Before it was "extreme", ECW was originally a small independent promotion called Eastern Championship Wrestling, founded by Tod Gordon, and was a member promotion of the National Wrestling Alliance, or NWA, the governing body of pro wrestling, that was an outgrowth of the defunct Tri-State Wrestling Alliance and featured many of their stars.

In 1994, the NWA was looking to restructure, as WCW had seceded from the NWA for good in 1993 and ceased using the NWA's championships. The goal was to bring the NWA back to its roots on the growing independent pro wrestling circuit. A tournament was arranged, with then-current NWA President Dennis Coraluzzo in charge and Shane Douglas selected to be the new NWA World Heavyweight Champion.

However, Gordon and his booker, future ECW owner Paul Heyman, had a different idea for the title, using it to get themselves over, as opposed to having the NWA use ECW to get over and on August 27, 1994, in the finals of the tournament, Shane Douglas won the championship, but then threw it to the ground, refusing the honour and cut a memorable promo decrying the NWA to the shock of not only the fans, but Coraluzzo himself. Douglas then declared himself the champion of a new promotion, EXTREME Championship Wrestling, vocalising the desires of Gordon and Heyman to break their promotion away from the NWA.

Officially withdrawing from the NWA shortly after Douglas' vacating the title and now free of the restrictions of having to use NWA-affiliated wrestlers and sanctioned matches, could now move the promotion in the direction Heyman envisioned for it, which is a blend of Mexican Lucha Libre, Japanese "death matches", and amateur-style technical wrestling, with less focus on outlandish cartoony gimmicks which was in style at the time to a grittier style, with more serious and realistic characters and motivations that would become ECW's hallmark and a percursor to the future direction of pro wrestling in general and the WWF's "Attitude" era in particular.

Heyman (and later the WWF's Vince McMahon in regard to his own product) would defend the ultra-violent aspects of the product (to include violence on women) as reflective of a changing society, as well as the changing tastes of wrestling fans.