Kingdom's Column

My wrestling viewing habits have become rather erratic and I don't think I'm alone in this at all. Now I must admit that I probably have a better excuse than most of you: I work evenings from 730pm until 3am. Sometimes I catch the start of Raw or Smackdown before work kicks into full swing, but unless its a holiday Monday or one of the increasingly rare times I don't have to cover for someone on a Saturday night, just about the only wrestling I know I'll get to see has been TSN's 3:30am Tuesday night/Wednesday morning replay of Raw... which I often fall asleep during.

Sure I could set my vcr and tape Raw and Smackdown and Impact. But I don't. Frankly there's just nothing going on on any of those shows that's inspired me to do anything more than catch them when I can and miss them the rest of the time.

There are only two things I've really made any effort to watch lately. The first is actually thanks to a kid on YouTube.com. With his his diligence I've seen all the wwECW shows from SciFi despite the fact that it doesn't start on Canadian tv until next week. And let me tell you, kids... the Vince McMahon ECW revival is, as my boy Ron would say, an abortion of biblical proportions.

No one with any intelligence thought the new ECW would be an exact continuation of where the promotion left off or, even more far-fetched, a throwback to the promotion's early glory. What everyone prayed it would be though, is something different than the current WWE in both its style and its substance. It is neither. The current ECW does not fulfill the dream of a promotion carrying on in the manner of the original.

Instead it comes off like a psycho ex-girlfriend you had a One Night Stand with while your new girlfriend was away who's gotten into your closet, put on your new girlfriend's favorite outfit and is running around your bedroom screaming "I can be her! You still love me!" Think Meryl Streep. Stephanie McMahon is gonna boil your bunny.

Thank god CM Punk debuted this week. For a precious few minutes I watched wwECW and didn't want to claw my eyes out. Punk is fresh and new for this product and is the beacon that I think most fans will follow thru the darkness of the new ECW.

Test? Mike Knox? Big Show? Weekly main events featuring people I already don't want to watch on Raw and Smackdown? Strippers who don't know how to strip? And Joey Styles and Tazz shilling for the garbage like they can't smell the "suck" in the air. Who the hell has wanted any of that?

Here's the test for the WWE brain trust: will they learn anything from the massive positive reaction that CM Punk received in New York this week and the massively negative reaction that Show vs Batista were shown and start reworking things to spotlight talents like Punk, RVD, Stevie Richards, Little Guido, Tony Mamaluke and the like???

OR...

Will they ignore what the crowd did Tuesday and fight to swim against the currents of the Great Material Continuum (nerd alert: I just made a Star Trek reference about a Ferengi philosophical belief. The GMC is like a river the flows throughout the universe and if you sail upon it smartly, your boat will be ladden with riches. Oh shut the F up... If you knew anything about Star Trek you'd know how PERFECT that analogy is.) and continue to forcefeed us crap on toast like Show vs Kane and
Test run-ins and the Vampire because they know what's good for us???

Time will tell.

Oh yeah, there was a second thing I made the effort to watch recently and that's the Dusty Rhodes dvd set. Three discs full of Dusty is like a trip to Tha Pay Window, daddy! You must view this set. Not even the edits to commentary from older matches can steal the fun away from watching Stardust doin' his thang.

Watch each and every match. Savor each and every promo. Vince McMahon has made sure that a performer as talented and charismatic as Dusty will never rise to the top of the business again. (And yet Vince is the guy making the money off this set of dvds. Don't let the irony escape you folks.)

And while the documentary portion of the first disc is the kind of love letter one would fully expect from this sort of production (highlight the positives, hide the negatives unles they can be used for tear-jerking purposes), there's one thing that really pissed me off:

Dusty takes credit for putting the WCW World title on Ron Simmons.

Huh?

Did I miss something? Apparently I did because the move to put the World title on a black wrestler for the first-ever time is something that I, for one, have always credited to "Cowboy" Bill Watts. Its nothing new for the WWE to engage in this particular kind of revisionist history. They do it now with practicaly everything they release. Its just sad that they feel they have to.

But don't let that deter you from watching the set. Its a decidedly enjoyable piece of viewing, from Dusty early days tagging with Dick Murdoch and working territories like Florida and the AWA, to his NWA title runs under the Crockett banner, to his lamentable WWF run more remembered for a polka dot outfit and a "fan-turned-manager" named Sapphire (Oh, the nightmares this brought back) to the Corino feud in ECW. Its the story of that little plumber's son from Austin, Texas who grew up to be soooo sweet...

And its hard to resist charm like that.

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