The Rise & Fall of ECW (13 page)

“I called my old friend Rick Steiner. I said, ‘I need you for one shot. We are going to do a three-way, and I am teaming you with Tazz.’ He said, ‘I will be there, no problem.’ I knew in my heart what I had to do. About five minutes before the show began, I went to Tod Gordon and said, ‘I’m going to fire Sabu.’ He said, ‘Oh, yes, you have to.’ I said, ‘No, I am going to fire him in the middle of the ring. I’m going to let the audience fire him.’”

Heyman grabbed Tazz and 911 and told them they would be walking out to the ring out of character, to tell the audience what was going on. Heyman got into the ring, took the microphone, and addressed the crowd: “Sabu gave us a committment and decided that because he was offered more money someplace else that he would not give you what you paid to see and he would not give me the courtesy of a phone call when he swore to God on Sunday night before we all went into production that he would do that when I said, ‘If you are not going to be in the arena, if you are going to fuck the audience that made you a star in this country, let me know and I will handle the interview.’ He said, ‘I swear to God I will be there.’

“Everyone back there busts their ass for you, and everybody back there has been building this thing together since September 1993, and everybody has made sacrifices. If you want him back, I will bring him back and all will be forgiven, and if you don’t want him back…time will heal all wounds, and if you want him back sometime, just let me know.”

Heyman says he didn’t know how the audience would respond. “The audience just gasped, because he was the hottest guy we had. I look over at Tazz, and he gives me this look like, ‘Holy fuck, man. This is where it ends. We blew it. We did something that the audience is going to hate the promotion for: fired their hero.’ But one person in the audience screams out, ‘Fuck him.’ I look over because I don’t know if the guy is pointing at me and talking about me. I don’t know who he is saying fuck to yet. Someone else yells, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ and in a few seconds, the whole building in unison is chanting, ‘Fuck Sabu! Fuck Sabu!’ and it got louder and louder. I put down the microphone and looked at the audience as if, ‘Okay, you made your decision.’ And we all left the ring and went on with the show. No one asked for a refund, and he wasn’t back until November 1995.”

Tazz was angry—angrier than normal—at Sabu for bailing on him. “Sabu and I did not get along,” he says. “I couldn’t stand him and he couldn’t stand me. I was really angry with Sabu when he left. Paul Heyman had me walk to the ring with him and 911, and Paul went into the ring and publicly fired Sabu. It was the real deal.”

Tazz and Sabu had a unique relationship. In many ways, they made each other, but they hated each other as well. “Sabu was the best,” Tazz says. “I don’t know how to explain him. There were times when we hated each other’s guts. We were tag team champions at one point, and we hated each other. We were at the Marriott in Philadelphia, at the airport, and Paul Heyman was in the room with us, and we were going to throw each other through the window. Paul had to calm us down. We just didn’t get along. We were both supercompetitive with each other. But, God, without Sabu, I don’t think I would be where I am today. He made me. The reason why I got into ECW was to wrestle Sabu in 1993. I was there to make him, and in the end, I think we made each other. He was ahead of his time, the whole table-breaking thing was him, in Japan, with FMW, and then The Public Enemy and the Dudley Boyz did it after that. Sabu was a crazy bastard with a good heart. He has a tough texture on the outside, but inside he was good people, a good human being. We used to get under each other’s skin a lot, but I miss being around him. I think he was great. His style was spectacular. He was so smart and knew how to make his moves mean something. He was a master at his craft.”

When Heyman fired Sabu, it was another revolutionary moment in wrestling, where the fans were brought behind the scenes and shown the real dealings of the business. “Paul never lied to the fans,” Dreamer claims. “Anything that got out to the Internet or to a magazine, Paul, a lot of times, would address it by going into the ring and talking to the fans. He lied to the wrestlers, but he never lied to the fans.”

Chris Jericho remembers how Heyman would lie to the boys. “It was my job to get the crazy plane tickets and plane fares that Paul E. would arrange for me, often calling me about a half hour before I had to leave my house for the flight,” Jericho says. “I remember one time I got home at eleven at night and was supposed to leave the next morning. There are very few flights from Calgary that will get into Philly in time. I called him every hour and no answer, 11:30, 12:30, left messages, and finally at 5:30 in the morning I left a message telling him he could ‘…take your TV title and stick it up your ass. I don’t care what you do, I’m not coming in. Forget your stupid promotion. See you later, buddy. Forget it. I am not coming, no matter what.’

“A minute later he called me back and said, ‘Hey, what’s going on? I tried to call you and your phone wasn’t working, and I just couldn’t get you, and here is your flight information. What’s going on, buddy,’ and blah, blah, blah. By the time I finished talking with him, it was impossible not to like this guy. I had called him and told him I was never going to work for him again, and ten minutes later I was packing my bags with minutes to spare to make it to the airport.”

Heyman had been the driving force behind the ECW expansion, and now he would become the owner as well. Tod Gordon was having financial problems and other issues, and in the first week of May 1995, Heyman took over total control and responsibility. “That responsibility, including a couple of hundred grand in debts that had been run up, including about $25,000 in TV station fees, and $35,000 in production fees, and plane tickets, and other expenses,” Heyman explains. “Tod remained on and helped out when he could, in some business things or securing an arena, and remained the on-air commissioner, for rulings and such.”

The organization moved the merchandising operation to New York—that stepped up sales—while the ticket operation was run out of Philadelphia, with the ECW Arena as the anchor. Much of that action had consisted of violent slugfests, with tables, chairs, ladders, canes, and whatever weapons could be used to fuel these brutal battles. But Heyman had also been cultivating another part of the promotion, using Chris Benoit, Dean Malenko, and Eddie Guerrero to present the fans with pure wrestling—moves and holds and fast-paced action. He would now place an emphasis on that part of the promotion, opening up another area to grow and bring in more fans.

“ECW was known as the blood-and-guts company in the early days,” Dreamer recalls. “Then everyone started doing crazier stuff, like breaking tables. Then we brought in all these new wrestlers like Chris Benoit and Dean Malenko, and turned it around to a wrestling company.”

Heyman said he wanted to use the ECW TV Championship to create this different personality with the promotion. “With Dean Malenko and Eddie Guerrero, I wanted to make the TV Championship different than the heavyweight championship,” he said. “I wanted to give it its own personality. At first, in 1994, it was the title that Mikey Whipwreck had won. He won it by accident, he took beatings and survived, he was the miracle kid. Then we took the TV title off him and put the tag team title on him with Mick Foley. But as we got into 1995, I wanted to make the TV title more of the pure wrestling championship. I gave the title to Too Cold Scorpio, and started having him doing really nice wrestling matches with people, usually the third or fourth match of the night, so no one would complain about it being boring or yell, ‘We want blood, we want blood.’ This would be the fifteen minutes a night of chain wrestling, is what they call it—whip into the ropes, duck under, drop-kick, grab a headlock, flip the guy over, and you both arch up to your feet. Wrestling, grappling.”

Heyman told Eddie Guerrero, “I want you to come in and beat Too Cold Scorpio for the TV title, and dedicate your victory to Art Barr [Guerrero’s former tag team partner who had passed away]. I know that will mean something to you. And I want to get you in a feud with Dean Malenko. I want Malenko to be the heel. I want to make this a wrestling feud.”

Heyman planned on switching the title back and forth between Malenko, Guerrero, and Benoit, which was unusual for ECW, which did not often use their titles for such gimmicks—flip-flopping champions quickly and doing all sorts of outcomes with the championship among the three wrestlers. Guerrero beat Too Cold Scorpio at the April 8 show to win the TV belt, then wrestled Malenko to a draw at the April 15, 1995,
Hostile City Showdown,
which also featured Raven winning over Tommy Dreamer in a disqualification; Axl Rotten beating Ian Rotten; Tsubo Genjin defeating Tony Sexton; Sandman taking the ECW Championship from Shane Douglas; The Public Enemy beating The Pitbulls for the ECW tag team title; 911 beating Ron Simmons; and Cactus Jack defeating Terry Funk for the ECW Heavyweight Championship.

The May 13, 1995, ECW Arena show was known as
Enter the Sandman.
Guerrero and Malenko wrestled to another draw, and then Guerrero beat Marty Jannetty; the feud between Axl and Ian Rotten continued, with Axl winning a “barbed wire baseball bat barbed wire chair match”; Tazz & 911 defeated Tsubo Genjin & Hiroyoshi Iekuda; Hack Meyers beat Tony Stetson. Sandman beat Cactus Jack and then Shane Douglas for the ECW Heavyweight belt; and in a Double Dog Collar match, The Public Enemy beat The Pitbulls again to successfully defend their ECW Tag Team Championship.

It continued to be a hot summer at the box office and on TV for ECW, with one big show after another raising the profile and spreading the reputation of the promotion. One of the featured promos that summer was a referee named Bill Alfonso, known as Fonzie. He was supposedly appointed by the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission, and created a lot of heat. “We had him do everything, every bullshit wrestling decision known to man,” Heyman notes. “We did every ripoff finish, because we had never done it before, and we put all the heat on Fonzie. We did things like reverse a decision, which we never would do. We had him call for a disqualification because someone threw a punch. We had him stop a match because someone would have a little cut over their eye. It was some of the most insane heat you had ever seen.”

Cactus Jack vs. Sandman.

The Dreamer-Raven feud was going strong, as was Sandman and Mick Foley’s. A tag team war was raging between The Public Enemy and a team that had arrived on the scene from Smoky Mountain Wrestling in Tennessee called The Gangstas. Jamal Mustafa, known as Mustafa Saed, and Jerome Young, a former bounty hunter known as New Jack, were The Gangstas, and they were one of the most violent teams in ECW, using anything you could think of for weapons, from crutches to staple guns.

ECW also introduced a gimmick that would spawn perhaps the most successful act in ECW history, though the Dudleyz would take some time to find their proper place in the business. At the July 1, 1995,
Hardcore Heaven,
Dino Sendoff & Don E. Allen wrestled to a no contest with Chad Austin & The Broad Street Bully; Hack Meyers defeated Big Malley; Too Cold Scorpio beat Tazz; Stevie Richards & Raven beat Tommy Dreamer & Luna Vachon for the ECW Tag Team Championship; Axl Rotten beat Ian Rotten; The Public Enemy defeated The Gangstas; in an ECW World Heavyweight Championship bout, Sandman beat Cactus Jack, and the Dudley Boyz defeated The Pitbulls.

The Dudleyz were a stable of wrestlers supposedly related to one another, and initially were part of Raven’s Nest, one of many characters who would connect as Raven followers. The story went that the Dudleyz were all half brothers, and in their debut, there were three—Dudley Dudley, the only pure Dudley because both of his parents were named Dudley; Big Dick Dudley (Alex Rizzo, 6-foot-3, 285 pounds, and trained along with Tazz by Johnny Rodz), the big enforcer of the group; and Lil’ Snot Dudley (Anthony Michaels), the underdog, who was injured in a boating accident after
Hardcore Heaven
and was replaced by Dances with Dudley (Adolfo Bermudez), so named because he was the result of their father’s visit to an Indian reservation. There would be many more Dudleyz over the years, but the two that would break away and carve out a huge niche of their own were Bubba Ray Dudley and D-Von Dudley, who would emerge on the scene a year later.