The Great Eight: Top 8 ECW World Heavyweight Champions

During the Monday Night Wars, WCW and the WWF were battling out at the top to see which company would reign supreme. But underneath that war, there was an underground movement of the Extreme. ECW started as Eastern Championship Wrestling, a small Northeast independent. Tod Gordon’s small upstart would strike gold when they replaced Eddie Gilbert with Paul Heyman.

Infamously, Shane Douglas would win a tournament for the vacant NWA World Heavyweight Championship. He would then throw it down and declare the ECW Championship the last real World Championship. And after a rebranding from Eastern to Extreme, the rest is history. While the company only lasted for less than a decade, its influence was huge. In the immediate, a lot of the Attitude Era was taken from ECW, as well as pop culture from the late ’90s.

More than that, ECW’s legacy helped to influence the 2000’s indie scene. Both in hardcore companies like CZW and IWA: Mid-South, and in companies like PWG and ROH. So, let’s take some time to look back at the top eight ECW Champions!

Fun Facts:

In its short seven-year run, the ECW Championship changed hands 33 times, and only 19 men can lay claim to being the champion.

The shortest single reign is tied between Sandman and Tommy Dreamer at less than a day.

Shane Douglas holds the longest single reign and total combined days as champion at 406 and 874 days, respectively.

Sandman holds the record for most reigns at five, and has the second-longest combined days as champion at 446.

Disclaimers:

Ranking Explanation:

I will not be including champions from the WWE ECW era

Disclaimer:

This is my list; if you don’t like it or have a different list, awesome! Please share your own list and opinions in the comments section. I welcome open discourse about this wacky art we all love. It is an art form, so it is subjective; we all have our opinions on it, and all of them are valid. So, if you want to share your thoughts and opinions, don’t insult others for their opinion. There is already enough negativity in the world; let’s not add to it. And with that, on to the list!

Plugs

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The List

Honorable Mentions:

Rhino, Don Muraco, Tito Santana, and Steve Corino

8: Mikey Whipwreck

Mikey Whipreck’s role as the little jobber who could was a way for fans to have a guy who they felt really represented them. He started as part of the ring crew for ECW and caught the eye of Joey Styles and Paul Heyman while doing some high-flying moves before a show.

Jobbers were still commonplace in the early 1990s, and that’s how Whipwreck was introduced. But the fans got behind him, and his underdog status would see him win every championship in ECW. Culminating with his victory over Sandman to win his first and only ECW Championship.

While he would only hold the title for a couple of months, his ability to take a beating and his reliability to the fans have forever cemented him as an ECW Legend and a spot on this list.

7: Mike Awesome

It’s sad that, to the mainstream fans, Awesome is more known as “That ’70’s Guy” and “The Fat Chick Thriller.” Because before that, his runs in Japan and ECW were well regarded. He was a big man who was also athletic. His feud with Masato Tanaka is legendary, so much so that they got a spot on the first One Night Stand.

Awesome runs as ECW World Champion are probably most remembered for leading to the only time a wrestler from the WWF and one from WCW wrestled against each other for the ECW Championship. But his first run was one of the last gasps of ECW. He had good defenses against Taz, Rhino, and Tajiri. He would drop the belt to Tanaka for a short period before getting it back.

While his runs may not be as fondly remembered as others on this list, they do serve as a reminder that he deserved more in WCW and the WWF.

6: Sabu

Sabu is one of three people on this list who had a title run before the shift from Eastern to Extreme. He would win his first ECW Championship from Shane Douglas at NWA Bloodfest in October of 1993. His next run would take another four years, when he beat Terry Funk in a Barbed Wire match.

While two may not seem like a lot, he is only one of seven men to hold the belt more than once before the WWE relaunch. It was his commitments to Japan that would prevent Sabu from having more or longer runs.

But what we got from The Homicidal, Suicidal, Genocidal Maniac, that was Sabu, was an embodiment of the ECW spirit. He sacrificed his body with reckless abandon. Often hurting himself in the process of trying to hurt his opponent. We can’t say there was never anyone like Sabu, because he learned a lot from his uncle, The Original Sheik. But Sabu took what he learned and made it uniquely his own. And that is all more than enough to earn him a spot on this list.

5: Taz

Shane Douglas had a stranglehold on the ECW World Championship, holding it for 406 days. It looked like no one would be able to take the belt from him. However, at Guilty as Charged ’99, the impossible happened: Taz locked the Tazmission on Shane Douglas and won his first ECW World Championship!

Taz had started as The Tazmaniac, a wild islander type gimmick, and while he would have success winning the Television and Tag Team Championships. It was when he returned from a neck injury and revamped his gimmick into a no-nonsense, street-tough, human suplex machine. That Taz’s star really took off.

It would still be another four years before he won the ECW World Championship, but when he did, he would go on a 252-day run as champion. He would drop the belt to Mike Awesome on his way to the WWF. But as mentioned above, he would return to beat Awesome, as Awesome was leaving for WCW.

Taz is one of the wrestlers who bled for ECW, and his work in front of and behind the camera cements his spot not only as an ECW Legend but on this list.

4: Raven

Before joining ECW and debuting the Raven character, Scott Levy had bounced around the indies and had runs in both WCW and the WWF. But in 1995, he would arrive in ECW as Raven and start a feud with Tommy Dreamer. It was this feud that would help launch Raven into the main event of ECW.

He would win his first ECW World Championship in just over a year after his debut. He would hold the title for most of 1996. His run was only interrupted for a couple of months when he lost it back to Sandman, before regaining it by the end of the year.

He would then go on to hold it until Barely Legal in April of 1997, dropping it to Terry Funk.

Raven represented the creative freedom of ECW. It was a place where wrestlers could try new things, step out of their comfort zones, and try to reinvent themselves. Raven was such a departure from Scotty Flamingo and Johnny Polo. It was the gimmick that made us forget who Scott Levy might have been.

And if it wasn’t for ECW, his feud with Dreamer, and his runs as World Champion there, we may never have fully understood how good Raven was.

3: Terry Funk

Terry Funk was 49 when he won the ECW (Then Eastern) Championship for the first time in 1993. He was a former NWA World Champion, had feuded with the greats, and could have used his fame to make ECW all about him. But instead, he went out there and busted his ass every night, and was a guiding voice for all the young wrestlers who came through the company.

And four years later, at 53-years old, he would win that title again. He was the one who finally ended Raven’s reign of terror. Once again, going all out and busting his ass to help put over ECW and the wrestlers around him.

Middle-Aged and Crazy was a great way to describe Funk during this time. He would lose the belt to Sabu in August in a Barbed Wire match. A match Funk could have refused to do, but he did it anyway. He selflessly did what was needed to help establish the company and make its stars.

2: The Sandman

I debated the top three for this list. And honestly, they could all be easily shuffled around. Funk was the selfless veteran giving his all to make the company into something special. And our number one helped to make ECW what it is most remembered for. But Sandman was the heart and soul of ECW. I’d like to note that ECW wasn’t all hardcore wrestling. There was a strong undercurrent of technical and Lucha mixed in. And make no mistake, Sandman wasn’t either of those things.

But what Sandman represented was the rebellion and counter-culture that made ECW what it was. He was never going to put on Five-Star Classics or do a 450 Splash. But he was going to be a man of the people, drink beer, smoke, and beat people up. There is a reason why he holds the record for most ECW World Championships. And it’s because of his connection with the fans of ECW.

Sandman wasn’t there to look pretty; he was there to kick ass and give the crowd what they came to see. His feuds with Dreamer and Raven are legendary, and it’s hard to think of many other names that are more closely linked to ECW than his.

1: Shane Douglas

If you didn’t cheat and skip ahead, you had to know this man would be one or two on this list. With Shane Douglas, we don’t have ECW as we know it today. From the moment he threw down the NWA World Heavyweight Championship, he kicked off a revolution that would change the industry in so many ways. He helped to give birth to a place where misfits and outcasts could find themselves and each other.

While it was Heyman’s vision, it was Douglas and others like him who brought it to life. As I said at the top, Douglas holds the record for the single longest reign and total combined days as champion. He wasn’t known as a hardcore guy, and the fact that he looked like a prototypical wrestler helped to set him apart and make him easy to hate.

The Franchise was just that, a Franchise player for ECW. He helped to establish the ECW World Heavyweight Championship and was the face of the company as it launched from a North East Indy to a national name. For all of that, he gets my vote as the greatest ECW World Heavyweight Champion.

Preview:

Tune in next week when we cover the top eight Money in the Bank matches