I am possibly going to catch some serious grief for this edition of the column from my friends in the pro wrestling business, but the thoughts I share in it are not only my thoughts, but the thoughts of many fans of both SciFi Channel and pro wrestling for more than a year now.  We've all thought this privately, but it is time to speak out and call for action.

Before I say anything, I want it clearly known that not only am I a major science fiction fan, but have also been a fan of professional wrestling for as long as I can remember.  My memories of wrestling goes back to the old territorial days when the Tennessee area was promoted by a fellow named Nick Gulas and his partner Roy Welch, as part of the old National Wrestling Alliance (NWA).  Every Saturday afternoon, you'd find me sitting on the floor, watching Jackie Fargo and his brothers, Don and Roughhouse, the Fabulous Fargos, Len Rossi, Tojo Yamamoto, Prof. Taru Tanaka, and a young kid starting out named Jerry Jarrett.  I also worked for a small professional wresting promotion for about a year and a half as a manager, and thus have seen the pro wrestling business from the inside.  So, as you read this column, please take into account that this is not the ranting of a super geek scifi fan, but someone with a genuine love and appreciation for pro wresting who also happens to be an uber geek scifi fan.

A couple of years ago, World Wrestling Entertainment announced that they were bringing a new show to the SciFi Channel, called ECW.  This excited a lot of wrestling fans who remembered the famous (or infamous, depending on how you looked at it) promotion called Extreme Championship Wrestling, from it's run in in the Northeastern United States from 1992 to 2001 when it closed it's doors.   Everyone, including myself, were excited that the promotion was coming back.  I, for one, hoped that it was coming back with its famous leader, Paul Heyman, back at the helm, but with WWE overseeing the costs where it could be successful as a subsidiary of WWE.  How disappointed we all have been.

The product started with a pay per view called One Night Stand which was similar to the old ECW, but not quite.  A couple of nights later, the weekly series started on, of all places, the SciFi Channel.  Now, we all know that pro wrestling is sports entertainment and that the results are planned, but airing it on the channel dedicated to science fiction, dedicated on the night it launched to the memory of Gene Roddenberry and Issac Asimov?  Now, as a scifi fan, this bugged me as wrestling and scifi just doesn't mix, but the wrestling fan in me hoped that at least they would do some things to help it fit. At first they did just a little bit, in the form of wrestler Kevin Fertig who wrestled on ECW as a vampire wrestler named Kevin Thorn.  But that was all.

As the past two years have progressed, the product has more and more ceased being ECW and has become just another hour of Smackdown (one of the other two WWE brands of wrestling, the third one is called Raw) as more and more the lines between the two have been absolutely blurred.  It is no longer what it was promoted to be, but has become the same old same old.  I guess we should have all known this would happen, especially when Paul Heyman left in December of 2006.  In an interview with the British newspaper The Sun, Heyman states that he now believes ECW should have never been brought back at all.  (The interview appears at The Sun's website at  http://thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/sport/wrestling/heyman/article762131.ece )  I must confess, in hindsight, that he is right.  It is very apparent that no one can properly run such a unique promotion and concept but the man who created it in the image he envisioned for it.

Folks, ECW is over, period.  It doesn't matter what Vince McMahon or anyone in the WWE tries to do to revive it, without Paul Heyman at the helm, it is NOT ECW, but the same old (and sadly sometimes boring) thing.  SciFi Channel pays for the show, but it is not scifi and it is NOT ECW.  It is time for either the WWE to wake up and smell the coffee and end this farce, or for the SciFi Channel to have mercy on wrestling fans and scifi fans alike and finally pull it plug.  As a viewer of the SciFi Channel, I think it is time to return that hour every week to programming that the channel was created for.  As a wrestling fan, I think this inferior replica of the original has gone on long enough and needs to end.  

Please, someone pull the ECW plug and let the memory of that unique and groundbreaking promotion rest in peace.  It and the men who made it the legend it will always be with wrestling fans deserve better than this.

Think about it.

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