AS I SEE IT 5/11: ECW Arena

AS I SEE IT
Bob Magee
Pro Wrestling: Between the Sheets
PWBTS.com

Since so many of you seem to like remembering the real ECW days…remember now it’s been 16 years since that building opened, and read the column below.

This past Saturday, the ECW Arena was used for a wrestling doubleheader, with an afternoon MBA benefit show, then later the monthly CZW show. Ironically enough, CZW is approaching the length of time using the Arena that ECW was actually in the building…but it’ll always be the ECW Arena to a generation of us.

Enjoy…
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I was ready to go to that first ECW show at this new arena back on May 14, 1993, the date that Eddie Gilbert and Tod Gordon scheduled their first show of Eastern Championship Wrestling in a nondescript looking bingo hall, located in a section of Philadelphia that former Strictly ECW head Tony Lewis then described as “West Hell”.

But, first, a little pre-history.

What was then called Eastern Championship Wrestling started after Tod Gordon picked up the remains of Joel Goodhart’s Tri-State Wrestling Alliance in February 1992. The Tri-State Wrestling Alliance, best known for its classic series of Cactus Jack-Eddie Gilbert matches that permanently put hardcore wrestling on the map in Philadelphia, blew apart on the eve of Winter Challenge III, a show that would have been the promotion’s largest.

The show was scheduled on January 25, 1992; and would have featured matches including “Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers vs. “Nature Boy” Buddy Landel, Steve Williams/Terry Gordy vs. Dan Kroffat/Doug Furnas, Chris Benoit vs. Shiro Koshinaka, and Eddie Gilbert vs. Kevin Sullivan. Goodhart cancelled the show and ended his involvement in wrestling as a whole live on his WIP 610 radio show only days before the Winter Challenge III show would have taken place.

Gordon ran shows as Eastern Championship Wrestling promoter with the local talent from the former Tri-State roster, including The Sandman (who was then doing a surfer gimmick), JT Smith, Tony Stetson, Sal Bellomo, Larry Winters, Glenn Osbourne, and The Super Destroyers, along with names Jimmy Snuka and Don Muraco.
The fledging ECW ran its earliest shows at the Philadelphia’s Original Sports Bar (now the basement of a Ross Dress for Less), the Chestnut Cabaret (now a hip-hop, roots, reggae and soul club called Pegasus), the Tabor Rams Youth Association, and finally Cabrini College. A handful of Chestnut Cabaret shows were taped for airing on a local low-power TV station, but ECW was at that point just another independent. Most notable was the fact that the TV announcer for WWF Philadelphia Spectrum house shows (aired on local cable sports/movie station PRISM) Dick Graham did commentary.

Cabrini College, a Catholic school in suburban Philadelphia, was the site of the promotion’s first TV taping on March 1993 for a small part-time sports station called SportsChannel Philadelphia. 60 people gathered there at Cabrini College on the eve of a massive super-snowstorm that left as much as three and a half feet of snow all over the East Coast. Then Cabrini College kicked out ECW after two shows because the college decided they didn’t want wrestling. Mind you, not “extreme” wrestling…ECW was nothing remotely near that yet. But at that point, Cabrini College decided that they just plain didn’t want wrestling.

Back to May 14th, 1993…

I was told by friend and ECW employee Kathy Fitzpatrick that this new building was at Swanson and Ritner Streets. In those pre-internet days, I looked up the intersection on a SEPTA map in my office. According to that and another map I looked at, the intersection didn’t exist. But she insisted that was the place.

I found out years later that the members of the Viking Club Mummers group had paved over freight train tracks and created an unofficial extension of a street. Thus, the intersection did exist…sort of.

So on the afternoon of the show, after asking around the neighborhood, and finally checking at the local Forman Mills discount store, I asked where the Mummers practiced. The sales clerk pointed down the street. Finding the building, I went inside, and saw the Bingo equipment up on the walls. I went into a place that looked nothing like any wrestling venue I’d ever been to, and thought “What in the hell is this?” Even those of us used to shows in flea markets, bars, schools, and even parking lots thought…”a Bingo Hall?”

How little we knew.

We found out that this building was Viking Hall, the home of the South Philadelphia Viking Club, the neighborhood Mummers group that practiced there for the yearly Philadelphia New Years Mummers parade. We also found out that they did “Midnight Bingo” there to fund the group. This meant that in the promotion’s early years, they were supposed to be out of there in enough time to allow set-up for Midnight Bingo.
From May 14, 1993, until the promotion’s last Philadelphia show on December 23, 2000… ECW created unparalleled magic in one of the most improbable locations ever to hold wrestling on a regular basis… the building that became the world’s most famous Bingo Hall… the building that truly became the ECW Arena.

On May 14, 1993, we couldn’t ever have known what was to come.

If someone had told us that this fledging wrestling promotion owned by a center city pawnbroker would make a longtime home in this building… would eventually be seen nationwide on cable television… would go on PPV from this building in 1997… and would have wrestling fans around the world chanting “ECW… ECW… ECW”….to this very day…

If someone had told us that it would feature talent ranging from New Japan stars Eddie Guerrero, Dean
Malenko, Chris Jericho, and Chris Benoit to lucha stars Rey Misterio, Jr., Juventud Guerrera, La Parka, and Psicosis… to Four Horsemen and Midnight Express members Arn Anderson and Bobby Eaton… to All Japan stars Steve Williams, Terry Gordy, Dan Kroffat and Doug Furnas, and Gary Albright… to Japanese lucha style stars Great Sasuke, Gran Hamada, and TAKA Michinoku… to wrestling legends like Stan Hansen, Abdullah The Butcher, Jerry Lawler, Terry and Dory Funk, and Kevin Sullivan…

If someone had told us that it would see the creation of the most memorable new character of the last decade, a character called Raven… and that the company would change the direction of the professional wrestling industry… if someone had told us ALL these things would happen and more…

We would have looked at you, and told you that you were in need of serious psychiatric help.

All we Philly regulars knew was that ECW had a new home after Cabrini College decided they didn’t want wrestling in its gymnasium any longer, and that this was ECW’s new home. We knew it was at least near the widely known Tony Luke’s cheesesteak stand, so we’d at least have a good meal before the show.

We went in that May evening to see a promotion which would start its TV incarnation featuring Eddie Gilbert and a Memphis flavored product, eventually with an accent of Japanese hardcore.

What became regular faces in the front row and those Section C (TV side) bleachers were seen by fans first on SportsChannel Philadelphia, then on MSG Network, then slowly across the country via commercial tapes, and tapes traded by fans all over North America and beyond.

There were people like John Bailey (seemingly known everywhere as “Hat Guy”), his brother George, Mike Johnson (of PWinsider.com), “Sign Guy” Paul Mellows (from whom Paul Heyman took the Sign Guy Dudley gimmick), Lennie (the Rob Zombie lookalike), along with yours truly, and many others whose faces would unintentionally become familiar. What we all became a part of was history.

Here are some of those ECW Arena moments from my memory:

1993