RWL:ACW Hardcore Debut

Eleven days after Remedy III, RWL was back at it again.

Sort of.

On 30 May 2007, the promotion presented the first RWL:ACW event, Hardcore Debut.

The slightly different name might suggest that ACW was a separate promotion, developmental group or some kind of early attempt at a brand split.

It wasn’t.

RWL:ACW was RWL.

Same wrestlers. Same championships. Same stories. Same continuity.

There was just one fairly important difference.

For once, Valo wasn’t booking the bloody thing.

What Was RWL:ACW?

The vast majority of RWL shows during the backyard era were organised and booked by Valo, but every so often Shawn O’ Mercy would take over and put together an RWL show himself.

Those occasional events were presented under the RWL:ACW name.

They were never a regular series and didn’t operate on a separate schedule. ACW shows simply appeared sporadically throughout RWL’s backyard years whenever the circumstances lined up for Shawn to run one.

There was a practical benefit to the arrangement.

By this point in 2007, Valo was spending a considerable amount of time travelling and wrestling with National Alliance Wrestling (NAW) alongside everything happening within RWL.

Having Shawn occasionally organise a show meant that everything didn’t always have to fall on the same person.

That didn’t mean Valo was absent from ACW.

Far from it.

He frequently wrestled on the shows himself and, on Hardcore Debut, somehow managed to appear in three of the five matches.

The luxury was simply that he could turn up, wrestle and let somebody else worry about putting the show together for once.

Most importantly, RWL:ACW was completely part of the main RWL continuity.

Stories continued through the shows. Championships remained the same. Anything that happened on an ACW event could carry directly into the next Valo-booked RWL show, and vice versa.

There was no separate roster and no alternate RWL universe hiding somewhere in Blackburn.

It was simply RWL with Shawn O’ Mercy holding the book.

Back to Turning Med

Hardcore Debut also marked RWL’s first return to a location that was quickly becoming part of its identity.

Turning Medieval.

The field had taken its name from the show held there earlier in 2007 and, inevitably, it wasn’t long before everyone simply started calling the place Turning Med.

But while RWL had wrestled here before, the setup had changed.

The familiar blue tarpaulin was now laid out in a different part of the field, in the position that would become its regular home for much of RWL’s time at Turning Med.

Beside it stood two conveniently squared-off rocks.

At the original Turning Medieval (Show), RWL had resorted to “borrowing” a pair of shopping trolleys to provide something vaguely resembling top ropes.

There would be no need for that anymore.

Turning Med had its own top turnbuckle.

Or, more accurately, it had two large rocks that everybody collectively decided were close enough.

The rocks would become a familiar part of the venue, effectively forming the top corner of RWL’s makeshift ring whenever the promotion returned to Turning Med.

It was still just a blue tarp laid across a field in Ewood.

But the pieces of what would become the classic Turning Med setup were beginning to fall into place.

Everything Is Hardcore

There was one other important distinction with RWL:ACW.

Every match was contested under Hardcore Rules.

There didn’t need to be a Hardcore Championship involved, nor did individual matches need to be announced separately as Hardcore Matches.

If it happened on an RWL:ACW show, Hardcore Rules were simply the default.

Which made the name of Shawn O’ Mercy’s first show particularly appropriate.

This was Hardcore Debut.

Better Than RWL

Only eleven days earlier at Remedy III, CorZ had become Valo.

The name change had also come with a major change in attitude, with the crowd turning against Valo and Valo being more than happy to return the favour.

By Hardcore Debut, he had found another reason to believe he was better than everybody else.

NAW.

Valo opened the show with a heel promo boasting about his involvement with National Alliance Wrestling, arguing that wrestling for NAW now made him better than everybody in RWL.

If anybody disagreed, they were welcome to prove it.

Valo issued an open challenge.

It was answered by a familiar masked wrestler:

Hyogo Kantai.

There was just one slight problem.

Historically, Hyogo Kantai had been Valo himself, wrestling underneath a Hayabusa mask during RWL’s earliest shows.

Valo obviously couldn’t answer his own open challenge.

Well, probably.

So on this occasion, the person underneath the Hyogo Kantai mask was actually “Cyanide” Danny Cooper.

Same character.

Different wrestler.

Early RWL continuity could be remarkably flexible when there was a wrestling mask lying around.

Valo Can’t Be Bothered

Valo’s newfound sense of superiority continued into his next match, a three-way encounter with Adam Watson and Project S20.

Unfortunately, his enthusiasm for actually having the match did not.

Looking back at the footage, Valo quite obviously wasn’t taking this one particularly seriously.

Neither was the weather.

The wind repeatedly caught underneath RWL’s blue tarpaulin, lifting it from the ground while the three wrestlers attempted to continue around it.

The resulting match is, to put it kindly, not one of RWL’s finest.

To put it less kindly:

It’s dreadful.

Among the highlights for all the wrong reasons are Valo’s attempts at a Van Terminator, which go very obviously and very visibly wrong.

Rather than accepting defeat, the solution was apparently just to try again.

That leads into another wonderfully revealing feature of the surviving footage:

everybody calling the matches incredibly loudly.

There was very little concern about the camera microphone picking up wrestlers openly discussing what they were about to do, largely because nobody expected this footage to survive as a complete wrestling show.

At one point, following another less-than-perfect attempt at a spot, the reassurance can clearly be heard:

“Don’t worry, do it again, this will just be a MV.”

MV meant music video.

That was how much of RWL’s footage was presented at the time. The best bits would be cut together, music would be placed over the top, and inconvenient things like botches, repeated spots and wrestlers loudly telling each other what they were about to do could simply disappear in the edit.

Which was a perfectly reasonable assumption to make in 2007.

Nobody involved was considering the possibility that, nineteen years later in 2026, somebody would go back through the surviving footage and reconstruct Hardcore Debut as a full show.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, that’s exactly what happened.

Nothing disappears in the music-video edit this time.

Eventually, Valo apparently decided he’d embarrassed himself enough for one match.

Late in proceedings, he simply walked out, abandoning the match and leaving Watson and S20 to finish things between themselves.

In storyline terms, it fitted the newly heel Valo remarkably well.

He had already spent the beginning of the show telling everybody that his involvement with NAW meant he was above the rest of RWL.

Apparently Adam Watson and Project S20 weren’t even worth sticking around to finish a match with.

His departure did at least leave both men with something they hadn’t necessarily expected when the match began:

a much better chance of winning.

Enter Flaming Chaos

Next came the return of a familiar face with a brand-new name.

The Sentinel was back.

Now known as Flaming Chaos, he returned to RWL competition against Kazuki “Lightning” Lyger and received a great reaction from the crowd.

Lyger, naturally, wasn’t going to let somebody else’s return get in the way of being Lyger.

There was plenty of comedy throughout the match, with the increasingly ridiculous masked character continuing to establish their own peculiar place within RWL.

Then another participant arrived.

Rain.

The weather had already spent the previous match trying to remove the tarpaulin.

Now it decided to start soaking everybody instead.

Lyger was not impressed.

Despite the increasingly unpleasant conditions, the match continued, and Flaming Chaos produced one of his better RWL performances up to this point.

The Sentinel was gone.

Flaming Chaos had arrived.

Rain Stops Play

Eventually, even RWL had to admit that wrestling outside in the rain wasn’t particularly useful.

The show was paused while everyone waited for the weather to improve.

Once the rain had stopped, there was still the slight matter of the now-wet wrestling surface.

RWL’s solution was wonderfully straightforward.

Flip the tarp over.

Problem solved.

Probably.

With the other side of the blue tarpaulin now facing upwards, Hardcore Debut continued.

Team RWL vs Team NAW

Next came another meeting between Jayyy and Valo, this time with the RWL World Championship on the line.

But there was another dimension to the match.

Jayyy represented Team RWL.

Valo represented Team NAW.

For Valo, it was the natural continuation of the attitude he’d displayed throughout the show.

He had opened Hardcore Debut claiming his involvement with National Alliance Wrestling made him superior to the RWL roster.

Now he had the opportunity to back that claim up by challenging for RWL’s biggest championship while representing NAW.

Standing opposite him was the reigning RWL World Champion, Jayyy, representing RWL itself.

There was, admittedly, one slight flaw in the premise.

Jayyy was involved with NAW too.

By this point, both men were regularly wrestling outside RWL and spending time around people with considerably more experience in the wider wrestling scene.

And that experience was beginning to show.

Jayyy and Valo had wrestled each other plenty of times before, including another RWL World Championship match just eleven days earlier at Remedy III, but this encounter represented a noticeably more polished attempt than many of their previous meetings.

Both were beginning to incorporate advice they’d received elsewhere, developing beyond the wrestling they had largely taught themselves during RWL’s earliest days.

They were still Jayyy and Valo wrestling on a blue tarpaulin in Blackburn.

But they were starting to get better at it.

The wider wrestling world that RWL had first properly encountered through shows like Best of the North West and Overdose was now beginning to influence what happened back home.

Valo had also brought something else back from his NAW character.

A Bible.

As part of his gimmick in NAW, Valo had begun hitting opponents with Bibles.

Naturally, this particular piece of character development also crossed over into RWL.

RWL had already discovered lighttubes, plasterboard, shopping trolleys, traffic cones, wooden ramps, nettles and whatever else happened to be nearby.

Now the promotion could add something else to the weapons list:

the word of God.

Shawn O’ Mercy vs Cyanide

The final match of Hardcore Debut saw the man responsible for putting the show together, Shawn O’ Mercy, take on “Cyanide” Danny Cooper.

There was no championship on the line.

There didn’t particularly need to be.

With ACW’s Hardcore Rules in effect, the match had plenty else to work with.

And it began magnificently.

Mercy charged towards Cyanide swinging a weapon.

Cyanide ducked.

Somewhere during the swing, Mercy completely lost hold of the weapon.

With the planned attack having immediately fallen apart, the two men somehow ended up locking up and beginning the match like two perfectly respectable professional wrestlers.

Watching it back years later, it’s difficult not to laugh.

Things became considerably less respectable from there.

Weapons quickly came into play, including lighttubes and various other objects around Turning Med.

Most notably, Cyanide took a glass picture frame directly to the head.

It was the kind of spot that demonstrated just how quickly RWL’s idea of hardcore wrestling had escalated during its first year of recorded shows.

The promotion had started with cardboard from Aldi.

Now somebody was being hit over the head with home furnishings.

Progress.

Shawn’s Show

Hardcore Debut wasn’t the beginning of a new promotion.

It wasn’t a separate brand.

And it certainly wasn’t the beginning of a regular ACW schedule.

It was something considerably simpler and considerably more RWL.

Shawn O’ Mercy fancied putting on a show.

So he did.

And in the process, several different parts of RWL’s history started coming together.

The promotion returned to Turning Med, with the blue tarp now sitting in what would become its familiar position beside the rocks that would serve as the venue’s wonderfully primitive version of a top turnbuckle.

Valo’s heel turn continued, with his growing involvement in NAW becoming part of his RWL character.

The Sentinel returned with a new identity as Flaming Chaos.

Jayyy stood opposite Valo representing RWL itself, with the RWL World Championship at stake.

And every match took place under Hardcore Rules.

For Valo, it also provided the rare opportunity to spend most of an RWL show simply being a wrestler rather than the person responsible for organising it.

Admittedly, he celebrated that freedom by wrestling three times, walking out of one of them, repeatedly failing to perform a Van Terminator and hitting somebody with a Bible.

But nobody said taking the night off from booking meant taking it easy.

Perhaps the most amusing legacy of Hardcore Debut, however, is something nobody involved could possibly have appreciated at the time.

In 2007, they knew the mistakes wouldn’t matter.

The botches could be removed.

The loud calls could be covered with music.

If something went wrong, they could simply do it again.

After all:

“This will just be a MV.”

Nineteen years later, Hardcore Debut was reconstructed as a full show.

Turns out the camera was listening after all.

RWL:ACW would appear again sporadically during the backyard years, whenever Shawn O’ Mercy happened to take control of the show.

It would always remain what it had been from the beginning:

RWL, just with somebody else holding the book.

Five Hardcore Rules matches, one returning wrestler, one RWL World Championship match, one Bible, one glass picture frame, several things that were definitely supposed to be edited out and a blue tarp that spent most of the day trying to escape in the wind and rain. Shawn O’ Mercy had officially booked his first RWL:ACW show.