECW fan. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the long drawn out stories of RAW or the quick and pretty matches of SmackDown! but ECW is supposed to be something dirty and seedy. I always suspected that the camera man only had one eye and a rap sheet. It seemed so simple. The wrestlers didn’t always seem to have the greatest technical background (there were a few exceptions) or the greatest looks or experience but they made up for all of this with heart. That heart doesn’t seem to beat as strong anymore. Sure there are some true ECW veterans who seem content with a paycheck, but for the most part it is the WWE’s third string show with no autonomy or originality. If Vince McMahon can step away from the production of the show and just let it take its course and let ECW thrive in its tiny little niche, it may just return to form. Maybe tomorrow’s ECW can be the stuff of legend as yesterday’s once was. Today’s ECW is less interesting than most matches that my brothers and I perpetrated for the sake of mayhem and that’s just sad.
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