Jared Soares | The Roanoke Times

Fit Finlay locks up Matt Hardy during a WWE match. Finlay defeated Hardy Tuesday night at The Roanoke Civic Center.

They call it brutal, bloody and vicious. They scream “Rip his heart out!” and “Kill him!”

Because, hey, this ain’t brawling in your momma’s back yard — this is Extreme Championship Wrestling.

So it was no surprise to hear loyal ECW fans — once known as the most loyal of all wrestling fans before the promotion went bankrupt in 2001 — chanting for live cameras to begin rolling Tuesday night at the Roanoke Civic Center immediately after the taping of World Wrestling Entertainment’s popular show “Friday Night Smackdown!”

“E-C-W!” they screamed from their brightly finger-painted mouths. Heavy metal music pulsed in the background as teenage boys bobbed their heads violently just before the opening of the show, which aired live on the Sci-Fi channel.

Pennsylvania-based ECW is back in action — this time under the watchful eye of Vincent McMahon, owner of the less gruesome WWE, which acquired the wrestling outfit and revived ECW’s outrageous style in June.

It was only the third edition of the new ECW television show since its comeback under McMahon. The upstart company, which began in 1992 under Tod Gordon and Paul Heyman, has long since been admired by a strong base of fans for its excessive tactics.

The first ECW match Tuesday night, an extreme rules match, showcased wrestler Sabu placing a chair at the edge of the ring ropes and catapulting himself out of the ring onto his opponent, Roadkill. He delivered three chair shots to Roadkill and left the ring with a gash under his shoulder.

Created with the hardcore fan in mind, ECW has popularized fairly gruesome battles including the barbed wire match, where wrestling ring ropes are replaced with sharp metal, and the flaming table match, where an opponent can only win by throwing his foe through a wooden table engulfed in flames. Wrestling legend Terry Funk once caught on fire during an ECW match.

And let’s not forget the Singapore Cane match, where wrestlers are allowed to wield swords much like those used in Japanese fencing.

No wonder it’s named “Extreme” Championship Wrestling.

But some fans are concerned that ECW has gone corporate with McMahon’s re branding and is in danger of losing the identity that helped make it unique.

“It can’t be the ECW they did 10 years ago,” said Scott E. Williams , who wrote “Hardcore History — The Extremely Unauthorized Story of ECW.”

Much of that is attributed to the inability of current promoters to capture the magic that existed in the company’s young days at a small bingo hall in Philadelphia.

For example, Tuesday night’s main event featured more of a traditional WWE-style wrestling match between ECW favorites Rob Van Dam and Olympian Kurt Angle. The two spent most of their time on the mat, and the crowd was quiet.

Even so, the Roanoke Civic Center was filled with 4,000 fans who shelled out between $23 and $63 to see a little gore.

“ECW is better because they use more weapons,” said 18-year-old Mark Patton, who was standing on his floor-level seat in the back row. He was accompanied by several friends, some of whom have remained loyal to the more toned-down WWE style.

“WWE fans for life,” screamed Pat Pollifrone, 16, from Salem. Pollifrone was sporting a white T-shirt with “The Undertaker rules (your soul)” scribbled in pen. Despite the crazy and sometimes gory matches, ECW fans have been loyal followers of the promotion for its dedication to athleticism in a sport that is sometimes dominated by girls in bikinis flashing the audience.

“It’s more raw, more rugged. These guys put more in their work than the guys in WWE,” said John Atkins, 20, from Roanoke.

Many of the original ECW fans, like Atkins, thought of themselves as insurgents, crying out against the way wrestling has turned into sports entertainment — in other words, a little wrestling and a lot of scripted vignettes — since McMahon nationalized the sport in the mid-1980s. For a long time, ECW had to maintain its ground in a market with WWE and another large wrestling promotion, World Championship Wrestling, or WCW.

“Part of the spirit of those ECW fans was the idea that they were these rebels against the two giant companies,” Williams said.

This sentiment was highlighted at the civic center with bright red “this match sucks” signs and scores of black “EC F’N W” shirts.

“A lot of the people are no-talent hacks” in the WWE, said longtime ECW fan Ishmael Abdul-Raheem, 21, from Roanoke. “And you can quote me on that.”

But with only a small portion of the original fan base — the old ECW had a television spot on the Nashville networks but never ran shows nationally — Williams said the only way a new ECW can be successful is to find new customers.

Fans such as Rich Jordan from Christiansburg are making that happen.

Gordon was a WWE fan for five years and has just recently made the switch to ECW-style wrestling.

“It’s faster, it’s more extreme,” said Jordan, 30. “The 'Smackdown’ matches are slower, not as exciting, the wrestlers have no energy.”

And of course, even as the WWE becomes the Microsoft of wrestling, a corporate giant that dominates its chosen field, some fans still like whatever, or who ever, enters the squared circle.

“If it’s wrestling, I’m gonna watch it. It don’t matter to me,” said Shawn Gordon, 29, from Radford. Even so, local fans of ECW-style wrestling, whether new or old, still get excited when their heel enters the ring.

This was demonstrated by the crowd starting with the first match of the night Tuesday — which involved tables, chairs and of course, a little blood.