Talk about it here.

Taz recaps the history of ECW and ties it into the FTW belt. Taz handles a heckler well. He talks about Shane jumping to the WWF and says he lost his claim to be The Franchise when he left, which everyone forgets. Taz of course will never leave. ECW has been pretty bad in 1998 outside of FBI house show matches, and I'm not interested in this storyline at all. The match doesn't last long, as Candido, Storm, Sabu and RVD all get involved.

I really dislike Taz and the heckler as it shows the mob mentality of the ECW audience to an extent with even fucking hat guy wanting the guy to get the hook. I got to say that this Taz build up while presented strongly has been missing a lot of the intangibles pretty much the whole way through and how many times can him and Bam Bam go at it at this point?

Why exactly didn't they run Taz v. Douglas at Wrestlepalooza? Why not blow it off and push Taz? I know Heyman loved the chase, but it became glaring really fast that they had nowhere to go with Taz with Shane on the shelf.

Yawn. Taz's monologue and FTW belt don't mean anything because ECW has nothing to rebel against anymore. If they wanted to be rebellious in mid-1998 they should have gone to an ROH-style Pure Sports Build model. (I know Heyman claims he was about to do that had ECW survived but that seems like a pretty post-facto explanation to me). Taz and Bigelow have an okay-ish match of sorts, but it wasn't so good that it made you want to shell out money to see it again on PPV. Storm & Candido lay out Taz afterward, but use Rolling Thunder and then mock Sabu & RVD's trademark taunts, bringing those two out. Sabu then wants at Taz, but Alfonso calls him off and it seems that an uneasy alliance is being formed.

I thought this was a good promo to get the FTW belt over. Unfortunately, it's building a feud that isn't going to pay off for months.