By Jon Mezzera, Torch Specialist

ECW HITS

John Morrison: John Morrison is finding his voice in this new persona. He has never been good on the mic, at times he’s been bad, at other times he’s shown promise, and it looks like he is starting to deliver on that promise. At the very least he is cutting out the bad performances. I enjoy his multiple nick names, and the weird Jim Morrison type statements that he comes out with are usually entertaining. I’m still not sure a WWE wrestler should be emulating a pop icon who died of a drug overdose way too young, but Morrison himself is playing the role very well and it is something different. I liked the way he ran down the potential #1 Contenders, particularly his comments about the Miz. His brief backstage encounter with CM Punk was also good.

Miz, Mahoney and Extreme Expose: The budding love story between Kelly Kelly and Balls Mahoney has been done very well so far. Kelly has the type of sweetness that makes her the perfect member of Extreme Expose to actually fall for a guy like Balls. Miz is very good as the cocky heel as from what I’ve seen of him on various MTV reality shows, it is just an extension of his real personality. He is an annoying man and he plays an annoying man very well. The fact that they are ratcheting it up with his ladies man character and having two hot women swoon over him is a great way to capitalize on his charisma and personality. It is an ironic twist on the classic ladies man wrestler (like Shawn Michaels in his initial singles run) in that the audience can’t quite figure out why women would be attracted to him. The storyline has been entertaining, and with one exception (more later) it developed nicely this week.

ECW MISSES

Burke vs. Mahoney Outcome: The Elijah Burke vs. Balls Mahoney match was decent. It was not good enough to get a Hit, not bad enough to get a Miss. But the ending fell flat. I have no problem whatsoever with Burke getting the win. After all, he certainly has a brighter future than Mahoney at this point. But after Mahoney got the upset win this week, I was expecting Burke to get revenge by picking up the win with the help of some interference from the Miz. Then Burke could move on and face someone else to get a clean victory next week to really rebound from his loss to Balls last week. Unfortunately, ECW doesn’t have a big enough roster and I’m not sure who they could use to fill that position. As it was, part of me says that it was good that they didn’t do the predictable interference. But that being said, this loss did not do anything to further the Mahoney vs. Miz feud, which would have benefited from the interference.

Main Event: The 4 Way #1 Contenders Match was not very good. It did have some nice action, particularly once it got down to Miz vs. Punk. But on the whole, it was a Miss. Part of why it was a Miss was how predictable the ending was. They weren’t going to go heel vs. heel. So that meant that only Punk or The Boogeyman could win. And nobody really thought that Boogeyman was going to win, so Punk’s win was very predictable and took away any drama from the match. The match also suffered from the slow plodding methodical style of Boogeyman and Big Daddy V. Yes, as I said above, they were cleared out half way through and the match got better. But I kept waiting for one of them to come back into the match at some point. It seemed like after the match, they were fighting on the outside. It would have been better to see them fighting during the match so that we would know why neither of them was getting back into the ring. So there was good in the match, but not enough to offset the bad.

Jon Mezzera is PWTorch.com's Hitlist Specialist, providing his point of view in the Torch's hitlist format for Raw, Smackdown, ECW, and TNA Impact each week. Email him at jmezz-torch@sbcglobal.net.

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