WCW Fall Brawl 1998

During the height of the Monday Night War there was a Wild West feel to professional wrestling that is hard to fully explain to anybody who wasn’t watching at the time. Each week in 1998 in particular, both WWE and WCW were pushing themselves further, crossing new boundaries and in general, doing anything they could to gain an advantage in the ratings battle that would define the era. In order to stem the flow of WCW’s runaway success at the beginning of the year, WWE had brought in Mike Tyson, at an extremely high price, to help solidify Steve Austin as the next major crossover star in the sport. In response, WCW had split the epoch making NWO into two separate, warring factions and created myriad new possibilities for future matches and rivalries. WWE in turn had broken new ground in violence with the infamous Hell in a Cell match between Undertaker and Mankind at King of the Ring 1998, while WCW had happened upon Bill Goldberg and ran with this new surprise mega star by putting the World Title on him despite legitimate questions existing as to his suitability for the role, having debuted less than 12 months before that faithful night in the Georgia Dome.

ECW Anarchy Rulz 1999

What is the legacy of Extreme Championship Wrestling? Is it of a company that changed the face of professional wrestling, dragging it, kicking and screaming, into a new millennium? Or is it the temporarily hot, but always bound to fail bastard child of the industry, that left a trail of broken bodies and minds in its destructive wake? Is it possible that the truth is that both of these answers is in fact correct, and that far from being a force either completely for good, or completely for evil, that ECW sits somewhere in between like only a truly innovating force possibly can? One thing is for sure however, that by the time Anarchy Rulz 1999 rolled around in September of that year, both WWE and WCW had already raided the promotion of not only its talent but also its ideas. Despite being a leader of change and revolutionary movement during the mid 1990s (when most consider the company to have been at its creative peak) by the end of the decade, ECW were struggling to stand out from a content perspective, and had already been massively disadvantaged from an exposure standpoint.