The Secret History Of ECW | Wrestling Timelines

Look around the modern pro wrestling landscape.

In All Elite Wrestling, you’ll watch on as the action inevitably and frequently spills to the outside. The wrestlers will use weaponry - tables, mostly - in matches that are not held under No Disqualification rules. The commentators are quick to point out things like “leniency”, and the referee’s unwillingness to throw the match out and deprive the fans of it. While AEW doesn’t take it quite as far, this approach - which is a somewhat cheap but massively effective way of getting a rabid audience into it - was a signature of Extreme Championship Wrestling.

In an early AEW success story, one so gripping week-to-week that AEW soon annihilated NXT in the Wednesday Night Wars, MJF feuded with Cody Rhodes. As part of the storyline, Cody could not put his hands on the man who betrayed, taunted, and whipped him until the pay-per-view. The sense of anticipation was rampant. Again: this was heavily inspired by an ECW storyline.

While ECW was not without influences of its own, most notably the crazily inventive Frontier Martial-Arts promotion founded by Atsushi Onita, it was the most influential wrestling outfit ever. The WWE of 2025 is very much removed from ECW’s influence, but the WWF of the late 1990s?

The promotions were philosophically intertwined like a figure-four leglock.

In the 1980s, the rapidly expanding World Wrestling Federation would not have dismantled the territory system and taken over without first taking many key personnel from the American Wrestling Association - which, with an emerging Hulk Hogan developing into a megastar, was almost the pilot of a monopoly.

ECW was the AWA of the ‘90s, in a lot of ways, in that, without it, no boom period happens.

This is the story of ECW: the revolutionary blood and guts operation that did in fact change everything. Its founder and glorified cult leader Paul Heyman often has much to say, a lot of it preposterously hyperbolic.

For once, no lies are detected…