Connor McGrath
This week, Wrestling On Fire takes us to New Jersey to an East Coast Pro Wrestling where the gold is on the line PLUS Bill Apter interviews recent WWE Hall of Fame Inductee Booker T.
After a one week break, Wrestling On Fire is back with another all new episode!
The show starts off with advertisements to book Wrestling On Fire for your next fundraiser and their shows in Maine on August 6th and September 17th. I suspect we’ll see them both, at least four times in the next half hour.
We formally begin with Bill Apter Skyping with Booker T. Aw shucky ducky quack. There’s a graphic advertising WWE.com onscreen. Booker talks about courting Sharmell and family life at the T household. Apter puts over the WWE Hall of Fame ceremony. Booker reveals that him and Stevie Ray were estranged for a few years before Stevie inducted him into the Hall of Fame. I actually didn’t know that! The segment ends with Book and Apter contemplating the possibility of Harlem Heat being inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame someday.
ECPW TV Title Match: Crazy Ivan (c) Vs Bandido Jr Vs Matt McIntosh
We’re in New Jersey again this week. Ken Reedy is “on vacation” so Charlie Savoldi is filling in. Man, how many Savoldis are there? Crazy Ivan is a guy in a prison jumpsuit who is “wacky” while Matt McIntosh is Irish. They actually have graphics with the guys’ name this week which makes my life a lot easier. They do what I think is kind of an “indy wrestling” faux pas by showing a closeup of the chintzy looking title. Hey, we’re only halfway through the show and we’ve seen the Wrestling On Fire On Tour ads three times so my prediction might be on the money. The ad prominently features the high pitched squeal of a handicapped Wrestling On Fire superfan that we’ve seen before which is not too fun to hear over and over again after a beer and whiskey fueled night. Don’t drink alcohol, kiddos.
Anyway…
This match is alright. McIntosh is kind of sloppy but Bandido (who we saw a month or so back) is promising and Crazy Ivan does a pretty good job with a sort of cliched gimmick. Pretty rote, meat and potatoes formula with Ivan throwing around the smaller guys and McIntosh and Bandio trying to comeback with double teams but being conflicted over who gets the pin. Crazy Ivan whacks Bandido in the cojones and rolls him up for the win. McIntosh dropkicks Ivan out of the ring but Ivan no-sells it and yells at some kids at ringside. The security guards for this show are wearing BWO shirts for some reason, which rules. As I said, this match was perfectly fine. I got a kick out of Ivan’s frantic mugging and as I noted, they didn’t try to do anything too crazy and kept it fairly basic. B-
We close with the fourth ad for Wrestling On Fire’s shows in Maine coming up (nailed it! I’m going to celebrate with a giant glass of tap water. Maybe put some ice in it) and advertising their fundraisers plus an ad for the official band of Wrestling On Fire, Vampire Banquet. And we see the opening credits again
That was a filler heavy show. That show wasn’t even mailed in, it was faxed. The Booker T interview only really got interesting at the end was basically just a teaser for a longer interview you can see on 1Wrestling.com (which I didn’t even know was still a thing before I started watching this show). The one match was fairly entertaining but the show felt even more padded out with ads than usual. This was basically an infomercial to see Wrestling On Fire live.
And we didn’t get to see Danny Maff and Vader team up! What a bunch of garbage!!!
