Does anyone remember the WCW? If your answer is, "Yeah! I go to the Web Content Caching workshops every year," then please stop reading, because this column ain't for you.

World Championship Wrestling. A short-lived creation of Ted Turner's empire that was meant to compete with the ever-so-popular World Wrestling Entertainment. Instead of competing, however, the WCW was gobbled up by WWE in the late 1990s and thus ended yet another strange chapter in professional wrestling.

For those of you not familiar with Tampa, Fla., this is like a professional wrestling mecca. Wrestlers from all walks of life either grew up here, got their start here, or still live here, including Terry "Hulk" Hogan, who grew up here, but just recently moved to Miami.

Thanks to that, I was able to attend a taping of "WCW Monday Nitro" in 1998 that was being done at the George Steinbrenner pavilion in Tampa. I was the guest of a young wrestler who had just been named the WCW Rookie of the Year, but was recovering from an injury. I had done a story on him, and he thought it would be interesting to get an inside look at how wrestling is done.

I was fascinated, especially by seeing some of the names and faces that I had grown up watching in front of the boob tube when Star Trek wasn't on. And no, I'm not trying to reveal redneck roots or anything like that. I'm just trying to demonstrate that whatever I say from this point on, that it's not because I don't like wrestling. I just don't think it should be sharing air time with what is supposed to be science fiction/fantasy/horror shows of SciFi Channel.

The announcement was made this past week that SciFi Channel, not its sister USA Network, would be airing a summer edition of ECW, a branch of WWE, that would replace Tuesday night science-fiction programming with wrestling. It's funny, whenever I tell people that, whether they like science-fiction or not, they have to do a double take.

Make all the jokes about how real wrestling is that you want, but the fact remains that wresting has absolutely no place on the SciFi Channel, period.

Yes, I know you were probably looking forward to some heavy-handed beating of SciFi Channel president Bonnie Hammer, especially after what she received from me with bonehead moves like the cancellation of "Farscape" to the airing and media duping of the M. Night Shymalan "documentary." But to be honest, I can see what Hammer is trying to do. Wrestling, no matter what your opinion of it, equals ratings. And if SciFi Channel is going to survive to continue making some of its trademark series like "Battlestar Galactica" and the Stargates, it's going to need viewership, and with it its ad revenue, to keep these other expensive projects afloat.

The bottom line is important ... but come on, where is the line? This is like saying that in order to draw more viewers to Oxygen, they're going to begin airing reruns of "The Man Show." Or to beef up sales at the local $100 steakhouse, there will now be $1 hamburger nights on Tuesdays. Don't get me wrong, but those crowds really don't mix.

Hammer says that there are a lot of sci-fi fans who are also wrestling fans. I know a lot of sci-fi fans who are also great quiltmakers, but I don't think a series about how to best create a quilt would be very welcome on SciFi Channel either.

Maybe it's time that we help Ms. Hammer understand what sci-fi is. According to Dictionary.com, "science fiction" (they don't include the hyphen like we do) is a noun that serves as a "literary or cinematic genre in which fantasy, typically based on speculative scientific discoveries or developments, environmental changes, space travel, or life on other planets, forms part of the plot or background." I'm sorry, but while I'm sure many of these wrestlers can be mistaken for aliens, how exactly do they fit that definition?

SciFi Channel has blurred the line between sci-fi and non-sci-fi for years now, and maybe we just haven't expressed our displeasure loud enough. I mean, even when you're shouting, it's sometimes difficult to get the attention of studio heads. But does that mean we should stop shouting? No. We need to keep doing it, and keep reminding Bonnie Hammer and the people working for her that THIS is what we, the faitful viewers of SciFi Channel, want. And THIS doesn't include wrestling.

Don't wait for ratings to kill wrestling. Just like on USA, the old UPN and what will be the new CW, no matter where wrestling is, it will draw the people. So for SciFi Channel, having ECW will undoubtedly be a ratings whopper. But sometimes we have to ask ourselves, what is the cost we have to pay for that success? When it comes to credibility of the SciFi Channel, that cost is considerable.

Michael Hinman is founder and news coordinator for Airlock Alpha, writing out of Tampa, Fla. He can be reached at michael@airlockalpha.com.