Entry 12: WWE vs..... ECW?!?!?!?!

Yo!

Well, well, well.......... So the big, bad World Wrestling Entertainment is about to square off in yet another "franchise war" against the long-since absorbed Extreme Championship Wrestling guys. Just like the good old days, I suppose. I'll come back to this battle in a moment. First, I gotta say something about ECW's big brother, the WWE.

First off, about the whole death of Eddie Guerrero thing last fall... Like most of the world (aw heck... probably at least 99.9999 percent with the 0.0001 percent being the actual WWE guys themselves, give or take), it took me a good long while to accept the gravity of the newly unfolding situation. When I tuned in to Monday Raw on November 14th, literally the day after news of Eddie's passing was slowly beginning to seep out into the mainstream, and I noticed the very first shot of the show had every Raw and Smackdown star all standing in a horizontal line in front of Raw's stage/ring entrance area practically in police suspect lineup-style (sorry, that was what it kinda looked like to me at the time. I calls 'em as I sees 'em), I knew something was up immediately. It was only after WWE Chairman Vincent Kennedy McMahon went into full eulogy mode breaking the news about Eddie's death to the public (and verifying this online at several websites other than WWE's homepage) that it started to sink in, after about ten minutes of raw disbelief (obviously, no pun intended).


Check this out: When you work in a business where the rules of pain, theatrics, reality, sportsmanship and death are bent and distorted almost beyond recognition, it comes as no surprise how long it took (for me, at least) to realize that this was, for once, real. The thing is, tragedies like Eddie's death shouldn't be met with so much disbelief, unless of course, it's a majorly massive loss of life. Katrina? That deserved disbelief like that. September 11th? Of course that took a while to accept. But the death of one man who isn't immortal, despite certain of his own "co-workers" constantly toying around with the permanence of death itself (*cough, Undertaker.....), shouldn't have been, in my opinion, been blown out of proportion like that.

With all due respect to Eddie's fans, friends and of course, family, I acknowledge that he had a lot of history with the WWE, and his legacy was justfully cemented in the annals of wrestling history at this year's WWE Hall of Fame ceremony not so long ago, but eventually everyone had to accept that even in the WWE, there's obviously no such thing as immortality, and even though those guys (except for in the Pay-Per-View events, I guess. Darn network Standards-and-Practices) almost never sustain any REALLY real injuries, they're far from gods. Well, John "Wrestling God" Leyfield still had that particular superiority complex going on, last time I checked Smackdown, which was a good while back. I'm not a big UPN viewer. Bottom line, Aside from his almost unneccessarily long mourning on-air on BOTH Raw and Smackdown, Mr. "Latino Heat" did have a great, long run while it lasted, and no doubt his legacy will be felt in the industry for years to come. ...........But that's (obviously not) just me. Rest in peace, Eddie.

Oh! Sorry about the length of that rant. I almost forgot the main thing I was going to talk about this week. I'm gonna have to divide this up into my first two-part blog entry! Let me just throw in this plug and then I'll get to what was supposed to be this week's rant next Monday night. The WWE's long-standing rival franchise through the '90s and late '80s, the ECW, is making its "triumphant" return Tuesday nights starting next Tuesday, 6/13 on SciFi Channel. That's right, SciFi. I know, I never woulda guessed those guys either. Check this link for more info. Okay, that's it! Rant to be continued NEXT MONDAY NIGHT! Same timeframe, same website!

-D.