June 19, 2006 Observer Newsletter: ECW One Night Stand, Pride

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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