10 Times Wrestling Promotions Came Back From The Dead
9. ECW - 2005
It's dead.
Paul Heyman said that ECW was "too small to be big, and too big to be small," and he nailed it. The roster depleted by the moneyed WWF and WCW, the big two also subsumed its identity as the edgy hardcore league. The cannibalised ECW product of 1999 and 2000, notwithstanding the piss-poor financial mismanagement, was abject.
With much of the audience desensitised to that which was once shocking, Steve Corino leaned into desperate and wildly unsubtle racist heat and bled buckets from the faucet that was his face to make a parody of the word "hardcore". The old system - ECW once platformed amazing, up-and-coming talent - became subverted with the brief, cursed detours made by Sid and Scott Hall. The new guard of Justin Credible et al. meanwhile failed to convince as headliners, and the plunder style lost its charm entirely and rapidly. The company, stripped of its identity and in financial disarray, shuffled off the coil in 2001.
It's alive!
Sort of!
Those two One Night Stand shows were miraculous; WWE somehow conspired to capture the old, renegade spirit so well that they never once resonated as nostalgia shows. The expertly-positioned threat of the WWE bully boys was a masterstroke: a reason was engineered to once make ECW the opposition it always excelled as.
And it died, again, because the subsequent TV show was a sh*tty hybrid of pastiche and arena wrestling, and not a spiritual sequel driven by CM Punk.