Barely Legal Is Barely Legal Today

They were misfits, but they came together for a memorable show 18 years ago today
Photo Credit: WWE.com

On this day, 18 years ago, Extreme Championship Wrestling presented its first pay-per-view event, Barely Legal. Personally, it was a big deal for me that ECW, my favorite promotion at the time, was getting to be on PPV because it meant it had arrived as a national promotion. It could be seen all over the country. I wasn't able to watch it live, but I still consider it a seminal moment in my wrestling fandom, because hey, now people had to take this thing I loved seriously.

The top two angles on the card exemplified everything that was right with the company in its mission statement. The only wrestler on the show who ever made it to the main event in any other major national company was Terry Funk, a man who by this time was considered to be ancient. However, fans in arenas across ECW's footprint loved him, and he was still as spry and gutsy as he was ten, even 20 years prior. Everyone else was a misfit, but in ECW, they rode the wave and were able to dazzle crowds despite being too short, too sloppy, or too skinny.

Taz was shorter than the average WWE female competitor, but he was built as a wrecking ball. Sabu wore Hammer pants and flubbed every other move, but the hype machine made him seem an indestructible acrobat. Stevie Richards made CM Punk look like Triple H. Sandman wrestled in a t-shirt and Zubaz pants. Raven looked like he smelled. But they all were good at something, and Paul Heyman did what should have been common sense to most bookers but is an anomaly in the history of American wrestling. He played to strengths.

And while the show wasn't ECW's best in-ring offering (outside of a massively outrageously excellent six-man tag featuring the stars of Michinoku Pro), it was still a watershed moment. The promotion would hold several more pay-per-view events until its demise in 2001. Of course, Heyman, though a mixture of mistakes pushing the wrong people (hello Justin Credible!) and some questionable dealings with the books, set his company on a course to failure ultimately, but even if Barely Legal didn't set the stage for national prominence for a prolonged time, the two or three years it did set the table for were still pretty special.