10 Great Wrestling Matches Hidden On Terrible Pay Per Views
1. Mike Awesome Vs. Masato Tanaka - ECW November To Remember 1999
ECW was a fading force in 1999. Much of their best talent had left for more lucrative pastures, necessitating longer, duller matches. Its entire allure - that of a renegade promotion steeped in blood and guts - had been appropriated and subsumed by the WWF.
November To Remember was well on its way to becoming a stellar event, but the all important feature matches disappointed. The main event counts for so much at a Pay Per View - if it doesn't deliver, it compromises the overall quality. A great card should build to a main event - but the six-man tag pitting Justin Credible, Lance Storm and Rhino against Raven, The Sandman and Tommy Dreamer here was almost an afterthought.
Leave it to Mike Awesome and Masato Tanaka, then, to save the show with their trademark chair and table festival - a pairing so incredible that they managed to find almost endless variety with such limited tools. Their commitment to the violent art was such that it bordered on the method. Such basic action required a lunatic degree of conviction - the sheer decibel level generated by the chair shots renders traditional psychology completely irrelevant to its merit.
Their matches are slightly unsettling in retrospect, knowing what we do now about concussions, the cumulative trauma of which may have contributed to Awesome's tragic suicide - but for better or worse, that is the man's legacy.