WWE's taping Friday night SmackDown tonight at the Sprint Center with Edge slated to wrestle Batista, and expect to see Chris Jericho (although he has a few legal issues to iron out ... or not), The Undertaker and Rey Mysterio in the final show before Sunday's Elimination Chamber pay-per-view.
But the footnote (and historic portion) of the evening will be WWE finally putting a bullet in the zombie of Extreme Championship Wrestling. Not the hard-core, Philadelphia-based ECW that featured great wrestling, adult stories, Terry Funk wrapped barbed wire, Raven crucifying the Sandman, and the five-star frog splashes of Rob Van Dam.
That ECW died in 2001 when owner Paul Heyman filed for bankruptcy (maybe even before).
The ECW that dies tonight is the WWE version of ECW resurrected following an awesome 2005 pay-per-view event called "One Night Stand" and then sanitized and bastardized for dollars Tuesday nights on SyFy.
ECW
never connected. It wasn't the cutting edge, rebellious, underdog,
underground promotion of the '90s. This was a shell of the original
ECW and finally, mercifully it all ends tonight with a final hard-core ECW championship match
between champion Christian and Ezekiel Jackson and a Unified Tag Team Championship match with the Big Show and The Miz defending against Yoshi Tatsu and Goldust. Let's just say the final ECW isn't shaping up to be a memorable show.
Next week, WWE launches a new show called NXT in which experienced wrestlers will mentor up and comers who will either flame out or graduate to Monday Night Raw and SmackDown.
Check back tomorrow for spoilers from the show.
