ECW June 17: Looney Tunes and Good Wrestling

ECW Results and Highlights

Hornswaggle def. Armando Estrada
Evan Bourne def. Matt Stryker
Kofi Kingston vs. Mike Knox ended when Shelton Benjamin enters ring
CM Punk def. Morrison

I don’t know why ECW gets a bad rap. This week’s show once again trumped Monday Night RAW in terms of excitement and good wrestling. Heck, it fit the same number of matches into one hour than last night’s show fit into two. FYI, I’m not counting RAW’s 12 second tag team bout as a match. It’s interesting what you can do when you’re not spending the entire show dialing a phone and giving away money.

The Hornswaggle vs. Armando Estrada match featured hilarious Looney Toons-like sequences with Estrada playing the perplexed Sylvester/Coyote/Elmer Fudd to Hornswaggle’s Tweety Bird/Roadrunner/Bugs Bunny. Hornswaggle dropped marbles, he shot super soakers, he broke cigars, and was always just out of reach from his frustrated pursuer.

Evan Bourne is lots of fun to watch with his Back flips and high flying action. Mike Knox rudely entered the ring after Bourne easily defeated Matt Stryker and put a beat down on the much smaller man. We hope Knox’s actions don’t prove a metaphor for Bourne and his life in the WWE.

The slightly larger and just as acrobatic Kofi Kingston handled Knox well and was about to pin him before Shelton Benjamin entered the ring and scrapped with his hated rival. We’d love to see both Shelton and Kingston drafted up and out of ECW on Monday. They would inject some life into RAW or SmackDown.

The night’s coup de grace was the ten-minute-plus highly technical match between CM Punk and John Morrison. These two have had a long ECW history and they clearly know each other well but this match didn’t have the feel of a tired retread (like Cena and JBL). It was terrific to watch a professionally executed extended match that wasn’t broken up by commercials and wasn’t stopped early by ring interference.

The night ended with the three ECW behemoths Kane, Big Show, and Mark Henry yelling at each other and talking tough. I had almost forgotten that Kane could talk. Even their stupid pose-prominent confrontation couldn’t spoil another great ECW episode.

Photo Source: Newscom.com