Extreme Championship Wrestling
Extreme Championship Wrestling began as Eastern Championship Wrestling and was founded in 1992 by Tod Gordon, a jeweler in Philadelphia. ECW was a member of the National Wrestling Alliance. His booking partner at the time was Eddie Gilbert and the company was built around veteran stars like Gilbert, Jimmy Snuka, Don Muraco, and Tito Santana. After a falling out between Gordon and Gilbert, Paul Heyman was brought in as head booker. Heyman, who had achieved success as manager Paul E. Dangerously in AWA, WCW, and ECW, took over and made many changes. The first change was removing the company from the NWA. When ECW Heavyweight Champion Shane Douglas won the NWA World Heavyweight Title in a tournament in August 1994, he immediately threw down the NWA title saying it was worthless and claimed the ECW title was now a world title. The company's name was then changed to Extreme Championship Wrestling and the phenomenon was underway. ECW now boasted veteran stars like Shane Douglas and Terry Funk, but they also made stars out of wrestlers that WWF and WCW had cast aside like Raven, Sabu, Cactus Jack, Bam Bam Bigelow, and countless others. ECW was also the first wrestling federation in the United States to showcase luchadores such as Rey Mysterio Jr., Psychosis, Super Crazy and many others, as well as the first federation to showcase the wrestling ability of Eddie Guerrero and Dean Malenko. ECW also became the breeding ground of such future stars like Taz, The Dudley Boyz, and Tommy Dreamer. After many defections of talent to WCW and WWF, the fed also began having problems financially. Even pay-per-view and a television contract with The Nashville Network could not save ECW. The company declared bankruptcy in April 2001. World Wrestling Entertainment purchased the tape library, the name ECW, and several of their character gimmicks. In June 2005, WWE ran an ECW pay-per-view entitled "One Night Stand" and followed that up in June 2006 as well. Building on that success, WWE relaunched ECW as a 3rd brand on June 13, 2006 on the SciFi network, later renamed SyFy. WWE closed ECW as one of their brands after running the last "ECW on SyFy" show on February 16, 2010. Pictured below are wrestlers that have Oklahoma ties that have held either the ECW World Heavyweight Title, or the ECW World Tag Team Titles.
