Raven, Richards, and the Pitbulls Take a Long Walk for the Sake of a 911 Chokeslam

Dudes will see Bill Alfonso eat shit and go "hell yeah."

ECW

Double dog collar? More like double dogshit, am I right or am I right?

I’m just playing, y’all: this two out of three falls double dog collar match for the ECW World Tag Team Championships is, for good and for ill, peak ECW, and I love and hate it in equal measure for that reason. In its proper context, with the 10-20 storylines that run through this match from Raven vs. Tommy Dreamer to Bill Alfonso vs. fun in mind, this is ECW’s magnum opus: a fun, sloppy thrillride with the full buy-in of ECW’s molten-hot audience, the sort of thing you remember fondly if you were there in the moment or its DVD afterglow.

It ends in triumph for the Pitbulls, but boy does it take its sweet time getting there. You see, Raven and Stevie Richards, the defending ECW Tag Team Champions, have agreed to a double dog collar match with two guys who are dogs. Not smart! Stevie is a coward, so he’s pretending to have a broken arm, presumably so he can scam up a tougher tag partner for his boss, but nobody takes him up on it. Pleading to the unfairness of it all, Raven’s girlfriend Beulah asks that the match be made two out of three falls, which the Pitbulls agree to, wanting to punish Raven even more en route to victory. With Raven hooked up to Pitbull 2, Pitbull 1 goes backstage and finds Stevie, busting him open, but his fiddlefucking around with Richards on the outside allows Raven to piledrive Pitbull 2 through a table and pick up the first fall. 

All of this would be fine, but ECW is an intelligent product for intelligent wrestling fans, and its hyper-intelligent announcer Joey Styles wants to gloat about how foolish the two out of three falls plot was, as Raven would have simply won the match and kept the titles without it. He’s right, but this opens up a galaxy-sized hole in the logic of the match, through which the various goons of ECW soon pour through as if the final battle of Avengers: Endgame took place on the corner of Swanson and Ritner.

Why does Pitbull 1 go to the back to beat up Stevie Richards when the big bad of ECW is helpless in front of him? Does Raven’s plan necessitate that ruse? If so, then yeah, why would he ask for a two out of three falls match? The answer to all of these questions is “shut up, you fucking dork; we’re on a journey here.” And what a journey it is! A gnarly superbomb Stevie Richards takes on his assbone ties things up 1-1 between the champs and the Pitbulls, all within five minutes.

From there, here’s what happens: crowd brawling; a referee bump; interference from Dances With Dudley and Dudley Dudley; the Pitbulls doing Road Warrior no-sells of a pair of superbombs; a superbomb that sees Raven hit the back of his head against the side of a table’ a near-fall due to the ref bump; Raven using ether to put Pitbull 2 through a pair of stacked tables so he can get free by taking off Pitbull 2’s collar; Beulah getting into the ring to watch Damage Control take Pitbull 2 to the back; Francine (Stevie’s ex-girlfriend) attacking her; Raven DDTing Francine; Tommy Dreamer coming out to attack Raven, putting the dog collar on, DDTing him, and winning the ECW Tag Team Titles with Pitbull 1; Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission referee Bill Alfonso spoiling the fun by invalidating the result due to a) his not approving the two out of three falls stipulation and b) Tommy Dreamer not being in the match, stealing Tommy’s dream of beating Raven (which he was right to do); Big Dick Dudley getting in the ring on crutches to protect Bill Alfonso; Extreme Commissioner Tod Gordon asserting that it’s his authority that matters, thus restarting the match; Alfonso shoving Gordon; Big Dick Dudley chokeslamming Tommy Dreamer; Bill Alfonso declaring that the banned chokeslam is legal for the night (unnecessarily, as neither Dreamer nor Big Dick are in the match, but one can hardly blame him for losing sight of things in his excitement for Dreamer’s demise); NINE ONE FUCKIN’ ONE HITTING THE RING TO A STEVE AUSTIN POP AND CHOKESLAMMING A PROTESTING ALFONSO TO AN EVEN LOUDER ROAR; Tommy Dreamer hugging 911 while Pitbull 1 gives him the Predator handshake; Pitbull 2 returning to the ring so that Tommy doesn’t steal his shine, A DOUBLE SUPERBOMB; new champions; big celebration.

What’s with the verbatim description? Well, friend, anything less would be a disservice to what happened in the ECW Arena on September 16, 1995. It is a big, dumb, stupid occasion, but it’s also a finely-tuned piece of clockwork that relies on an extremely minute detail — Raven taking off Pitbull 2’s dog collar and leaving his on — to grant the crowd their long-awaited Tommy Dreamer victory over Raven. The double Dusty Finish takes that away from Dreamer but still gives The Pitbulls their moment — look at Gary Wolfe trying to fight back tears at the end of this match and tell me this shit wasn’t real to him. That’s the magic of ECW, baby.

Also the magic of ECW? How fucking badly its fans want to see Bill Alfonso get chokeslammed by 911. Against the prevailing logic of the ECW faithful being a gang of pretentious snobs, one of their most over acts was a dude who could really only hit a chokeslam. His hitting Bill Alfonso with one after the move had been banned to protect ECW’s heels being the big pop despite the seeming payoff to the Dreamer/Raven melodrama? Chokeslams over cinema? That’s what you love to see. That’s grist for my particular mill.

Rating: *** & 1/2