9 Times ECW Was Better Than Literally EVERYTHING
3. Taz Vs Mike Awesome Vs Masato Tanaka (Anarchy Rulz '99)
The dirty little secret about Extreme Championship Wrestling is that with every passing year, less and less matches hold up to rewatch, even with the best will in the world and trying to view them in intended context.
All work ages to an extent, but much of ECW's lauded violence grows quaint or disposable, the innovative technical, areal and lucha work gets diffused by the unreasonable "you f*cked up" response to inevitable botches, and the understandable Paul Heyman obsession with repackaging misfit toys often serves only to remind the viewer why they were misfit toys in the first place.
This, thankfully, is not the case with the utterly sublime Three Way Dance for the ECW World Heavyweight Championship at Anarchy Rulz '99. Going in as Champion and facing a torrent of abuse following the news that he was set to leave for WWE, Taz might have been in a difficult position, but Awesome, Tanaka and the booking solved the problem before it could even really become one. The 'Human Suplex Machine' was soundly beaten by the two in a sprint start, resulting in the guarantee of a new Champion, and a careful walking of the work/shoot tightrope to give Taz his flowers from the fans and the roster before he departed.
What remained was arguably even better, Yet one more match between two of the best rivals in the history of the company, monsters incapable of having a bad match, and now for all the marbles. They now had the space to destroy each other for the richest prize, all within the confines and context of a tear-soaked goodbye.