Watched most of the PPV the last couple of days, and it wasn’t ECW’s best effort.

Mikey Whipwreck vs. Justin Credible was poor, and while they tried hard, it wasn’t enough to make the match anything other than sub-par. You had the usual run-in interference that plagued a lot of ECW matches, unnecessarily most of the time, with Jason hitting the ring and the referee just going along with it, which was an ongoing theme of the whole night.

Taz vs. Pitbull #2 was a squash to write out the Pitbulls as major players due to legal trouble they had gotten into earlier that year. They’d run their course as well and weren’t of any real value anyway, so it was no great loss. They were put with Lance Wright, he of Hype Central ‘fame’, with Lance doing a gimmick where he’d been sent to ECW at the command of Vince McMahon, and to this end, after the match, Brakkus showed up to face off with Taz, and the result saw Taz choke out a security guy who was keeping them apart. Paul Heyman was on color for this match, and screamed for the production guys to play anything they had at hand when the guard got choked out, trying to treat the incident as a shoot.

Tommy Dreamer vs. Rob Van Dam was a reasonably entertaining highspot match with both guys working hard and bumping hard. You had the interference as usual, but at least it made some sort of storyline sense, with run-ins from Sabu, Dan Kroffat and Doug Furnas, playing on the WWF vs. ECW theme, as well as the surprise return of Stevie Richards, who superkicked Dreamer. The match ended apparently in a no-contest, and with Van Dam, Kroffat and Furnas and Richards parading around a WWF banner. This saw Sandman show up and his match with Sabu followed.

Sandman and Sabu was a Tables and Ladders match, and has gained almost cult like status for being incredibly bad with an almost non-stop procession of botched spots. I can tell you right now that the match is nowhere near as bad as people have claimed over the years. I remember Dave Meltzer gave it -*** which I thought was grossly unfair back then and I think is just as unfair now. Don’t get me wrong, the match isn’t that good, and there are some badly blown spots, but it’s still above, just, the DUD zone, and far from the worst brawl you’ll see. It’s not the best brawl you’ll see either, but there are plenty worse out there. The match does go on a little too long, and would have done even had everything gone to plan, and the finish saw Sabu use a ladder for an Arabian press to get the pin.

The main event was Shane Douglas vs. Bam Bam Bigelow in a low rent version of Ric Flair vs. Vader from Starrcade ’93. The booking going into this match was all over the place. Douglas and Bigelow were top heels in the Triple Threat stable and the storyline at the time had Rick Rude, who was aligned with the Triple Threat, brining in outside names for Douglas to defend the ECW World title against, because Douglas wanted Rude to find the best international talent for Douglas to test his skills against. At a TV taping in New York, Rude reveals that Douglas’s opponent is Bigelow, turning both Bigelow and Rude instant babyface, and Bigelow pins Douglas for the ECW World title. However, with N2R taking place in Pittsburgh, which is the home state of Douglas, the big storyline of the PPV sees Douglas, a top heel, having to be a one night top babyface to play the hometown hero, while Bigelow, now a top babyface, having to be a one night top heel.

The match itself wasn’t very good and Bigelow, who was pretty good in Japan, looked terrible here. Bigelow, playing the Vader role, controlled most of the match and it was painful to watch because he didn’t do much for the first 10 minutes other than punch, kick or headbutt Douglas around. Things sort of picked up as the match wore on, and there were some decent spots somewhere in all the mess, but the match wasn’t even a house show quality main event let alone a PPV quality main event, and if Douglas or Bigelow were looking to show they were better, or even as good as, Flair and Vader, then to say they failed miserably would be an understatement. Had N2R been somewhere else and they just wrestled a normal match, with no hometown hero storyline, then it might have been decent. Instead, we got a 25 minute match that felt like 45 minutes and just never went anywhere.