Shane Douglas © vs Taz – ECW
ECW Heavyweight Championship Match
01/10/1999
In wrestling, it is often the chase that is more engaging than the catch itself. Find yourself a red hot babyface to go after a nefarious heel with the gold, and you often have yourself a recipe for success. However, there is also an argument about striking whilst the iron is hot; wait too long, and the fans just get sick of waiting. Striking the correct balance is not an exact science.
Taz’s almost yearlong chase for the ECW Heavyweight Championship arguably fell into the latter camp, though not through any real fault of his own. At the tail end of 1997, Shane Douglas had suffered a broken arm in a match involving Bam Bam Bigelow at the November to Remember PPV. This, alongside several illnesses, forced Douglas off television for long stretches of 1998, though Paul Heyman made the strange decision to keep the World title on him. Thus, the ECW faithful were left with a champion who wasn’t always able to defend his title.
To attempt to redress the balance, Taz introduced the FTW Title which, whilst unsanctioned, was defended by Taz as he bided his time for a shot against Douglas. When Douglas returned, the big clash continued to be delayed; it felt as if ECW wanted Douglas to be as close to one hundred percent as possible when eventually dropping the title to Taz, one of the only homegrown stars left. Therefore, an injured Douglas only defended the title once on PPV that year – a pedestrian encounter against Al Snow.
Finally, enough was enough. A still-visibly injured Shane Douglas (a case still on his arm, and not in a Bob Orton Jr. way) put the title on the line at Guilty as Charged. Considering the length of Douglas’ title reign, with limited amounts of title action in the process, the result felt like it was a foregone conclusion. Here was the chance to Taz to become a star, defeating the man who he had won his first ECW singles title from in 1997, the ECW Television title.
Joey Styles spends the opening minute espousing the quality of each man’s amateur background, and we do get some grappling and joint work to open the match. It was always going to be a matter of when, rather than if, the match degenerated into a fight, and Douglas cracking Taz with two punches in the corner certainly cut short any attempt to keep this technical. For his troubles, he got dumped hard with a head-and-arm Tazplex shortly afterwards.
With the storyline animosity between the two wrestlers, and the physical debilitation of the champion, there was always going to be shortcuts to try and turn this match into an epic. The usual big match ECW staples get wheeled out, as both men brawl their way through the crowd, Douglas gets busted open and waffles Taz with a chair all within the first ten minutes.
Having spent a large portion of the match walking and punching each other through the crowd, a lot of the action happens in the final five minutes in-ring. In an ideal world, Taz would have made Douglas tap out and prove that he was the better man all along. However, it wouldn’t be ECW without the dog and pony show that follows almost all of their marquee matches.
Two tables have already been destroyed, one apiece, when fireworks go off and Sabu hits the ring to get his revenge on both wrestlers for seemingly conspiring to injure him. This builds to the only real nearfall in the match, as a splash off of the top rope through a table almost allows Douglas to steal the victory. Tammy Lynn Sytch, Chris Candido and Francine will all then get involved, leading to Candido punching Douglas in the face. A clearly distraught Franchise ends up watching Candido leave, vulnerable to a resurgent Taz who slaps on the Tazmission. After a brief struggle, Douglas is out. Notably, he doesn’t tap; three drops of the arm is enough to give Taz the ECW World Heavyweight Title.
Even though the long term booking made limited sense, even though the match wasn’t the best, and even though the clusterfuck finish, it truly did feel like something important had when the arm dropped for the third time. With Douglas finally dethroned, Taz had ascended to what many felt was his rightful position in the promotion, and was left to shoulder the burden of leading the company into the New Year. His title reign would only end when the WWE came calling nine months later.
