Most Extreme Player for 11/30/06

In what may come as a surprise to many ECW fans, this week's MEP is...Paul Heyman. Regardless of what Heyman has done to RVD and the rest of the ECW Originals who helped make the ECW that Heyman now takes credit for, it was Heyman who devised the Extreme Elimination Chamber for this Sunday.

For years WWE "borrowed" concepts from the original ECW in order to make their brand of sports-entertainment edgier and, in a word, extreme. There is no doubt in my mind that WWE's creation of the Elimination Chamber was an attempt to capture the audience created by ECW; an audience that wanted to see scores settled in a more malicious fashion than could be provided by a steel cage, or even Hell in the Cell.

Once ECW became part of the WWE corporate family of brands, ECW's mad scientist Paul Heyman started plotting to make the new ECW more extreme than WWE's Raw and SmackDown which, in many ways, had become like the original ECW.

In one fell swoop, Heyman returned the favor of WWE "borrowing" his ECW concepts for years by "borrowing" WWE's Elimination Chamber and then rendering the original Elimination Chamber obsolete by locking weapons such as a barbed wire baseball bat in the 10-ton structure with six extreme athletes.

At ECW's December to Dismember, ECW will once again take its rightful position as the cutting edge innovator in wrestling and as much as it pains me to admit it, the man responsible is the Father of ECW, Paul Heyman.

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