It’s time for some “Wrestling Salvage Yard” and this time we’re looking at Sid Vicious and his ECW run.
Sid in ECW
After leaving WWE in late 1997 and taking the time for neck surgery, Vicious hit the indies. In the 90s, it wasn’t unusual to see recently released main eventers or big stars roaming the indies for a brief period. They had been on national TV and these big PPVs where everyone can easily watch them just a couple of months prior.
Now, they’re spanking your local heroes at your local high school or War Memorial Auditorium. Wrestling comes full circle the vast majority of the time.
By January 1999, he arrived in ECW and would engage in a few very brief matches against guys who were more in the middle of ECW’s card like Kronus as well as up-and-comer Justin Credible and hot tag team act the Dudley Boyz.
His booking presented him as someone who was never really scheduled to wrestle on the show but here was this super-impressive looking superstar demolishing opponents.
As mentioned before, the matches were all brief affairs and nothing was actually planned long-term for Sid Vicious.
By May 1999, he was gone and would re-debut with WCW at The Great American Bash the following month.
Salvaging Sid Vicious
Sid doesn’t need salvaging as he had a good career where he was positioned as World champion in the two biggest North American companies at the time more than once. However, sometimes the creative wasn’t the best. Given his career, ultimately that doesn’t matter since he ended up with four World titles.
In ECW, I felt that there was more that could’ve been done with Vicious. He was a special attraction and that worked but he would’ve been an interesting star to get the mix of things and shake up the routine of ECW shows a bit.
While he wasn’t ECW World champion material by the expectations of the fans and Paul E might have needed a couple of fail-safe matches to send fans home happy after his title matches, he could’ve easily held every belt in the company at the same time.
Star power and the ability to draw trump a lot.
A better way to use Sid would’ve been similar to Bam Bam Bigelow in ECW. Bam Bam won the World title and was positioned in a way where not only was it a possibility but when he won it, it made sense.
Like Bam Bam, Sid had some indy appeal—mostly in the south and mostly in Tennessee and Arkansas—but the appeal was there.
That indy appeal is pretty important when looking at ECW champions because many of them were never that big of a draw or had the excess star power to the point that we have a Roman Reigns situation where the challenge becomes finding someone who can beat the champion.
Now, that presents a problem with this approach for Sid because unless we’ve got someone like Mike Awesome or Bam Bam facing him, you’re looking at the precursor to Tommy Dreamer winning the belt because their top star was on their way to greener pastures.
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