Hardcore Wrestling - Yay or Nay

Miakal

Please vote on this very, very important matter.

It's funny, hardcore wrestling used to be the most popular form of wrestling and now it's quickly fading away. Does anyone still enjoy it?

A good hardcore match can be fantastic once in awhile. It's too bad that WWE didn't adopt more of it's truer nature.

ECW was great because it combined real wrestling with some hardcore elements. WWE missed out on the whole idea completely and fails to have the same kind of mixture.

It would be great to see technical and hardcore mixed together in the WWE. Maybe it could get people to watch again?

WWE made the hardcore too cartoonish and too spotty, it didn't look natural at all. Hence, they don't do it anymore.

Maybe a mainstream company like WWE can't do hardcore.

Either way, I'm interested in everyones opinion. Do you like hardcore wrestling? Should WWE use more of it?

skinartia

It's only good based on the wrestlers & how far they can safely go. I've seen hardcore matches where the people involved had no business at all being in a match like that so it was terrible.

::devil::

"I hate every bone in your body but mine.
I can't wait 'til I can hate you tonight."

~Poison

Drunksader

First off, to call a purely hardcore match "wrestling" is difficult - it usually resembles more of a gladiator battle. That being said, it suffers from the fact that there's only so much you can do in a hardcore match and as innovative spots become harder and harder to come up with, it loses the insanity and death-defying manuevers that attracted the mainstream crowd to it.

A hardcore match needs a good story to it - there's a reason why two men want to beat the living hell out of each other and use whatever they can find to do so. Funk and Foley told some classics, as did a lot of the great ECW hardcore feuds. But when the gimmick hit mainstream wrestling it turned into a collection of spotistution, and eventually lost favor w/the fans.

Now it's being picked up in backyards by guys who've decided to risk everything just to hurt each other with lightbulbs and such, which I think is idiotic. Let's face it, anyone can get into a ring and start hitting people with a cookie sheet - even Miakal. Back when hardcore wrestling was intriguing, the nature of the match only enhanced the brutality of the feud.

Y2J The King Of The World

I'm voting "nay" on this one. Granted, I never watched too much ECW back in its heyday, but what I did see wasn't all that fantastic IMO.

I agree with Miakal in saying WWE's hardcore matches were very spotty and they just weren't all that great. However, I can't say I've ever seen a great hardcore match that wouldn't have been great anyways, without that gimmick added.

To me, a hardcore match is like any other gimmick match. It has a certain importance and impact when used every once in a while, but for it to be a weekly thing cheapens it. Think about it: would HIAC or ladder matches be a big deal and something to look forward to if they happened every week? No, they'd be "just another Hell in a Cell" or "just another ladder match." So, I say nay to a division, but the matches can be good if done well and used sparingly.