The Disaster That Was WWE ECW December To Dismember

December often isn’t a great month for WWE pay-per-views, but the most egregious event the company has ever produced during the run-up to Christmas remains WWE ECW December to Dismember, which emanated from James Brown Arena in Augusta, Georgia on December 3, 2006. 

WWE Revives ECW

There has never been a more glaring pro wrestling-related example of "Be careful what you wish for" than the return of ECW in 2006.

After the promotion went bankrupt in 2001, a large void in the pro wrestling landscape was left behind that companies failed to fill, although CZW, XPW, and even TNA all tried in different ways, from promoting hardcore wrestling to simply booking the likes of Raven, Shane Douglas, The Sandman, New Jack, Team 3D and more. 

Fans clamoured for a promotion that would revive ECW's old niche, but it was never going to be the same because ECW was an innovative product, and anyone else trying to be ECW was not that. The only thing that could properly fill the ECW void was ECW, and World Wrestling Entertainment had the ability to bring back Paul Heyman’s promotion if they so desired.

Through trademark and video purchases, WWE began monetising ECW in the mid-2000s, starting with the highly successful Rise and Fall of ECW DVD. WWE then went a step further in June 2005 with One Night Stand, a reunion pay-per-view at New York's Hammerstein Ballroom that proved to be critically successful and remains one of the best pay-per-views in WWE history as a three-hour love letter to the celebrated Philadelphia promotion.

One Night Stand kicked off momentum for a full-scale revival of Extreme Championship Wrestling and WWE did just that in 2006, which led to ECW One Night Stand 2006 as a reborn ECW was at war with WWE. In the main event of the pay-per-view, Rob Van Dam defeated John Cena to win the WWE Title, and it also made RVD a double champion as Paul Heyman awarded Van Dam the ECW World Heavyweight Championship upon the full formation of ECW as a new brand within WWE.

With the new brand came a new TV outlet as ECW began airing at 10 pm ET on Sci-Fi, but this show was nothing like the Hardcore TV broadcasts of the 1990s as the new ECW featured zombies, preachers, vampires, fortune tellers, WWE crossovers, ECW originals getting flattened by the new breed, neutered commentary, bored crowds who only showed up for the SmackDown taping, and The Sandman entering to generic create-a-wrestler music.

WWE ECW wasn't all bad, but it didn't exactly remind hardcore fans of the ECW they dearly missed, and metrics across the board indicated that WWE's vision for Extreme Championship Wrestling wasn't winning over any new fans either.

About the only true net positive during the show's first six months of existence was the debut of CM Punk, fresh from a year in WWE developmental. As an earnest, no-frills babyface with an impressive indie resume, unique offence, and the aura of somebody that didn't entirely conform to the WWE way, Punk was an immediate standout in ECW, as fans treated him like a huge deal.

Aside from Punk, ECW was a mess. Originals like Danny Doring and Roadkill, The FBI, Balls Mahoney, and Justin Credible were little more than squash fodder. Replacing them on the escalator were the likes of Mike Knox, a generic bearded hoss whose entire character was that he was annoyed with crowds for ogling his exhibitionist girlfriend, Kelly Kelly. Then there were the vampires Kevin Thorn and Ariel, snooty schoolteacher Matt Striker, and a two-man MMA team of Elijah Burke and Sylvester Terkay. Other pushed stars included Test and Hardcore Holly, while Kurt Angle was briefly on the brand before he left WWE in August. 

This all paled in comparison to Rob Van Dam dropping the ECW Title to The Big Show in July after Heyman double crossed the ECW original, with it emerging that Van Dam had been arrested during a traffic stop for marijuana possession in the preceding days, and was subsequently suspended from WWE, which necessitated dropping both his world titles.

This maligned version of ECW persisted throughout the summer and autumn, forging a path to the first weekend of December, where for the first time, WWE would produce an ECW pay-per-view with a name other than One Night Stand in December to Dismember. 

Lacklustre Build To December To Dismember 

For the main event of the pay-per-view, The Big Show was scheduled to defend the ECW World Heavyweight Championship in an “Extreme” Elimination Chamber match, where each pod would contain a weapon that its occupant could bring into the fray. The challengers included Rob Van Dam, CM Punk, Sabu, Test, and recent acquisition Bobby Lashley following an uneven year on SmackDown.

As of seven days before the pay-per-view, this was the the only announced match and a second match wasn't made official until six nights before the pay-per-view, as an open challenge issued by Matt and Jeff Hardy was answered by the reunited MNM duo of Johnny Nitro and Joey Mercury, none of which were part of ECW. 

This underscored a major problem with WWE ECW, as outside of the Chamber participants, few other wrestlers on the show had been fleshed out as anything vaguely resembling an impact player. Including the Hardy Boyz vs. MNM dream match was made necessary due to the fact that the rest of the ECW roster consisted either of underpushed wrestlers or wrestlers that didn't pique the crowd's interest.

By Sunday December 3, those two matches remained the only contests announced for December to Dismember. Bryan Alvarez wrote in Figure 4 Weekly that this was apparently Paul Heyman's idea with the rationale being that these would be the only matches worth paying money to see anyway, so why bother advertising anything else. Granted, ECW pay-per-views from the company's dying days sometimes followed this same formula, but this wasn’t a good sign. 

Making matters worse, you couldn't even reasonably guess the other matches, because there were no other feuds. All the eggs were in that Chamber basket, and the Hardy Boyz vs. MNM was just a random novelty. Everyone else on ECW was directionless. 

A note in Figure Four Weekly stated that by the afternoon of the day of the show, those in WWE creative only knew of four matches. There wound up being seven in all (dark match included), so you can draw your own conclusions about how much meticulous planning went into anything that didn't involve a giant cage.

By the time the show was set to get underway, a reported 4800 fans filed into the James Brown Arena that Sunday evening. This wouldn’t be the typical WWE crowd, however, and was very much a smart, hardcore audience in the half-filled building, who weren’t going to be afraid to express their discontent. 

December To Dismember

In the opening contest, ECW original Stevie Richards defeated Rene Dupree in a dark match. The pay-per-view broadcast then got off to an inauspicious start as Joey Styles and Tazz welcomed fans to the show, during which Styles wasted no time in accidentally blurting out that a new ECW champion would be crowned in the main event. 

The opening contest of the pay-per-view then saw WWE’s The Hardy Boyz vs. WWE’s MNM in the other previously advertised match, but this was a very good match that made full use of time-honoured tag team tropes, although it may have been slightly too long due to clocking in at over 22 minutes.

Until the final hot tag, the match felt a tiny bit like something from a house show where a handful of scheduled wrestlers ran into travel issues, with it feeling like the four wrestlers were sent to the ring to stretch things out, especially with the match featuring multiple heat segments. Granted, these were exactly the men you want stretching for time, but regardless.

After a wild final sequence with the expected amount of near falls and innovative spots, Jeff Hardy crunched an MNM stack with his patented Swanton Bomb for the win. Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter awarded the match three and a quarter stars and the high point of the night was already over. 

With over an hour until the main event, the first unadvertised match of the evening saw malevolent schoolteacher Matt Striker take on ECW original Balls Mahoney in a match under Striker’s Rules where the basic tenets of pro wrestling would be strictly enforced to put Mahoney at a disadvantage. 

Now, admittedly, Striker insisting on gentlemanly wrestling in an "extreme" environment could have actually been a fun hook for a villain in ECW, since it was basically what Bill Alfonso did as a corrupt referee in 1995 and it made him the most hated man in the company, but Striker didn’t win to continue the gimmick and instead lost clean in seven minutes to Balls Mahoney. 

By this point, the crowd was already disinterested and their interest hardly grew when Sabu was found unconscious backstage as the man who once finished a match with his jaw broken in several places, and another match with a two-foot long gash down his arm from a barbed wire mishap, was put out of commission by an unseen attack in an arena hallway that left no visible marks or wounds.

After that deflating element of "card subject to change", most of the fans in Augusta really couldn't be bothered with the next match which pitted Elijah Burke and Sylvester Terkay against The FBI of Little Guido and Tony Mamaluke. What followed was a clunky seven-minute TV squash where Guido and Mamaluke mostly got picked apart before Burke finished Mamaluke off with Jeff Jarrett's Stroke. Post-match, Terkay actually hit Guido with Samoa Joe's Muscle Buster, prompting light chants of “TNA.” 

While those chants were surreal enough, it was equally bewildering to have to hear Joey Styles and Tazz act like they had never seen these moves before, as they marvelled at such novel and exotic technique. In the original ECW, Styles was an encyclopedia of all things non-ECW, and could relay such knowledge to the home audience, but that isn’t what WWE wanted from their announcers. 

Following that, the third match of the night was Tommy Dreamer vs. Daivari, who was accompanied to the ring by The Great Khali, and Daivari even scored the win via roll-up. After the match, Dreamer received a double chokeslam from Khali on the entrance ramp and fans were not happy.

That unhappiness then only grew as Paul Heyman gave Sabu’s spot in the Elimination Chamber to Hardcore Holly. 

It was then time for another unannounced match as Kevin Thorn and Ariel competed in mixed tag action against Mike Knox and Kelly Kelly. Three of those talents were heels, and Kelly Kelly had the bare minimum experience wrestling.

The ongoing angle was that Kelly had a crush on CM Punk, and she wasn't shy about admitting it. Before the match, Kelly grabbed the mic to wish Punk luck in the main event, and Knox was none too pleased by this random declaration.

Then the match started. At one point, when Ariel and Kelly began mixing it up, Tazz implored the home audience to "say a prayer!" The Knox/Thorn portion of the match was nothing to write home about, but Kelly vs. Ariel was just plain bad.

Probably to Vince McMahon’s dismay, the crowd then cheered when Knox turned on Kelly and left her for dead. Ariel soon after pinned Kelly Kelly for the win, which was followed by a cameo from The Sandman who caned Thorn. 

Then the crowd had to watch a pretape of Michael Cole plugging WWE Armageddon in two weeks. The fans in Augusta couldn't have booed louder if Cole told the fans they had to pay double if they wanted to go home.

The Main Event

While the portion of the show filled with unadvertised matches was truly dreadful, there was still time for the Extreme Elimination Chamber match, but WWE managed to do the truly unthinkable and put together a bad Elimination Chamber match. 

Paul Heyman headed to the ring before the match and cut a soliloquy that was full of subtle shoot lines, including one knowingly-prescient section where he basically said that ECW would still be around long after he was gone.

The match began with Rob Van Dam and Hardcore Holly as the others reported to the weapon filled pod, with The Big Show’s sporting a barbed wire bat, Bobby Lashley a table, Punk a chair, and Test a crowbar. The first few minutes were actually somewhat fun. Van Dam and Holly had an underrated TV classic earlier in the year where Holly horribly gashed his back on a table crease, and they displayed that chemistry once again. 

CM Punk entered third in the match with a steel chair and Van Dam was a bloody mess soon after, with the match very much living up to the stipulation so far. Test then entered fourth with the crowd and gouged the wounded Van Dam, but RVD managed to fight back and he even scored the first elimination of the match by pinning CM Punk following a Five-Star Frog Splash.

WWE have produced some truly terrible booking decisions over the years, and this one was right up there. The pin was the former ROH World Champion’s first pinfall loss in WWE since his debut, and Punk by this point was so organically popular that a week earlier at Survivor Series, he received the loudest cheers and chants among his teammates, which included Triple H, Shawn Michaels and The Hardy Boyz. 

The pin also went against what Paul Heyman wanted to do, who pitched to Vince McMahon for Punk and Big Show to begin the match and Punk would stun everyone by eliminating Paul Wight by submission with the anaconda vice before the third entrant came into the match. This suggestion was shot down by Vince McMahon, however. 

After CM Punk was pinned by Rob Van Dam, the crowd was furious. Many expected Punk to actually win the Elimination Chamber and become the new ECW World Heavyweight Champion, and having forked out their hard-earned cash to attend December to Dismember, they weren’t thrilled at watching the golden boy be dispatched in such easy fashion. 

While the crowd was registering their disgust with Punk being gone, Test double-crossed on-screen ally Hardcore Holly by hitting him with a running boot and pinning him in a botched moment that saw Holly exit the chamber anyway. Ninety seconds later and Test pinned a blood-soaked Van Dam with a Flying Elbow from the top of a pod onto a chair placed over Van Dam’s face.

With everyone but Test gone, the crowd grew more angry as their two hoped-for winners were out of the match, being left with just Test stood in the ring alone. Bobby Lashley was the fifth entrant but he was trapped in the pod by Paul Heyman’s helmeted goons, who stopped the referees from unchaining the door. Super Bobby Lashley remedied that issue by smashing through the pod's chain ceiling with the table, and then climbing out to beat Test up. Within two minutes, Lashley had speared Test for the next elimination.

While this was going on, fans continued to boo loudly, and they had plenty of time to fill the air with anger because the timer for the final entry still had over two minutes to go. Two minutes of dead time followed as Lashley walked around the ring and The Big Show stood in the pod. 

After the two talents finally came to blows, it wasn’t pretty. Show came in toting the bat, but like the table, it was never actually used as a weapon. Lashley, still green in late 2006, also had to do most of the moving around because Show was hampered by a severe back injury, and was actually going on a long sabbatical shortly thereafter. 

After minutes of slow, heatless in-ring action, Lashley scored the win with a spear to Big Show to become the new ECW World Heavyweight Champion. To only make matters worse for what WWE considered a crowning moment for Bobby, the crowd chanted for The Big Show during the final minutes. 

Dave Meltzer gave the Chamber two and a half stars, and that was probably fair. There was a lot of hard work and good stuff prior to Van Dam's elimination, but when the mood went south there was no saving the match.

The pay-per-view then ended 43 minutes short of the allowed window with a runtime of 2 hours and 17 minutes. Such was the disaster of December to Dismember that Tommy Dreamer and Stevie Richards asked for their releases after the show was over. A massive fight then broke out in the building between a large group of exiting fans that took about 10 minutes for security to fully quell.

The Legacy Of December To Dismember 

December to Dismember was so anti-ECW, both in presentation and in treatment of the built-in audience, that it's viewed as the brand's death knell, even though ECW survived for three years after the fact. 

Paul Heyman was sent home shortly after the pay-per-view. He and Vince McMahon had clashed over the direction of ECW as Heyman predicted the audience would wholly reject December to Dismember, and Vince insisted they would be happy because of Lashley's crowning moment.

Really, December to Dismember was the culmination of six months of misguided vision. Between roster, match, and story quality, WWE ECW was a brand that didn't need a pay-per-view, to say the very least.