BRM Reviews ECW It Ain't Seinfeld

[Big Red Machine]

ECW It Ain’t Seinfeld (5/14/1998)- Queens, NY

JERRY LYNN vs. JUSTIN CREDIBLE (w/Jason & Chastity)- 7/10
An awesome opener which the already hot crowd fed off of to create an amazing atmosphere.

DANNY DORING vs. SABU (w/Bill Alfonso)- Uncomfortable squash
Sabu murderizes Doring, but not in the dominant monster way. In the “I’m going to hit your helpess body with vicious moves” way. This felt actually felt kind of uncomfortable to watch.

JAMIE DUNDEE PROMO- F*CKING AWESOME!
Dundee just cut a promo ripping on various members of the crowd (“you’re so fat you went to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet and got a group discount,” “I’d tell you a joke that would knock your titties off… but I see you already heard it).” He ended the promo with some extremely rude comments about Francine, then saying “I’m gonna prove to all of you Yankee b*tches that the South will rise again!” FAN-F*CKING-TASTIC!

JAMIE DUNDEE vs. CHRIS CANDIDO (w/Francine)- 5/10

SUPER NOVA & THE BLUE MEANIE vs. THE FBI (w/”The Don” Tommy Rich)- 4.25/10
The FBI shoved the referee, so he beat them up. Judge Jeff Jones got involved but wound up eating a DDT from referee John Finnegan.

BALLS MAHONEY vs. LANCE STORM- 6.75/10
They went for some mat wrestling in the beginning, but the crowd crapped on it, so they just did the same style everyone else had been doing all night. This was very good until the last minute or so. Lance hit balls in the head with an unprotected chair shot, which Balls totally no-sold. Lance then wound up on the top rope and went to missile dropkick the chair that Balls was holding into Balls’ head for the finish, but the camera angle made it clear that the chair did not have any contact with Balls in any way.

TAZ INTRODUCES A NEW TITLE BELT- Halfway through the show, Joey Styles finally decides to welcome us to ECW. He starts to say something but is interrupted by Taz. Taz says that because he beat up and injured ECW World Heavyweight Champion Shane Douglas, he deserves to be the ECW World Heavyweight Champion… and as such, he has made up his own championship belt so he will no longer be the “uncrowned” champion. Taz tells us “you can call this Brooklyn World Belt, the F*ck the World Heavyweight Title, you can call it anything you want.”
Anything I want, you say? Well then, allow me to introduce Taz, the first ever ECW Chilean National Midgets-only Alpaca Wrangling Champion!
Taz challenges Shane Douglas for Title vs. Title match, but Bam Bam Bigelow comes out instead. Bam Bam says that the only way Taz is going to get to Douglas is through him. They then had a short brawl which took all of the referees and several very large men from Atlas Security to break up. Completely awesome segment.

ECW TV TITLE MATCH: Rob Van Dam(c) (w/Bill Alfonso) vs. Mikey Whipwreck- 6.5/10
Lots of good hardcore stuff here, with Fonzie getting involved a lot, too. RVD was a showboat and even stole a few of Sabu’s moves throughout the match. RVD set up to hit a triple-jump move to put Mikey through a table in the same place Sabu had done to Doring earlier but Sabu came out and stopped him, then put Mikey through the table himself. This led to RVD and Sabu fighting. Candido came out to help Sabu and then Lance Storm came out to help RVD, and the locker room emptied out to break up the fight. This was good build for their tag team match in days at A Matter of Respect II, but it sucks that it robbed a title match of any sort of finish at all.

BAM BAM BIGELOW vs. AXL ROTTEN- DUD!
Axl went for a chair shot, Bam Bam ducked, then hit Greetings From Asbury Park. That was the whole match.

PRE-MATCH DUDLEYS PROMO- Standard Dudleys stuff inviting the fans to fight them that, for a viewer at home, drags on for WAY too long. It got a great reaction from the live crowd, as usual. Maybe too good a reaction, though, as the fans littered the ring with trash before the main event had even stared. This is the show where the Dudleys infamously managed to goad a fan into jumping down from the balcony to get into the ring to fight them.

Then the babyfaces finally come out, and because they are hanging around with Sandman, their entrance takes forever and there is beer involved. At one point Tommy did the spot where he pours beer onto Beulah’s rack… but rather than drink it himself, he invites Spike Dudley to do so. After this happened, Tommy pantomimed masturbating, so I guess Tommy likes to watch Beulah bang other dudes. This puts the origins of the Raven vs. Dreamer feud in a whole new perspective. Tommy didn’t turn Beulah down at summer camp because she was fat. He turned Beulah down so that she would go have sex with Raven instead so Tommy could hide and watch.

THE DUDLEYS (w/Sign Guy Dudley & Joel Gertner) vs. THE SANDMAN, SPIKE DUDLEY, & TOMMY DREAMER (w/Beulah McGillicutty)- 1/10
Darn. Well here I was thinking this match was actually going to start, but instead they trade some verbal jabs back and forth. Bubba says that “Spike Dudley had one beer, and now he thinks that Beulah is good looking.” This is good heel stuff because it implies that Spike is a lightweight and that Beulah is ugly. Beulah responds by saying “Hey Bubba, I had one beer, and now I think you’re thin.” This was not a good babyface line because, in the “extreme” adult-oriented promotion, Beulah has admitted to being such a lightweight that just one beer makes her so drunk that she thinks Bubba Ray Dudley is thin.
We then spent TWO AND A HALF MINUTES with both teams at their corners with Tommy and Devon in the ring as the legal men doing nothing but either standing still or circling each other before they finally locked up. This was almost SEVENTEEN MINUTES after the first team came out. I had completely stopped caring at this point. I just wanted them to get on with it.
After this one lock up, Sandman grabbed a mic and cracked a fat joke at Bubba, then we got another minute and a half of nothing before the “action” started. At this point they were starting to get some well-deserved “BORING!” chants. The action consisted of another lock up, a knee by Devon and trading rollups. Then Devon made a tag to Bubba, after which Tommy spent another minute or so deciding whether or not to tag in Spike. At this point I actually shouted “OH MY F*CKING GOD JUST DO SOMETHING!” at my TV.
Spike and Bubba did some very good big-man little-man stuff, with Spike never backing down from his much larger and stronger opponent, and eventually gathering enough momentum to finally knock Bubba down once or twice. Bubba then tagged out to the even bigger Big Dick Dudley. Spike, who last year had earned the nickname “giant-killer,” and who had just not only bravely fought against, but even had gained the momentum against Bubba Ray… fled in fear of Big Dick and tagged in Sandman instead.
Sandman, completely unprovoked, attacks Bubba and Devon, who are standing on the apron. Bubba Ray Dudley was so angry about being cheap-shotted and knocked off the apron that he walked around a bit and casually drank a beer.
Sandman and Big Dick got some good action in before things started to break down into an all-out brawl on the outside. That, too, was pretty good. Apparently this is a Lucha Rules match because the ref just counted pinfalls for whatever pairing happened to be in the ring at the time. The babyfaces Beulah got Bubba, Devon, Big Dick, and Sign Guy all in the tree of woe and gave them all dropkicks with the chair.
Gertner then got in the ring and challenged Beulah to fight him (doing a hilarious Flair impersonation, too). They lock up and Gertner forces a kiss on Beulah. Beulah’s boyfriend, Tommy Dreamer, does nothing about this, giving further credence to my theory that he likes to watch. Beulah takes care of Gertner with a low blow and a DDT, and only then, once Gertner has already been taken down by a 115 pound woman, do Tommy and Sandman attack him. Some babyfaces they are.
The heels save Gertner and Big Dick pins Spike with the Total Penetration. Then, AFTER THE MATCH IS OVER AND THE HEELS HAVE WON, they actually get some good heat on the babyfaces (stuff like hitting Sandman with his own Singapore cane), until New Jack makes the save. At one point New Jack completely no-sold a low blow with a weapon by Bubba. After all of the other heels were down, Gertner, who must have a death wish, gets into the ring to challenge New Jack. Now, if you’ll remember, New Jack has just beaten up the Dudleys more or less by himself. When Joel Gertner, an unathletic ring announcer who has already eaten a low blow and a DDT so far in this match, gets in the ring to face New Jack, Sandman grabs Gertner and restrains him so that he can’t prevent New Jack but hitting him with a guitar.

There was some good action at points here, but aside from the stuff with Bubba and Spike in the very beginning, the psychology here was just atrocious. Combine that with how boring the pre-match stuff and the very beginning of the match was, and you have a horrible main event.

This started out seeming like it would be a great show from ECW, but it completely fell off a cliff towards the end, with an especially disappointing end to the show... which is certainly poetic, as this show was named "It Ain't Seinfeld" because it happened on the same night as series finale of Seinfeld, and like Seinfeld, it started off decently well but was very disappointing at the end.