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With the firing of Joey Styles as the play-by-play announcer of ECW, Vince McMahon has effectively severed one of the last ties to the upstart rebel promotion Tod Gordon and Paul Heyman started about 15 years ago. His replacement, Mike Adamle, formerly best known as the announcer of the original American Gladiators, is a wrestling newbie whose inexperience hurt the ECW telecast this week, and could very well doom the promotion in the ratings.

Perhaps there were good reasons behind the scenes for letting Styles go, including a price tag issue brought up by the company’s budgeting software. Who knows? But for anyone who was holding out any vestige of hope that ECW could rebound and recapture its former glory, the last spark of hope was snuffed out with Styles’ dismissal.

Sure, it played in front of a huge live crowd, but don’t for a second think that WrestleMania 23 was a success on the level of WrestleMania 3, 20 years ago. That memorable 1987 pay-per-view featured Hulk Hogan doing the near-impossible… bodyslamming the un-bodyslammable Andre the Giant. As weak and quick as Hogan’s bodyslam of Andre was, it is still the most memorable moment in WrestleMania’s 23-year history, and no figures produced by modern budgeting software to declare WM23 a bigger moneymaker will change that fact.

Nothing about WrestleMania 23 really measured up, and mostly it was due to poor, run-of-the-mill booking. The main event, John Cena vs. Shawn Michaels, lacked heat for many reasons. First, Michaels is too past his prime to really be a main event threat to the red-hot Cena. Also, both were crowd favorites and wrestling is at its best when there is someone to boo. That lead folks to have to choose between a legend like HBK and the WWE’s hottest champ since Stone Cold and The Rock walked away from the biz.

The “billionaire’s hair match” was too predictable to be interesting, despite some decent story-building. No one believed Donald Trump would agree to be shaved bald for WrestleMania, especially since he’s in the middle of a season of The Apprentice. So the outcome - Vinnie Mac getting shaved bald due to an Umaga loss - was entirely too predictable.

The ECW Originals vs. New Breed match was OK as far as it went. The lumberjill women’s match was nothing special. Undertaker continuing his undefeated streak by becoming the new SmackDown champ was also entirely too predictable, and another example of booking two crowd-favorites against each other with neither playing a true heel.

I liked the Money In the Bank ladder match best of all, but the rest of the card was purely average at best. It’s a shame that wiser minds didn’t prevail. Even though he’s not yet established very well, a far more compelling main event would have been a title match between Cena and The Great Khali… it would have called to mind the classic Hogan/Andre main event of 1987.

Missed opportunities.