The Rise & Fall of ECW (17 page)

Mikey Whipwreck cuts Sandman down to size.

Mikey Whipwreck climbed into the ring, and Sandman, who had climbed to the top of the ladder in the ring to be used as a weapon in the match, comes down and towers over Mikey Whipwreck. As the ring introductions were made, a long-haired blond Steve Austin, dressed in garb that both reflected the Sandman and Mikey Whipwreck image, came out of the locker room and walked up to the ring, pointing his finger.

Austin got in the ring, took the microphone, and said, “A couple of people got smart with me on the way to the building today and said I was a Hulk Hogan wannabe. One of them said I look like Hulk Hogan. I’ve been crapped on for four years. I believe I deserve a break.”

He climbed up the ladder and said, “I didn’t get to climb the ladder to the top of WCW like this. I’m up here all the way at the top, and I look down and I see two jabronees and”—pointing to Woman—“from the places I’ve been, about a five-dollar piece of ass.” As the crowd roared, Austin continued, “Whipwreck, you amaze me, son, because you’re a go-getter. You ain’t got no quit in you. You don’t know what the word quit means. I respect you for that, but you are still just a loser in my book, son. This is Steve Austin talking to you, and if I am calling you a loser, you can damn well bet it is the truth.”

Then he turned to Sandman and said, “Keep drinking a few more beers, smoke a few more cigarettes. You are sure really, really cool. Brother, I am going to get your ass in the ring and run circles around you, and when your tongue is hanging out down by your feet and I am walking off with the damn belt in my hands, you’re going to wonder what the hell was I thinking, that’s Steve Austin.”

Austin turned his attention to Mikey Whipwreck again and said, “Mikey Whipwreck, this is not one of the misfits back there in that godforsaken dressing room, man. This is Steve Austin.”

Then he pointed to Woman and said, “Don’t get me wrong, hey, I can rustle up five dollars, and if I had a clothespin to put on my nose, I’d give you a try. Don’t be looking at me pissed off, honey, because it is you that married a midget, not me. I wish both of your guys best wishes. I hope one of you kills the other because whoever comes out on top, you are looking at the next champ right here.”

As soon as Austin left the ring, Sandman ran over and attacked Whipwreck on the ropes, hitting him with his can of beer, kicking him and putting him down on one knee. But at the end, a bloodied Sandman was laid out on the canvas, with the ladder on top of him, as Mikey Whipwreck dived from the top turnbuckle and hit a splash on top of the Sandman, getting the pin, and the crowd roared its approval for this bizarre twist—Mikey Whipwreck, the lovable loser, was the ECW Heavyweight Champion.

Fans at the October 28 show also got more than they bargained for when a match between Dreamer and Cactus Jack was scheduled, with Terry Funk in Dreamer’s corner for support and Raven in Cactus Jack’s corner. After Cactus Jack turned heel, he proceeded to perform terribly in the ring for several weeks after that, further angering the fans and getting over as the heel. Heyman, as part of the storyline, accused Cactus Jack of stealing money, while Cactus Jack kept building up WCW and tearing down ECW. So Dreamer was there not only to meet Cactus Jack for revenge, but also to carry the banner of ECW and give the fans their money’s worth, since they felt so cheated recently by Cactus Jack. They would get their money’s worth and then some. At one point in the match, Cactus Jack stood on the ring apron and attempted to lead cheers for WCW, forming the letters with his arms, á la “YMCA.” Dreamer beat up on Cactus Jack, who fought back hard until he screamed at one point after hitting Dreamer, “Oww! I think I broke my hand!” He grabbed the ring microphone and addressed the frenzied crowd at the arena.

“Ladies and gentlemen, as you can see, I suffered tremendous damage to my hand, and as a result, I just can’t go on,” Cactus Jack said. “The pain is too great. I am truly sorry, but I’m afraid that this match is over. The bout will be ruled a no contest.”

To which referee Jim Molineux replied, “Cactus Jack, this is ECW—there’s no such thing as no contest.”

“Then do your job and count me out,”

Cactus Jack said. “Cactus, why are you being such a pussy?” Molineux shot back.

Cactus Jack walked back to the dressing room. Bill Alfonso—“Fronzie”—came out and said that Cactus Jack, according to the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission rules, had every right to be counted out. Alfonso began counting Cactus out, and Terry Funk decked Alfonso, took the microphone, and tried to lure Cactus back to the ring. “Cactus Jack, you’re a goddamn coward, you son of a bitch,” Funk said. “Your wife is a whore. Your mother is a whore. Your children are both whores.…Bischoff is a homo.”

Cactus ran out to the ring, where he was pummeled by Funk and Dreamer. Suddenly, Raven appeared and hit Dreamer and Funk in the back with a chair. Raven pulled out a ten-pound weight and a roll of athletic tape and taped the weight to the top of the boot of Cactus Jack, who used it to kick Funk in the testicles. Funk went to the back of the arena, and Raven and Cactus double-teamed Dreamer. Funk returned, but Raven and Cactus Jack beat up Funk and Dreamer until Alfonso came back out with a chair that was to be set on fire, using a kerosene-soaked towel. Cactus Jack hit Dreamer and Funk with the unlit chair and the kerosene-soaked towel, knocking them down. The chair was lit, and Cactus Jack raised it up to hit Funk, but Dreamer dove in to protect Funk, who told Cactus Jack to use the chair again. He did, but this time the towel came off the chair and looked as if it had set Funk on fire. Cactus Jack tried to catch Funk, who was running around seemingly on fire. What happened was that the towel hit Funk and then rolled off him, but it still burnt him on the arm and at least one fan in the audience. It set off panic in the arena, as workers started spraying fire extinguishers, and chaos—more than the typical chaos—was everywhere. When Funk got back to the dressing room, he was screaming and throwing furniture around.

“Funk and Cactus come up with a stunt that they had done several times in Japan, where they are going to set a chair on fire,” Heyman explains. “The way that you do this is you wrap a towel around a chair and douse it with lighter fluid, and set it on fire. This is not like a flaming table, where you just use the Ronsonal—barbecue lighter fluid—and it just dissipates. This is a cloth, so it doesn’t dissipate. That towel is going to burn. What they suggested was that at the finish of the match, Dreamer has Mick Foley beat, Raven gets involved, Funk comes in, the fight between Funk and Cactus gets out of control, they get Funk and Dreamer down, they light the chair on fire, Funk gets the chair and nails Cactus. Dreamer goes for the DDT on Raven. Balls shot to Dreamer, and DDT to Dreamer on the flaming chair. Cactus gets Dreamer as Raven and Funk fight off.

“Well, when Funk swung the chair, the towel broke loose, and the fire was bigger than they thought. It burned the rope that tied the towel to the chair. The towel came off the chair and flew onto Funk’s back. Funk rolled out of the ring. His shirt was on fire. A fan reached over and tried to put him out. Funk burned his arm pretty good, but the fan really burned his fingers. To make matters worse, the crew at the ECW arena, seeing there was an incident involving the fire, went crazy and started spraying fire extinguishers all over the place. Then the lights went out. It was a convergence of bad luck—one, two, three. Funk is on fire, the fan reaches over to put it out and burns his hand and starts screaming, ‘Help me, help me.’ The lights blow as the arena people caused this panic, spraying fire extinguisher everywhere. We are about to have a stampede.

“We had this spotlight that I had set up, not connected to the power supply,” Heyman continues. “We hooked it up to an alternative power supply, because we knew this spotlight was so bright it could blow the fuses in the building. The sound guy brought it, and brought the extra generator for it. That was the spotlight for Raven and Dreamer. So I am looking over in the dark while this mass panic is going on, and I see that Raven has Dreamer chained up. So I said, ‘Hit the spotlight.’ We hit the spotlight on Raven and Dreamer, and got everyone’s attention, and it made for great footage, too.”

This set up
November to Remember
—November 18, 1995—with so many twists and turns and any number of features that alone would have made any single show. Put together, the promotion was boiling over with heat.

Where to begin? How about bringing back Sabu?

Heyman had fired Sabu in April for taking a match in Japan and violating his commitment to an ECW show. But he saw Sabu about seven months later in Chicago, where Heyman says they made peace. “At the time, Sabu was miserable on the independents. We did a show right after the fire, where we put on some ECW
lucha libre
matches, with Konnan and Rey Mysterio and others, at The Amphitheatre in Chicago. It was a Spanish show, and we put on some ECW matches. It was the first time Sabu and I had seen each other—he was on the show, too—since the week before I fired him. We were very cold to each other, but when we were in the same room with each other for a minute, you could tell one was waiting for the other guy to say, ‘I really miss you.’ I missed him and he missed me. One was just waiting for the other to make the first move, and we ended up on the phone the next week. I said, ‘I had this fire thing happen, and I really want to give the fans something big when they come back. I think you are the answer.’”

So at the start of
November to Remember
at the ECW Arena, Heyman walked out to the ring and took the microphone. “Last time here we had a very bad incident with fire,” he announced. “It was bad. You have to look no further than me, because the buck stops with me. If there is anyone responsible or to be yelled at, I am the guy. We always make things up to the audience, and we’re going to make this up to you. We want to thank you for coming here tonight. We want to thank you for your support. We want you to know that it is not about personal agendas here. It is about giving the audience what you want. The only thing I will tell you is that if I could turn back the clock, I would. But you can’t. So why don’t we say that we at least tried. So if you don’t mind, and there is no fire or fire extinguishers, let’s dim the lights and turn back the clock.”

They dimmed the lights, and when they came back on, Heyman was standing in the ring with Sabu, which sent a roar through the building and pumping the crowd up before the first match even took place.

If they were going to bring back Sabu, then why not Tazz, who was nearly recovered from his broken neck? He came back for this show as a special referee for a feature match between ECW Commissioner Tod Gordon and the heel referee, Bill Alfonso.

It would be a new Tazz, an angry, badass character that would skyrocket as one of the anchors of the ECW promotion. “We were bringing Tazz back, and this was under a new gimmick,” Heyman recalls. “He was going to be our ultimate fighter-style wrestler. We were going to market him as the toughest guy on the planet. He was going to be a lot of what Austin’s character became. A lot of what Austin was, the beer drinking came from the Sandman, but the attitude came from Tazz. Tazz gave the middle finger, the whole thing.

“We were going to bring back Tazz, and I knew he could be a big monster babyface, but you needed to give him a year and a half as a heel. And again, wanting to break all conventions and the way things were done in the past, I knew that the biggest feud in ECW, and the match we would end up going on Pay-Per-View with, was Tazz against Sabu. And much like I was going to make people wait forever to see Dreamer defeat Raven, I wanted to make people wait forever to see Tazz wrestle Sabu.”

Tazz welcomed the change, and like Cactus Jack, called on real emotions to create his persona and deliver compelling promos. “I was bitter, and for real, because no one sent cards or letters or anything, nothing from the fans,” Tazz explains. “I was talking on the phone to Paul one day and saying, ‘This is bullshit. These people don’t care about me.’ I went off, and Paul said, ‘You need to do that in the ring.’ I said, ‘Paul, you know I am no good on the microphone, I can’t do it.’ He said, ‘You can, and you need to let that out.’ He kept trying to get me to talk on the microphone. The Tazmaniac character had died—we killed it—a couple of months before I broke my neck, and we were still trying to find this new character.

“All we knew about this new character was that he was going to be from Brooklyn, like I was, and I was going to wear orange and black, and going to have an attitude,” Tazz remembers. “That is a little vague, but that is what the character was at that point. We would let it evolve into whatever it was going to evolve into. And then, boom, I break my neck. Paul had this genius idea that if you are so bitter, tell them on the microphone. Tell them how you feel about that. He had me do this thing as a special ref to help Tod Gordon and not help this evil referee who was going to become a character wrestler—Bill Alfonso—and I would help the heel, Fonzie, and punch the shit out of Tod Gordon. I would cut the thing on the microphone: ‘No one cared about me. Not one card, not one letter. No one gives two shits about Tazz. The only one who cared about me was Bill Alfonso. He helped pay my bills.’ It was all a heel promo, and very heated at the time in late 1995. It was strong. It was a breakout promo for me, and it was all because of Paul. No writers, none of that bullshit, just Paul gave you some input and you just found a flavor for yourself.”