This week's co-MEPs are Rob Van Dam and Sabu. Yeah, I know some WWE RAW fans are reading this and wondering why I am not awarding the extreme honors to DX. After all, Shawn Michaels and Triple H did make their first ECW appearance and took on ECW World Champion Big Show in a Handicap Match.
 
The fact is, the ghosts of Karl Gotch and George Hackenschmidt could have main evented ECW this past Tuesday night and not been able to top what ECW Originals, former ECW World Champions, former ECW TV Champions and former ECW Tag Team Champions, RVD and Sabu did to new Extremists, Mike Knox and Test to open the show.
 
If you new ECW fans have never seen the original ECW, the Extreme Rules table-smashing, chair-bashing beating that you witnessed was vintage ECW. Back then , we didn't call that type of match Extreme Rules...we just called it wrestling.
 
MEP special consideration goes to my long time friend Stevie Richards for getting his first pinfall victory in the new ECW over Balls Mahoney. Stevie's win was long overdue and I hope it is the first of many for a man who wrestled his ass off in the original ECW, then WCW, then ECW again, then WWE and now the new ECW. Many people thought that Stevie's career was over when he broke his neck about ten years ago in ECW but Stevie has gutted it out and continued to work hard in a business where ten years of continuous employment is a much overlooked accomplishment.
 
Fortunately, next week's ECW televised events are in New York City and Worcester, Massachusetts which means I have short, solitary drives from the Styles compound in very suburban Connecticut. It will be a short lived reprieve from driving with my broadcast colleague, Tazz who is lucky he made big bucks suplexing people on their skulls because he cannot read directions for all the money in the world.
 
Tazz...beat him if you can...survive the the drive if he let's you!