10 Weirdest Ways To Create A Wrestling Championship

10. The Franchise Goes Extreme

In the mid-nineties, the National Wrestling Alliance was floundering horribly. WCW, the last of the major NWA territories with a television show and a quality roster, had just seceded from the Alliance. It had been over forty years since the NWA had been created to bring order to all of the warring wrestling fiefdoms, and history was finally passing it by. Tod Gordon€™s Eastern Championship Wrestling was small time compared to WCW, but it was pretty much the final place the NWA had anything approaching TV attached to it. However, Gordon and his right hand man and booker, Paul Heyman, didn€™t like the constant paranoid micromanaging they felt from the NWA, who were determined to maintain a rigid control of this, their last stand in the business. Something had to give. On August 27th 1994, Shane Douglas won the NWA World Heavyweight Championship, and - title in hand - delivered the promo of a lifetime, and the one that would define his career forever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kpEjrKqf3s It was a scorching, game-changing moment for the little promotion that could, and for Douglas and Heyman, too. The new Extreme Championship Wrestling had set out its stall, picked out its figurehead and created and awarded its symbol of greatest achievement in one fell swoop€ and cast aside and spat on the National Wrestling Alliance in doing so. There were NWA representatives at the event. The way Heyman tells it, they weren€™t in on the swerve, but they were talking around afterwards, made to see how a worked ECW vs. NWA angle could actually benefit business for both parties. The promo that the NWA rep cut to camera was therefore a worked shoot, not a legit position from the dying organisation. Still, the audacity of the move would come to define ECW as a company.