Connor McGrath
ECPW On Fire
September 13th, 2014 (Taped August 22nd, 2014)
From The Elks Lodge in Paramus, New Jersey
Announcers: Ken Reedy and Joey G
Wrestling On Fire returned to my home state of Maine this weekend for the first time in a year alongside local promotion Independent Wrestling Entertainment. However, we probably won’t see those shows for another two or three weeks (and I couldn’t attend because of a family reunion. Stupid Grandmas! I wanna see Josef Von Schmidt rasslin) so let’s look at what went down in New Jersey last month. We got a couple debuts and a big title match on this show.
Big Bad John (with Vincent Valentine) Vs Aaron Bradley (With The Creeper)
Does The Creeper manage everyone that goes against Vincent Valentine? Kayfabe-wise, considering that Valentine and his goons brutally attacked him, I can sort of understand why they would have Creeper do that. In reality though, it just makes his quest for vengeance against Vincent Valentine’s stable of freaks seem silly if he just manages whichever cannon fodder that goes against them. Anyway, this match is perfectly fine big fat guy-little guy squash although the ending is anti-climatic with Big Bad John winning with a Khali-esque head chop. C+ Also Vincent Valentine kind of reminds me of a lame, mid ’90s WWF manager in a sense. He came in with proclamations of destroying the promotion a few months ago and all it amounted to do was his guys squashing some jobbers and being unable to cleanly beat anybody past the midcard level. Definitely sounds like a ’90s WWF heel manager. Or Bray Wyatt.
Fenris Wolf Vs King Swipes
Fenris Wolf, we’ve seen briefly a few times but I’ve never seen his entrance. He apparently has a Game of Thrones/Thor/some sort of middle aged warrior gimmick as he comes to the ring wearing pelts and doing some dramatic war dance with a big wooden mallet. King Swipes, I’m not sure what gimmick he has but he sort of reminds me of the white version of Delonte West. Joey G mentions that Swipes is a last minute replacement for a wrestler who got sick. Both these guys names/gimmick seem indy as hell and the announcers implicitly bury them both. It’s too bad the presentation is terrible because this isn’t a bad, little match. Both these guys work hard and get the crowd into it with the time given. Wolf wins with a modified Death Valley Driver. C+
Johnny Thunder Vs Dillinger
Another match featuring a guy who has only been featured once or twice on the show (Dillinger) and a guy I’ve never seen (Thunder). Johnny Thunder is not the long deceased punk rock star of the ’70s but a former ECPW Champion, who according to Joey G, was in town visiting his parents and decided to contact the promoters and get a spot on the card. I’m not sure when he was champ but judging by his prodigious gut, I’m guessing it was some time ago. That being said, he has great agility for a man of his size. Dillinger, though, well, he wrestles like he looks (a shorter version of post retirement Shaq). You know how some guys are just naturals in the ring? Dillinger is not one of those guys. There’s a really only partially intentionally silly finish to this match where Dillinger hits a big lariat on Thunder then does some heel mugging for a ridiculously long time. Dillinger mugs and jaw jacks with fans for literally a minute and a half or so allowing Thunder to shake it off and win the match with a Flatliner for the win. I’m not sure if Thunder was actually knocked silly by the clotheslines and they had to stall for time or they wanted Dillinger to look like a goof. Definitely succeeded with the latter. D+
ECPW Heavyweight Title Match: “The Re-Enforcer” Andrew Anderson (c) (with Doug DeVito) Vs Josef Von Schmidt
It’s a rematch of a match from the SummerSlam weekend episode of this show. Last time, both Anderson’s ECPW Heavyweight Title and Von Schmidt’s WOF Title were on the line. For some reason, the stakes are lowered in the rematch and only the ECPW Title is on the line. I get a laugh out of Von Schmidt berating the ring announcer at the beginning of this match. I get a bigger laugh out of the middle aged dudes who always sit in the front and mark for Von Schmidt, chanting “Holy Schmidt” throughout the match. Anyway, this match is marginally better than their match four weeks ago but still isn’t very good. Von Schmidt gets credit for actually giving into the crowd’s whims and deciding to play the babyface rather than doing another awkward heel vs heel encounter. Other than that, not much. Von Schmidt has a good look and is one of the best promos in the promotion but other than that, he seems like he’s taken a step back since he returned six months or so back. There’s just moments in the ring that seem awkward as hell. He does a really bad spinning heel kick and does the worst sell of a slingshot into the corner I’ve ever seen. He just very slowly got up, stood there for a beat and slowly through himself into the turnbuckle. Just awful. He could learn a lesson from Anderson, who will probably never get rhapsodic write up from the Wrestling Observer but knows what he can do and does it well. Anyway, the match ends with ECPW On Fire’s other evil German, Kraig Stagg running down and whacking Von Schmidt with his tin foil World Cup to give Anderson the win. D+
Interesting, I was just commenting last week about how weird it was that ECPW had two German characters that didn’t interact with each other at all. I would claim this was because of me but this show was taped weeks before I wrote that. Anyway, I get a laugh out of Ken Reedy saying that the Berlin Wall would be put up again. I’ve got to say, I’ve really grown to like the Joey G-Ken Reedy announce team. They’re not perfect but they’re consistently entertaining and do about as good of a job as they can selling the product. It’s a 1000x improvement over the mostly indecipherable, monosyllabic hollering of Tommy Savoldi that I had to put up with for years.
We take a bizarre left turn at the end of the show with Josef Von Schmidt cutting a heel promo on WWE Hall of Famer Tony Atlas about their scheduled match against each other during WOF’s tour of Maine. I think they’re trying to present Von Schmidt as a babyface during the ECPW shows and as a heel during the WOF shows but it just seems baffling that they’d have a segment of him trash talking a beloved local hero right after Von Schmidt is the wronged babyface who got screwed out of the title. Sometimes, the editing of this show is baffling…
Anyway, this episode reminded me of the show when I started watching it five years or so ago (when it was NWA On Fire); a combination of young guys with goofier than a three dollar bill gimmicks, grizzled no-name vets, and a lot of stuff that just doesn’t make sense. Plus Tony Atlas, a mere thirty years past his prime, being a top babyface. It’s been a while since we’ve seen Tony on this show. Looking forward to seeing the former Saba Simba again on this show. He’s always entertaining.
Anyway, it’s time for pumpkin. Pumpkin flavored beers, pumpkin flavored coffee, pumpkin pie, pumpkin flavored pumpkin. Believe it or not, you can feed your dogs pumpkins. It’s good for the digestive system. What’s not good for dogs’ digestive systems is chocolate. Never feed your dogs chocolate! I’ll see you next week! Thanks for reading!
