I have a gap between my two classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, during which I like to eat lunch. One particular September afternoon, coming out of the Student Center, I caught a glimpse of a flier taped to a light pole. Moving closer, I saw that it was actually for a music/pro wrestling hybrid show called “Wreckage at the Warehouse,” taking place on Oxford Street. As a wrestling fan, I wanted to attend. Unfortunately I couldn’t, because I don’t live on or around campus, and Septa Regional Rail’s schedule is the ultimate heel (wrestling term for a villain).

I’ve been watching pro wrestling for as long as I can remember. If I had to guess, I would say that my first wrestling show I watched was WWE’s Friday Night Smackdown on either the CW or MyNetworkTv between the timespan of 2007-2009. I like to think that my first solid feud was the critically acclaimed CM Punk vs Jeff Hardy, but I fear it may have actually been Hornswoggle vs the Great Khali.

Pro wrestling seems to get a bad rap for its “fake” nature, when really just another form of entertainment. In a way, wrestling is real in its unreality. It’s “fake” in that it’s a work of fiction. It’s real in that many of its performers sustain long term damage. It’s fake in that match results are predetermined and agreed to ahead of time. It’s real in that some performers develop egos and want to protect their spots on the card, putting that predetermination in danger. It’s fake in that everyone in some way is playing a character that you can be invested in. It’s real in that performers put their heart and soul into their craft. Pro wrestling is a strange industry that can breed both unparalleled creativity and toxicity. And no company occupied both sides of that coin quite like Philadelphia based Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW).

ECW in its most famous iteration technically only ran from 1994-2001, but it left quite a mark on the wrestling landscape. True to its name, ECW made its name off extreme, or as they and now others like to say, “hardcore wrestling.” Matches between performers were violent, and frequently made use of weapons such as chairs, kendo sticks, tables, barbed wire, and fire. But ECW was also known for aspects outside of hardcore, namely the creative output of CEO and head booker Paul Heyman, the passion and character work of the wrestlers, its showcase of Mexican and Japanese performers, and an equally hardcore fanbase.

Founder Tod Gordon described ECW as “The Little Engine that Could,” and by the late 90s, this violent little engine was the 3rd biggest U.S. wrestling company, behind the giants in WCW and the WWF (now WWE). Unfortunately, due to poor finances and an inability to secure a TV deal, ECW folded in 2001. Its assets were eventually purchased by WWE in 2003.

Many wrestlers and wrestling companies today cite ECW as a big influence. It was an underground underdog that created many memorable moments while also cultivating a cult-like following. Unfortunately, the underground was the only possible place for something like it. ECW was too controversial, while also occupying a very specific niche in the cultural zeitgeist. Ultimately, Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW) could not survive outside of the context of the 1990s and Philadelphia.

The Arena

First and foremost, ECW likely would not be successful without the 2300 Arena (referred to at the time as the ECW Arena). While ECW did hold the occasional live event outside of Philly (as we’ll see later), the majority of its tv tapings were shot at 2300, a large abandoned warehouse on South Swanson Street, just under I95. In his book “Tod is God,” Tod Gordon describes how the arena was almost always in a state of disrepair. There was a leak in the roof that miraculously never led to a slip and fall, and Gordon admits that they were “busting something up” fairly frequently. The a/c system was also broken, so at full 800 person capacity, it felt like an oven. South Swanson wasn’t any less dingy, with wrestling journalist John Lister describing it as a “vandalised, drug-filled, bleak urban jungle”. It’s good to be bad, and right away you have a perfectly bad physical environment. Combine a menacing city street with a poorly ventilated, low capacity building that looks like it could fall apart at any moment. Now throw a show in there, where the performers are actively hurting and making each other bleed with weapons. You get something that feels downright criminal, something you shouldn’t be watching.

The Network

Now, the best criminal is the one that doesn’t get caught. Until it landed a TV deal with TNN in 1999, ECW Hardcore TV (ECW’s weekly show) basically aired on Philly Public Access TV, which allowed them to slip through the FCC’s radar. ECW Hardcore TV started out on local cable channel SportsChannel Philadelphia on Tuesdays at 6 pm. In 1996, it was upgraded to an 11 pm slot, with a Friday 2 am replay. SportsChannel Philadelphia eventually went out of business, and ECW moved to WPPX-TV 61 (now ION TV) at a Wednesday 9 pm timeslot, and then to WGTW 48 (now owned by TBN) sometime very late on Friday or Saturday nights. Apparently, FCC oversight was not present that late at night and on that obscure of networks. This allowed ECW to get away with its graphic violence, blood, harsh language, adult presentation and use of copyrighted music without the proper licensing fees.

The Vibe

Unlicensed copyrighted music was also a big part of ECW’s identity. Many of its most famous performers came out to mainstream songs that fit their characters.

The Sandman, who was basically trailer park trash that beat on opponents (and occasionally and unfortunately, also their female partners) with a Singapore cane, came out to “Enter Sandman” by Metallica.

Tommy Dreamer, a glutton for punishment and ECW’s closest equivalent to the everyman archetype, came out to “Man in the Box” by Alice in Chains.

Raven, who was basically Kurt Cobain if Kurt Cobain was a cult leader and also liked quoting the one line from Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven, came out to “Come Out and Play” by The Offspring.

The list goes on. The FCC is much stronger these days, and people are much more aware of copyright law, so the company would be sued to oblivion if they tried this today.

The Crowd

“If you pleased them, if you gave them what they were looking for, if you satiated their appetite for satisfaction in a product, the Philly fans would reward you by publicizing and singing your virtues to the masses because Philly accepted you as their home team and they wanted the bragging rights of saying, ‘This happened here in Philadelphia.”

– Paul Heyman in a 2013 interview with the Philadelphia inquierer

An anything-goes, dilapidated warehouse playing sick music is cool and all, but what worked most in ECW’s favor was the passion of those living in Philadelphia for all things Philadelphia. They had this thing that was theirs, and they showed it the utmost reverence (or at least as much reverence that a mass of drunk, testosterone-fueled, hygienically deficient dudes can show).

Bringing it All Together

Let’s bring back the criminal analogy from earlier, and let’s introduce an angsty teenager. Let’s say that you’re an angsty teenager in the U.S. in the 90s.

The Soviet Union has just collapsed. For all you know, Clinton’s policies have contributed to domestic tranquility. There is no major political turmoil that you know of. You feel the need to rebel, but is there really anything to rebel against? You were a big fan of wrestling growing up in the 80s, being a mark for guys like Hulk Hogan, Macho Man, and Andre the Giant, who were all larger than life. But now this material feels cartoonish. You’ve tried getting back into wrestling, but the content that WCW and WWF are putting out right now feels weak and geared towards pandering to children (for f’s sake, they got a guy playing the character of a trash collector).

You’re bored, channel surfing late at night when you come across something interesting: ECW Hardcore TV. You’ve vaguely heard of it before. At school, you saw a group of kids in South Park and Jackass shirts negotiating and trading tapes of footage. You think you’ll give this show a try. Immediately, you hear the music: Metallica, Alice in Chains, The Offspring, AC/DC, Dr. Dre and Ice Cube. You see these performers, looking intense and ready to kill. You see a match, that’s more of a fight to the death than it is a typical sporting contest. You see guys getting hit with chairs to the head, getting put through tables on fire, getting mangled and cut open with barbed wire. Most importantly, you hear the rowdy crowd.

The building looks packed, and the people seem to cheer and boo for every little thing. It’s clear that they appreciate the violent show that’s being put on for them. You decide that you have to check this out. You hear at the end commentator Joey Styles mentioning the ECW Arena. As it turns out, the ECW Arena is in Philadelphia. Conveniently, you live in Philadelphia! You buy tickets and go down there with your friends. You feel unsafe on the street walking to the arena, even in a group. The ECW Arena itself doesn’t look like much. The inside is worse. It’s hot and it stinks of the body odor of 800+ men packed into a tiny space. But the crowd is loud, louder than what you heard on TV. It maintains that energy throughout the night, and you eventually join in. You wonder if everyone else has the same story as you. Did they stumble on to this madness watching TV late at night? Are they from a city outside of Philadelphia and were they drawn to this show via a tape that was traded to them? It doesn’t matter. You are all the spectators of this violent spectacle. This is hardcore. This is ECW.

The point I’m trying to make is that obscurity bred a hardcore fanbase that fed into its own energy to create more fans. Local Philadelphia public access TV brought in viewers while hiding what was going on from the TV authorities. 90s tape trading could’ve possibly expanded viewership. Finally, the vibe of 2300 fit the product. This could not work today with social media. Stronger word of mouth would spread what ECW was doing to more people, and so the fanbase wouldn’t be as tight and as loyal. In fact, if social media was around in the 90s, ECW would’ve been destroyed from a legal standpoint.

The Incidents

There were multiple “incidents” during ECW’s time that the company got away with because they were so small. There was the chair throwing incident, in which Cactus Jack and Terry Funk asking an audience member to throw a chair to them results in a domino effect of the entire arena throwing chairs into the ring, burying the Public Enemy tag team.

There was the arena fire, in which through a miscommunication the wrong guy (Terry Funk) was set on fire, leading to him freaking out and running into the audience, causing a stampede (no publicly available footage of this, although WWE may have it in their tape library).

There was that time Raven crucified the Sandman without the prior knowledge of anyone backstage, and then was made to go out and apologize to the fans (the WWF would copy this and do their own crucifixion stunt a few years later).

There was the Heatwave Incident at a live event in Dayton, Ohio, in which Bubba Ray Dudley goes a tad bit too far during a promo and arguably very nearly incites a riot.

But the biggest one of all has to be the Mass Transit incident. In 1996, at a non-televised live event in Revere, Massachusetts, a 17 year old fan by the name of Erich Kulas convinced Paul Heyman that he was actually a trained 21 year old wrestler by the name of Mass Transit. Kulas ended up getting booked in a tag match with D-Von Dudley against The Gangstas (New Jack and Mustafa Saed). During the match, Kulas convinces New Jack to cut him open with a scalpel so as to “get some color.” New Jack obliges, but ends up cutting a little too deep, very nearly killing Kulas in the process. Kulas’s family sued New Jack for assault a few months later, but the case was ruled in New Jack’s favor, as Kulas was found to have falsified his age and training. I’m not a legal expert by any means, but I think in this day and age an incident like this would have ended ECW. Paul Heyman and the rest of the company would be sued for criminal negligence, with the case being dragged out for quite a while. More importantly, the scrutiny on social media would be intense, and there would definitely be calls to cancel ECW (perhaps rightfully so).

In Conclusion

The most famous iteration of Extreme Championship Wrestling is remembered fondly by wrestlers and wrestling fans alike, but this is because that version isn’t happening today. ECW came at the right time and place (the 1990s and Philadelphia), and it belongs in that time and place.

While ECW could not have survived, other companies in and around Philadelphia have in its wake, namely CZW and ROH. Combat Zone Wrestling (CZW) was founded by John Zandig in 1998, and filled the extreme niche after the collapse of ECW (CZW refers to its brand of extreme wrestling as “ultraviolent wrestling”). Many alumni from CZW currently wrestle for bigger companies and prominent independent brands in WWE, AEW, Impact Wrestling, and GCW.

Ring of Honor was launched in 2002. RF Video’s Ron Feinstein was making big sales on ECW, and needed something to fill that void. After failing to negotiate a deal with CZW, he co-founded Ring of Honor with Paul Heyman’s protege Gabe Sapolsky. ROH presented technical wrestling with a more realistic presentation, but still essentially followed the same diy idea as ECW. It has run shows throughout the years at the 2300 Arena, and was purchased by AEW after going bankrupt during the pandemic. Similar to CZW, many of its alumni can also be found all over the modern wrestling scene.

Perhaps most importantly, the 2300 Arena still runs wrestling and other combat sports related shows.

ECW would not work today, but it has cultivated a thriving wrestling scene in Philadelphia. After all, why would “Wreckage at the Warehouse” be put together if the promoters thought it wouldn’t bring people in? The title itself seems to evoke the extreme.