The Rise & Fall of ECW (14 page)

The roll that ECW was on took a turn in the opposite direction in the summer of 1995. During a show in Fort Lauderdale, Tazz broke his neck in a tag team match with Eddie Guerrero against Dean Malenko & Too Cold Scorpio. “Scorpio and Malenko were taking it to me pretty good,” Tazz notes. “I was trying to tag Eddie, and I couldn’t get to him. The next thing you know they gave me a spike piledriver. Malenko came off the second rope, grabbed my boots, drove my boots down while Scorpio had me up for the piledriver, and boom. I didn’t get a chance to protect myself. I landed on my forehead and jacked my whole neck back, and that was it. It was just a nasty move where I thought it was going to be one move, and it ended up being a different move, and when your timing is off in this business, it is catastrophic. I was scared. I didn’t have any feeling in my body for a few seconds, although it felt much longer than that.”

Dudley Dudley, Big Dick Dudley, and Snot Dudley.

But Tazz still managed to finish his match, and after the show, with the help of Tommy Dreamer, went to a nearby hospital. “When Tazz broke his neck in Florida, he finished his match and kept saying, ‘Damn, my neck is hurting,’” Dreamer recalls. “I walked him into the hospital. We would always travel together. They asked him, ‘How did you get in here?’ He said, ‘I walked.’ They said, ‘There is no way you walked in here.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I did, I walked in here.’ They said, ‘Well, sir, you have a broken neck.’”

It was frightening on several levels for Tazz, who, with his wife, had just bought a house and had no signed contract with ECW. “The company was just starting to make a little money,” Tazz remembers. “I had just gotten back from my honeymoon, maybe a week after my honeymoon. Paul stood by me, paid me for every week, even though I was out for about nine months. We were just barely getting by as a company, and he couldn’t afford that. We had a deal with a handshake, not a written contract. I never signed a paper contract with Paul Heyman, always a handshake, even when I was ECW Champion, and it was big. We always had that trust. I didn’t have insurance. I was young. Paul said he would stand by me, and he did. I will never, ever forget it. Paul was loyal to the crew and the crew was loyal to Paul.”

The other setback came in the Guerrero-Benoit-
Malenko story-line. Heyman planned on having Guerrero and Benoit meet for the ECW Heavyweight Championship, with Benoit winning and being a long-term title holder. But at the end of the summer, all three left ECW for WCW, which sent a shock wave through ECW and created controversy that exists today over how it happened.

Heyman accused WCW boss Eric Bischoff of raiding ECW. “ECW was the first victim of the Monday night war [between WCW and WWE],” he states. “In August 1995, WCW stole Chris Benoit and Eddie Guerrero and Dean Malenko, all in one swoop.”

Dreamer says that ECW had become too popular to ignore by the two larger promotions: “I think ECW started getting noticed, and the other companies needed more talent.”

Bischoff dismisses the notion that he “raided” ECW talent. “I need to point out that one man’s raid is another company’s acquisition,” he asserts. “We never raided anybody. We never raided the WWE, despite everybody’s opinion to the contrary. We never raided ECW. We never raided anybody. Think about it, did Vince McMahon raid all the local territories when he accumulated talent? They made a decision that they would rather work for Vince McMahon as he was expanding his national territory, as opposed to working for local promoters. Was that a raid? Certainly not in Vince McMahon’s mind and certainly not in the minds of the people who work for WWE currently, or in the fans’ minds, or mine. Did some talent leave ECW and come to WCW? Of course they did, because: A, they probably weren’t getting paid, and they had to in order to pay their bills and feed their families, and B, they recognized that WCW was a much stronger, much more secure, a much larger international platform for them to ply their trade. Did they make that choice to come to WCW? Of course they did. Did some of them make the choice to go to Vince? Of course they did. But that is not a raid, despite what Paul Heyman and others would have you think.”

It certainly created some bitter feelings between WCW and ECW, beyond perhaps the normal competitive tension. “Eric Bischoff is full of shit, and much like a lot of other people, never gave ECW the credit that it deserved,” Heyman claims. “Eric Bischoff stole Chris Benoit, Eddie Guerrero, and Dean Malenko, same way he signed Chris Jericho from ECW, same way he stole the cruiserweights from ECW. It was a smart move by Eric Bischoff to do it, because he was in competition with Vince, and he had to have the talent, and he found them in ECW before anyone else had a chance to sign them. It was smart by Bischoff to do it. I just don’t like the fact that he never said, ‘Yeah, I stole that from ECW.’ Because he did. It was blatant. We sued him over it a bunch of times.”

That sort of tension didn’t exist between ECW and World Wrestling Federation, as witnessed by the later cooperative efforts between the two promotions. “I didn’t think it was the right thing to do that we would just raid his talent roster and give nothing back,” McMahon says. “We put Paul on the payroll to compensate him in some way for taking a lot of the talent that he had. Contrary to that, of course, was Eric Bischoff, who would take his talent as well and not give him anything. Gleefully, not give him anything.”

But even in the departure of three of its biggest stars, ECW showed it was a different promotion. It was the last night in ECW for Guerrero and Malenko, and the fans were told so when the two met in a Two Out of Three Falls match. The two wrestlers didn’t relish facing what they expected to be a hostile crowd, and perhaps there was no more hostile crowd on the face of the earth than an angry ECW crowd. But it was also a crowd that appreciated what wrestlers did in ECW, putting their bodies on the line to produce great shows. That was the emotion that took over the audience for Malenko and Guerrero’s last night in ECW. “Others who had left had heard chants like, ‘You sold out,’ ‘Fuck you,’ ‘We hope you die,’ and all kinds of different chants,” Heyman explains. “But these guys got showered with respect. The audience was chanting, ‘Please don’t go.’ Both Guerrero and Malenko were moved to tears during the match. It was a moving night. They wrestled to a draw, very rare in ECW. It was a regular card at the ECW Arena that we showed the highlights on television. Again, doing what no one else had done, we taped the match and we aired it throughout the course of an hour as one episode of television, a very famous episode of
ECW TV.

“In the past, no one would ever say a wrestler was leaving one organization for another,” Heyman continues. “You just beat a guy on his way out. If we followed the golden rule of wrestling, we would have had Eddie Guerrero get up in the ring and have Sabu put him through a table, and it would be the end of Eddie Guerrero. Then we would have Dean Malenko come out and have someone beat the fuck out of him and run him out. We went the opposite way. We showered them with respect, and when their match was over, unbeknownst to them, we all were coming out to the ring, the whole locker room. We put them up on our shoulders and shook their hands. We wanted to show everyone we were the fans’ promotion. We appreciated everything they did for ECW. It was so cool. It was such an emotional moment. And everyone thought I was nuts. All my confidants thought I was crazy. They said, ‘You have to beat them out the door.’ I had a lot of resistance to what I wanted to do, but we were going to do this my way.”

This is the way Joey Styles called it on the video: “If you are not here tonight to see this live, I don’t know that the camera, or anything else, can convey and capture the feeling in this arena tonight, the overwhelming emotion that is overtaking everyone in this building.”

Still, despite all the warm feelings, there was a lot of fear about what would happen next in the promotion after losing three major attractions. Ron Buffone turned to Heyman in the studio while putting together the TV show and said, “I now know it is over. There is no way we can recover from this. We have been so publicly punked out. I am scared this is the end.”

Heyman, though, had options, and tapped one that had captured his attention in Mexico—a group of wrestlers who were making a name for themselves in
lucha libre
wrestling, in particular, Rey Mysterio, Jr., and Psicosis.

Rey Mysterio, Jr., was born in San Diego, California, on December 11, 1974. He was trained by his uncle, another great
lucha libre
wrestler, Rey Mysterio, Sr. The young Rey was so good and talented that, at the age of 15, he made his professional debut, which had to take place in Tijuana, since he was too young to be licensed in the United States as a professional wrestler. Despite his small size—5-foot-3 and 140 pounds—he developed a crowd-pleasing acrobatic style and found someone who could compliment him in battles in a rival who went by the name of Psicosis. Heyman had seen some tapes of the two and was very impressed. “It was the hottest thing I had ever seen, and it wasn’t even the main event,” Heyman recalls. “It was in the middle of the card—two young kids, stealing the show every night. I knew this could replace Benoit, Malenko, and Guerrero. It was a whole different style,
lucha libre.
Nobody had seen it in this country. WCW had it in its lap, because they co-promoted one
lucha
show in Los Angeles, put it on Pay-Per-View, and fucked it up, didn’t follow up on it. It was just another example of WCW not understanding where wrestling was heading.”

Heyman called a booker and wrestler in Mexico he knew named Konnan.

“They took Benoit, Malenko, and Guerrero,” Heyman said to Konnan. “If you were me, and you had the golden pass to take anyone from Mexico, and use them when it is convenient and doesn’t interfere with your business, who would you pick? It can’t be you. You can’t come in person. You can’t lead the way.” (Konnan would, however, soon join ECW.)

Konnan told Heyman, “Mysterio and Psicosis.”

“Is it okay with you?” Heyman asked.

“Paul E., they are going to blow away everything you have on your show,” Konnan said. “Nobody can follow them. I am learning it now. Nobody can follow them. It is the hottest thing you have ever seen.”

They would make their debut at
Gangstas Paradise,
a September show that would come at a time when it appeared ECW might be on the ropes after the loss of Benoit, Guerrero, and Malenko. It turned out to be one of the bigger nights the promotion had seen yet.

The Pitbulls beat Raven & Stevie Richards for the ECW Tag Team title in a Two Out of Three Falls-Double Dog Collar bout; Tommy Dreamer pinned Raven, but Fonzie came out and reversed the victory as the state athletic commission representative; 911 finally got his hands on Fonzie, whom he had been chasing all summer, and chokeslammed him; Mikey Whipwreck & The Public Enemy defeated Too Cold Scorpio, New Jack & Sandman in a Steel Cage match; and a new tag team named The Eliminators came to ECW and joined Jason in defeating Tazz & Rick & Scott Steiner.

Lucha libre finds a home at ECW: Mysterio vs. Psicosis.

The Eliminators consisted of two very talented athletes—Perry Saturn and John Kronus. Saturn—born Perry Satullo on October 25, 1966, in Cleveland—came out of the army, where the story goes that he was an airborne ranger. He used his physical prowess when he came out of the service to become a wrestler, and began training with the legendary Killer Kowalski in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1988. Two years later, as Saturn, he made his debut in the United States Wrestling Association. He also wrestled under the name The Iron Horseman as a cowboy in Kowalski’s promotion, the International Wrestling Federation. Like many other wrestlers, he also wrestled in Japan with New Japan Pro Wrestling in 1993.

Saturn also worked as a manager of a bar in Boston, and it was there he met a bouncer named George Caiazo, who was interested in becoming a wrestler. Saturn sent him to Kowalski for training and then formed a tag team with him, giving Caiazo the ring name John Kronus. Kronus was a unique 6-foot-3, 280-pound force of nature in the ring, and along with the unpredictable Saturn, would form a devastating tag team.