Classic Review: ECW Living Dangerously 1999

It’s time for a CLASSIC! You voted, this is what you voted to read about. Well maybe you didn’t. Maybe YOU voted for something else! But enough people voted for this.

This was the first ECW pay-per-view I got to see live; I was a big fan of the company starting from ‘97 when I first got access to the weekly show on PASS Sports in Michigan, and it was a cool experience to finally get to see what I’d see on the highlights, you know, actually happening.

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• From March 21, 1999, at the Asbury Park Convention Hall in scenic Asbury Park, New Jersey! Just under 4,000 in the building, supposedly!

• We open our broadcast seaside outside the venue, where interviewer Steven Prazak awaits the arrival of ECW champion Taz, who faces famed rival Sabu tonight in a “unification” match, as Sabu holds the fake FTW title. Taz says ECW has been trying to hide the fact that he “busted Sabu’s jaw” in North Carolina about a month prior, and then he says “jaw” about 17 times to tell us what he’ll be attacking later tonight. Taz wonders what other champions out there could beat him, and decides none could. He takes, in ECW tradition, a particular shot at Ric Flair, a “50-year-old man,” while also naming Steve Austin, “Maivia,” Mankind, and Hulk Hogan. Beat him if you can, etc.

• We’ve got one man calling the action, and that man is Joey Styles, who kicks us off in the ring. In typical ECW style, he makes reference to a recent event, as he says “there are no paid off judges at ringside, there are no predetermined draws” — well — and “most importantly, Don King has been barred from the building!” This is all in reference to the March 13 fight between Lennox Lewis and Evander Holyfield, which King co-promoted at Madison Square Garden. Take that, Don King!

Yoshihiro Tajiri vs Super Crazy

These two had a show-stealer match at January’s Guilty As Charged and this is the rematch from that show. Well, it’s thought of that way sometimes, but in reality they had wrestled each other literally 15 times in ECW between GAC and Living Dangerously. Crazy is using V-MEN’s “Blue Roads” and Tajiri has been assigned The Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up.”

Joey Styles tells us that “quite simply,” the winner of this match “wins their feud.” The two would wrestle each other, one-on-one, another 15 times in ECW alone into the dying days of the company — including the final ECW show ever in Pine Bluff, Ark. — and 26 more times overall to date.¹ Entering this match, Tajiri leads their one-on-one series, 10-7 (they had two matches prior to Guilty As Charged.)²

Tajiri is still in the white-and-blue with the Japanese flag on the trunks, a lovely young competitor who has yet to go weird. They’ve really got quite a stalemate, feeling-out routine put together at this point for the early stages, as they work in the ECW tradition of the Malenko-Guerrero series for the time being.