Tag: Ecw One Night Stand 2006

The second ECW One Night Stand was, more than anything else, a night the crowd made the show.

Crowds help and hurt shows every night. The first ECW One Night Stand was a great show, made legendary because of the crowd. The second was a show, that if it was held in Orlando and called TNA, people would have called it awful and complained about gutless booking of finishes. If it had been called WWE instead of ECW, people would be complaining about how bad the wrestling was. But it was ECW, very much the new ECW. The 2,460 fans at the Hammerstein Ballroom, after five years of mental anguish when their beloved promotion went out of business, and failing to get it revived last year when by all rights a lot more should have been done in the aftermath, were there to make sure the decision on its resurrection ended up nothing like the 2001 WWF decision to market WCW.

Going in, you knew all that. The show didn’t live up to last year’s model, but it was a completely different type of show. Last year was a stand-alone reunion. No matter what happened, it was noted the next night on Raw by Eric Bischoff, that “last night never happened,” and in storyline form, that is how it was handled.

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The Pride Fighting Championships, at least at the level we know them, may be no more.

With the belief the Yakuza involvement scandal was about to break with arrests, the Fuji TV Network, which bankrolled a substantial percentage of the events, announced at 5 p.m. on 6/5 it was canceling its contract with the promotion and that Pride would never air on the network again. The announcement came just one day after network cameras and production crews were at the Saitama Arena for the Bushido event. The event was taped and scheduled to be broadcast by Fuji on 6/10 in a late afternoon time slot, but will never air.

Dream Stage Entertainment, which receives millions from the network in rights fees, was blindsided by the news. The network sent out press releases to the Japanese media the day after the show simply stating that Pride had breached its contract. In actuality, the network made the decision secretly at the end of April, but since a major show was taking place on 5/5 at the Osaka Dome, the first round of the Open Weight Grand Prix, a prime time special that was expected to do big numbers (it did a 17.6 rating), they kept the decision from getting out.

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