RAVEN MACK is a mystic poet-philosopher-artist of the Greater Appalachian unorthodox tradition. He does have an amazing PATREON, but also *normal* ARTIST WEBSITE too.

Wednesday, March 26

12-Pack Review: ECW 05/18/93

BEER ONE: Ahh, cheers to the young man who either ripped me off and got scared that black nationalist were emailing him all of a sudden, or maybe the kid was just slack. But he finally sent me my fuckin’ tapes and without an email apologizing. Ultra-Clash was very early on in ECW’s history, so early that they weren’t even extreme yet. I have never seen this, and when I looked up the date I held my hand over the screen so that I had no idea of who would even be in this. I have a fresh 12-pack of my old lover, Old Milwaukee, and am ready to get fuckin’ hyped. The daughter is upstairs asleep and the wifey is out at a dance party. I am wearing cut-off jean shorts with a big hole on one side that allows me easy access to rub my dick if the urge strikes (not sexual, it’s nice just to touch it and know it’s there and safe and all that), and I am wearing my Darrell Green football jersey. Those black away jerseys the Giants were wearing against the Yankees tonight were pretty swank. I’d get one if they didn’t cost four thousand dollars. It is Friday night, and as the old redneck saying goes, I’m overworked and underpaid. So the SPLISTSH of opening a can of delicious OM is Heaven to my ears, which are connected to the body that has spent fifty-plus in the pits of Hell on the Monday thru Friday routine. Fuck all routines, whether work or vaudeville or body checks by law types. Nothing should be routine. It goes against the natural chaos of the Universe. A very old school and channel 65 looking ad for the ECW Wrestling Academy, it is not even public access quality by today’s standards. I will drink to generic, and to Bruiser Brody sticking his tongue out at me. The beginning segment features such greats as Snuka, Koloff, Shane Douglas, Road Warrior Hawk, fireballs, and people falling off the balcony of the ECW Arena. I am geeked. First match is The Public Enemy vs. Jason Knight & Ian rotten. A young Ian Rotten looks like an old G.G. Allin. Jason looks like a Lakers fan. The ECW Arena looked much more like the bingo hall it actually was back in these days. My bad, it’s actually the PE that look like Lakers fans, in yellow and purple wigger gear. I actually heard a dude at work talk about “stupid nigger” today. I thought that shit was gone. The thing is, he’s a liberal middle class kid. They’re always the most racist, yet it’s creepy ‘cause they keep it on the down-low like R. Kelly did his marriage to Aaliyah. They should have a fat man moonsault challenge between Rocco Rock, Vader, and the Headhunters, and The Blue Meanie if he bulks back up. Joey Styles announcing, John Finnegan reffing, it’s nice to see ECW kept those guys around and rewarded their hard work with paychecks that were four weeks behind.

BEER TWO: Don’t let the speed of that first beer fool you; I’m just ready to get drunk. Though a 1993 Johnny Grunge is certainly no enemy of mine. The PE pins Ian Rotten, and shit, it was the PE’s debut in ECW. A drunken senton bloody legend is born. Boy, they sure punked out their own rep in WCW, didn’t they? Next match is Tony “Hitman” Stetson vs. Tommy “Ironman” Cairo. Stetson seems to be a hybrid of both halves of the original Hart Foundation, in appearance. Here comes Tommy Cairo, who I’ve never actually seen before, but have always read about. He looks like he’d be friends with The Sandman. Ahh, the leather jacket with fringe and leopard print trunks, you can’t be a face in an outfit like that anymore. Mr. Hunter Hughes, the manager, looks like the type who would be Ricky’s black friend on Silver Spoon. Remember when little Ricky cut slits in all his nice sweaters because he was going “punk”. That damn Ricky, what a rebel, with all his video games right there in the living room. You know you wished you had that shit back then, plus the hot ass step-mom to catch naked in the shower. She was one of those hot ‘80s brunette Kates, there were like three of them. Shit got confusing though when one of them was on that Kate & Allie show but they’re character wasn’t the one named Kate, or some shit. I don’t know for sure. I was growing and the hormones were spurting through my body and all over the side of the pillow I didn’t put my head on. I love raw wrestling, much like raw hip hop. When it gets overproduced and everything’s shiny and finely mastered, it’s just not as good. It needs some raw to it – an old person in the front row wanting to throw Dr. Pepper on the bad manager, shitty black ropes and a murky blue ring apron, a rope barricade at best tied to chairs nobody can sit in at all four corners of the ring about four feet outwards, hot 13-year-olds actually getting to have sex with the wrestlers still. It’s fuckin’ beautiful, and it’s American as shit. Japs made it seem real, and the Mexicans made it seem like a cool movie that would come on late at night on the weekend. Raw American wrestling, at best, is a good realistic brawl displaying the moral beliefs of the crowd inside the ring fantastically in opposition to regular life which jades and cynicizes those asses in the chairs, and at worst, is a couple of weird guys running around in funny-looking underwear. Either way, I don’t mind shelling out a few dollars to sit there and look at it. You should sell beer, though, if you’re thinking about doing that type of shit. I like when wrestlers put their foot on the rope and the bottom of their boot looks like he walked through tar pits. That means he’s keeping it real. Kevin Nash has never wore a pair of dirty boots, nor has Bill Goldberg. Oh, it’s the old manager distracts the ref while the heel hits the face with the title belt and thus, wins said title belt. It is evil irony displayed for public consumption, the face being the American worker, the heel being an oppressive government, and the title belt being taxes. And the ref, which symbolizes the Law, lets it stand, and there’s nothing anybody can do, though everybody knows it’s fucked up. Match three is Super Destroyer #1 vs. Super Destroyer #2. Somehow, I don’t think either of these guys are Wild Bill Irwin under the mask. Ricky’s black friend manages the first Super D to come out. Super D #1 is the face, obviously. You can’t get a crowd full of dumbass wrestling fans to root for #2 over #1. Ahh, they wear different armbands, that’s the way to distinguish them. Face Super D has a ska-ish checkered arm thing on his right arm, the good arm of course. Evil Super D has a dark red (blood?) band tied to his ominous left arm. Additionally, good Super D has white soles on his black boots, while bad Super D has black soles. Such things may seem trivial, but a good wrestler who smokes too much weed and has immersed himself deeply into the carny history will do such “unimportant” things completely on purpose. At least, I ‘d like to think so.

BEER THREE: The great thing about the indy show masked man match is it’s probably two guys who are wrestling again somewhere else on the show. Old school wrestling masks with the weird eye shape and outline around all the facial features are so fuckin’ swank, even more so than outlaw women chicks in Harley tank tops at the river on the weekend. This might not suck if I could tell these two guys apart. Oh, Jerry Styles just said that whoever loses must remove his mask; that makes it at least partially more interesting. The stepover toehold is just not ominous unless you do that Terry Funk spin around thing every now and then to conceivably twist the toes up like cartoon chicanery. Good ska armband white sole (soul?) Super D won. So bad black sole (soul?) Super D has to unmask. The Dark Patriot comes in to cause trouble. An all black outfit with red stars here and there, that’s the Dark Patriot’s get-up, and he is Doug Gilbert, an American Classic.

BEER FOUR: You can buy a fuckin’ Super Delfin mask with real dolphin skin and a string of firecrackers hanging down the back, but you can’t buy a Dark Patriot all black mask with the swank giant red star around the right eye. It’s a crying shame. Same as when my old boss, Sam, used to come to work, in his big pick-up, with a bed cover and little Confederate soldier caricature in the back window, with a box of bagels for everybody. A supposed Southerner bringing bagels to his own fuckin’ business? What the shit is that? Biscuits, motherfucker, biscuits. Get some butter and some jelly and a few slabs of ham and bring some goddamn homemade biscuits into work; that’ll make people work harder. Bagels…whoever heard of such shit. When I get rich I’m gonna buy a bunch of billboards across Virginia and the Carolinas that read “BAGELS – THE DIET OF MOTHERFUCKERS WHO MOVED DOWN HERE FROM UP THERE”. J.T. Smith comes out. He was the trainer at an industrial park wrestling school outside of Richmond that me and Firefighter Matt went to one time. Hey, this is a scaffold match, and you can’t see half the shit going on because of the heat pump contraptions in the ceiling. Ahh, chain stabilizers for the top of the scaffolding, nice engineering. I’ll drink to mad science like that. There hasn’t been a good scaffold match in quite some time. I guess Owen Hart kind of ruined it for the rest of us. When you get headbutted into the sprinkler system on the ceiling, that’s fuckin’ awesome. J.T. is hanging onto the sprinkler system! And getting choked by a drawstring. This is fuckin’ beautiful. They really test the sprinkler system now, as The Dark Patriot pulls J.T. across the top of it, so that his feet are on the pipe, then he does a face first Pedigree style DDT onto the scaffold. FUCK! J.T. Smith just did a drop kick on top of the scaffold! That’s fuckin’ retarded.

BEER FIVE: The Dark Patriot goes in his trunks for…we’ll see. Powder, of course. Two things are appropriate in a scaffold match, powder and selling a broken knee on your fall from the scaffold. It is testament to the great Midnight Express vs. Road Warriors scaffold match from Starrcades of yesteryear. The Dark Patriot is beating J.T. Smith through the crowd now. Chairs are smashed and there’s a guy in the crowd wearing the classic white D.R.I. shirt. God Bless America, Mother Fuckers! ECW had a lot more black people in the crowd back then. One black guy in the crowd is bald, looks retarded, and is wearing a pink polo shirt. I bet he’s Ricky’s black friend’s father. WHAT THE FUCK! Stan Hansen & Terry Funk vs. Abdullah the Butcher & Kevin Sullivan, in a Texas Bunkhouse tag team match!?!? How ‘bout I just drink up two beers right now. Funk goes immediately up the scaffold and tries to shake it down. Abby & Sullivan, goddamn. You have a blind guy, a soul food restaurant proprietor, a Funker, and a guy who used to pretend to be a Satanist in the state that has more bonafide Satanists than any other.

BEER SIX: I am putting the over-under on blade jobs at three on this match. Funny to think this was 9 years ago, and three of these guys (not Hansen) plus Dusty Rhodes just fought a match a few months ago that ended up with Terry Funk trying to run Rhodes over with a pick-up truck. I predict blood in the following order: Funk, Abby, Sullivan, maybe Hansen. This is fuckin’ great watching these guys do all the old school shit to get blood. Hansen is trying to juice Abby. Funk smacks his own scar tissue hoping to break open a trickle. Abby’s bleeding. Sullivan and Funk climb the scaffolding. Of course, Abby shakes the scaffolding, trying to kill everybody. The ECW Arena was much nicer with yellow walls. Funk has a gusher going. Hardcore wrestlers who wear normal old school brief-style trunks rock, because there’s no bullshit t-shirt or cut-off jeans or some shit to protect them. They are hardcore within the established history of pro wrestling. Today’s wrestling ignores the history of pro wrestling, which makes it seem stupid. Like when the WWF lost that stupid court case and had to not be the WWF. Instead of becoming the more extended World Wrestling Federation and thinking up a new shortened version of that, they immediately changed to World Wrestling Entertainment and everything was WWE and it was like Brave New World where everything changed all at once. Or was that 1984. No, 1984 was that Van Halen record with “Hot For Teacher”. And I’m sure Vince McMahon had that shit in place for if they lost that court case, because he’s a marketing guy, not a wrestling guy. A wrestling guy would’ve called it World Wide Wrestling Federation again, WWWF, and paid Superstar Graham’s hospital bills. There should be a movie about Jason vs. Abby. That would be seventeen times better than Jason in Space. However, Abby in Space would be tight as fuck. Right now, Abdullah has the best blood, but Sullivan is hitting Funk with a hammer, so maybe Funk will bust a main vein. Eddie Gilbert comes out and nails Funk and the ref. And The Dark Patriot is out there, too. Shit, couldn’t they have added the Gilbert brothers and made it a 3-Way? Well, Sullivan turns on Abby, and the mad man from Sudan takes a few chair shots before he pokes his white foreign object into Kevin Sullivan’s eyeball a few times. Of course, out comes the locker room, which gives the crazy vets open season on the youngsters for a few minutes. I imagine this is a locker room tradition, like telling the new guy he’ll win the battle royal in his hometown, only to throw him over the top when he’s not looking after he thought the last guy got eliminated. ABDULLAH IS THE FUCKIN’ GREATEST! He just ran up the aisle with his eyes wide open, his forehead covered in blood, and both hands upraised as Hansen chased him with a chair. Beautiful. Now, we’ve got a mixed gender battle royal. The only person I recognized was Sensational Sherri, so she’ll probably win. Well, Donn E. Allen is in it too, but he’s a jobber. Tigra has a big ass. There’s a sign in the crowd that says “Michael Jackson Kidnapped Freddie Gilbert”. That’s old school. Angel is a chick with fake blond hair, fake tits, and American flag trunks. Tits are so nice. Never has flabby flesh been so succulent.

BEER SEVEN: Some guy called Jay “the 6-pack” Sulli comes to the ring. Apparently, his gimmick is to look and dress like Mr. Haney from Green Acres, yet drink like Otis from the Andy Griffith Show. It works for me. Sherri is mean and nasty, like a pussy should be, even when old. Damn, the two chicks have de-pantsed Ricky’s black friend. Lesson number seven from the Confederate Mack School of Wrestling – if you want to give the crowd a good time, take an established bad manager, strip his pants off, but make sure he’s wearing goofy underwear. You can’t abuse this gimmick, but you should use it once every five years or so. It is priceless. The clothes are so ‘80s. I’ve come to realize the attire of your average wrestling program is about five years behind real life. Hip hop guys in wrestling today, 2002, dress like Ice Cube is still popular and Biggie Smalls is alive. About two years from now, there will be a wrestler with a finishing move called “The Bling Bling”. Sir Richard Michaels, I have no idea about. “Wildman” Sal Bellomo is a gladiator with a teddy bear sidekick. Sir Michaels looks like Jerry Lynn ten years closer to Faster Pussycat’s first record. Sal Bellomo has called Sherri Martel to be his second (her four hundred and seventh, thanks folks, I’ll be here all week after dinner). What happened to Bellomo? He seems very ECWish. I’m surprised I never saw him in the later years; he must’ve wrecked a car or some shit. I would’ve preferred him and Hack Myers over Justin Credible any day. Damn. Bellomo is doing some cool shit in the ring, and all while wearing a gladiator outfit. And he wins.

BEER EIGHT: The Rockin’ Rebel is now beating on people. Using the usual clusterfuck mentality of ECW, even back in ’93, I will assume somebody will come out and fight him. Well no, he leaves. I guess this is setting up next month’s show or some shit. The ECW Heavyweight Title match is next. The Sandman, skinny somewhat and before Metallica ever made his theme song, comes out first. Shane Douglas has dark hair and looks young. He also has tassles on a cut-off leather jacket. It is actually the worst piece of clothing I’ve ever seen in my life. The Sandman is wearing actual wrestling trunks. To Shane’s credit, he does the classic heel kick-step across the ring to raise your hand while being announced thing that gets the crowd all pissed off forever. Shane left, and there’s a nice shot of the ring rats by the dressing room door. That’s worth drinking to. The Sandman is a normal wrestler, which leads me to believe that he’s a major drunk in real life, so they just made that his gimmick so that it wasn’t so hard for him to do his job. I wish my job would work with me like that. At this point in the ECW Arena history, there were only like five rows of fans on the camera side. I think they ended up switching the angle on that, but I don’t know, I’ve never been there. Think how great ECW was, just judging it by how many indy groups run the ECW Arena in hopes of attaining that same greatness. And you read the listings and you wonder if the Public Enemy, The Sandman, and Steve Corino don’t live in apartments underneath the ECW Arena or some shit. They’re always booking ECW faves in these Viking Hall shows. Wiliam Devane is in the front row, I just saw him. You know what? Alan Jackson is about the only current country musician worth a shit. He’s alright. I don’t care what any of you uptight, stuck up motherfuckers think. Way down yonder on the Chattahoochee, it gets hotter than a hoochie coochie. Back home, that’s what we call a quality couplet. This is actually the first ever match I’ve seen of The Sandman where he’s not wearing either jeans or Joey Buttafucco pants to wrestle in. We have a ref bump.

BEER NINE: Sandman did that club thing underneath against the nuts. I always thought that should be called the Clubber Lang. Did I ever tell you about my surreal moment with Mr. T? Well, I’m staying in a hotel room in Oklahoma City, and I get up early to try and hitchhike to Colorado. I put it on public access, because I don’t care where you’re at, public access has the shit to watch. Well, they’re talking about arson, and I think, “Fuck, is arson that big out here?” All of a goddamn sudden, Mr. T is on the screen going, “Don’t be burning nobody’s house down, fool. How would you like it if somebody burned your house down? I pity the fool that burns a house down.” To this day I am haunted by that memory. Hey, it’s a baseball bat match. The Headhunters take on Miguel Perez Jr. and Crash the Terminator, better known as that dude with the fucked-up beard who does moonsaults. The Headhunters rule because they’re like two Abdullahs, but with Sting face paint. Sorry, I got sidetracked, now everybody’s bloody and fighting everywhere. Shit, remember what I said about the moonsault challenge? Well, both Crash aka Hugh Morrus and one of the Headhunters have missed moonsaults in this match. Headhunters win. Shit, that’s it. But they have a post-match brawl, and in the greatest ECW moment I’ve ever seen, Miguel Perez Jr. throws a box fan at the Headhunters, breaking it on the ground. Miguel Perez Jr. should do a Norelco commercial; it’d be better than that fake one Saturday Night Live used to have after that female bitch did interviews in the New England Patriots locker room like seventeen years ago. I remember everything, even the shit I don’t recall.

No comments: