It was 20 years ago that Extreme Championship Wrestling was born, when Eastern Championship Wrestling changed direction under the evil genius of Paul Heyman, breaking away from the National Wrestling Alliance. The recent launch of the WWE Network means that every ECW pay-per-view in history is available at the click of a button. Amid the overwhelming options available, it can be hard to choose which matches to re-live first. Of course, there were plenty of quintessentially "extreme" moments in ECW -- the crucifixion of Sandman, rings collapsing, chair-hurling, and the infamous Mass Transit Incident, to name a few. But in the Land of Extreme there were many extremely good wrestling matches, notable for their technical proficiency rather than gratuitous violence. This list celebrates both "extremes," so to speak -- the matches that made our stomach turn with violence, and the ones that made us marvel at truly great wrestling. This list, like any of its kind, is subjective. That's the nature of examining art -- even if it's the gritty, low-brow performance art of ECW. We rank ECW's most "extreme" matches as judged by the reactions they elicited from fans, whether due to extreme violence or extreme technical proficiency.
Marshall Ward is an arts, music, entertainment and professional wrestling writer based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. A weekly columnist with the Waterloo Chronicle newspaper, Ward is also a contributing writer for Rock Cellar Magazine and has interviewed everyone from William Shatner to Olivia Newton-John to Ringo Starr. Email is welcome at marshall_ward@hotmail.com.
