The Rise & Fall of ECW (21 page)

“Stevie and I started doing a parody, paying tribute to the wrestlers who had come before us, like The Fabulous Ones,” Meanie recalls. “Then we started doing teams that were current. WCW had a team called The Bluebloods, which was William Regal and ‘Beautiful’ Bobby Eaton. Stevie became Lord Stevie, and I became Sir Meanie, the Earl of Eating, because Bob Eaton was the Earl of Eaton. My family crest on the back of my shirt was a plate, with a knife, fork, and spoon. One time Stevie was Baron Von Stevie and I was Colonel DeMeanie.”

Eventually, that turned into the three of them forming the Blue World Order. “That was supposed to be a one-night deal, but the crowd reacted so strongly to it, ECW saw a chance to push Stevie and sell a ton of T-shirts,” Meanie explains. “They did that. It became a great avenue for Stevie to become a single star. The merchandise woman at the arena told me at one point they were selling two hundred T-shirts a night. It became a big hit and lasted nearly a year.”

It started from a parody they did of the rock band KISS at the ECW arena. JT Smith went into the ring to cut a promo, and instead of singing, as was his gimmick, he said his throat was sore and he couldn’t sing.

“What I’ve done is gone out and got the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band here for you tonight,” Smith said, and Meanie, Nova, and Richards came out in full KISS makeup.

“We did the bop and the strut, and the place went insane,” Nova recalls. “Sandman came out and wound up caning us. I remember in the locker room after that, Bubba Ray Dudley said, ‘You guys are never going to top that. The only thing that would top that would be a parody of the nWo.’ Meanie said, ‘We should be the bWo, the Blue World Order. We joked around and kidded about it and then we decided to do it. We had to clear it through Raven, and he had to clear it through Paul.

Nova as the Blue World Order’s Hogan.

“I made all the signs for the bWo,” Nova says. “I remember Meanie saying, ‘I’ll be like Razor Ramon. I’ll be the Blue Guy instead of the Bad Guy.’ Stevie said [to me], ‘Dude, you have to be Virgil.’ Raven says, ‘Virgil? He has to be Hogan.’ Stevie says, ‘He can’t be Hogan.’ Raven asks, ‘Why not?’ Stevie said, ‘If he is Hogan, everybody is going to think he is the leader of Raven’s Flock. Everybody knows Raven’s the leader of the Flock.’ Raven said, ‘Fuck that, he’s Hogan.’ That is how I got to be Hogan. We had a lot of fun with it.

“It was only supposed to be a one-night thing, but Paul said, ‘Keep doing it.’ Then we made the shirts, and we sold out a gross of those shirts in one night. Stevie and I said to each other, ‘We better get some more paint, because we may be doing this for a while.’ We did it for a year. It never got old. We hit the ring throwing the shirts out and posing. It had absolutely nothing to do with wrestling ability or anything like that. But there was a chemistry between the three of us, and the people got it. It was so cool. Raven’s lackeys stepping up and doing their own thing. People still remember it. Twenty years from now, people will be walking up to me and saying, ‘bWo.’”

They experimented with other parodies not quite as successful as the bWo. “No one ever saw this one,” Nova states. “One night in Reading, Pennsylvania, we did the Jackson Five. We had blackface and Afro wigs. It was done tastefully. I was Michael. I didn’t have any blackface on. I was white. We only did it once. We were going to do it at the arena, but Paul said, ‘No Jacksons. If the wrong people catch wind of this, we’re ruined. No Jacksons.’

“ECW shows were like a circus. The strong man. The bearded lady. The high wire act. It was a little bit of everything. So we were an attraction. We were characters—a superhero, a 350-pound guy with blue hair who did moonsaults, and Stevie. We weren’t the second coming of the Freebirds.”

Another ECW act that made its debut in 1996 might have rivaled that legendary tag team, though, in terms of popularity and surpassed them in intensity—the Dudley Boyz, not as previously constituted, but this version with Bubba and a postal worker from Brooklyn, New York, named Devon Hughes, who would later go by the name of D-Von Dudley.

“My grandmother pretty much raised me,” D-Von says. “I remember watching wrestling one night when I was a kid, on Channel 9, WOR, at midnight, and I remember asking my grandmother what that was. She explained to me that it was wrestling. I never dreamed of doing it then.”

D-Von and Bubba Dudley.

But as he grew older, he became more interested, to the point where he wanted to be part of it. So he went the route of so many other future ECW stars, and was trained by Johnny Rodz. “I owe a lot to Johnny Rodz,” D-Von says. “My grandfather gave me the money for the school. None of my family members believed I could do this. Everybody downed my idea. At the time, I worked for the post office, from a mail carrier to unloading trucks to sorting the mail, but I knew there was more for me ahead than that. But nobody believed in me. Everyone said, ‘You have a government job. Stick with it, it has good benefits.’ But I couldn’t hear that. My grandfather, Richard Davis, was the only one who believed in me. He gave me the money to go to wrestling school.”

The 6-foot-2, 240-pound D-Von toiled on the independent circuit, as so many others had, before getting his break in ECW in 1996, calling himself the A-Train. “I put in so much money and time,” D-Von says. “There were times when I would drive three hours for a show, and nobody would show up. And if I had a chance to do it all over again, I would do it the same way. I drove all over, and didn’t always perform in front of large crowds, but it gave me the experience I needed to go forward and arrive in ECW.”

When D-Von first got to ECW there were a number of Dudleyz already there, including Bubba. D-Von would first feud with Bubba before wrestling as a single for a while and then later joining Bubba for their successful tag team. “Bubba was a kind of babyface,” D-Von says. “He danced, and when he talked, he stuttered, and people would want to see him dance and make him talk so they could hear him stutter. But my character was supposed to be totally against it. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want him to try to please the people or encourage him to do it, at one point beating him up in the ring a couple of times for doing it.

“Me and Bubba would have probably never gotten together without Paul,” D-Von says. “Nobody knew about us. When we got the chance to work with Paul Heyman, he saw something special in both of us.”

What was “special” in the Dudley Boyz was not just how brutal they were or the weapons they used in the ring, of which there were many. It was the buttons they pushed in the crowd, so that many times the fans would lose control, riots would take place, and police would arrive.

“Nobody got the crowd worked up like we did,” D-Von recalls. “We would just tell people what they didn’t want to hear. We told them they were ugly. We told them they were losers. We told them what we were going to do to their girlfriends or wives or daughters, after the match was over. We told them we were going to beat them up if they didn’t shut up. We got in touch with the fans. That was the whole ECW concept. We catered to the fans in a way that we got them involved in the match. We knew how to get under people’s skin. Whatever got underneath our skin when we were out in public, we would put that in our act in the ring, and that was how we would incite the fans. It got to the point sometimes where they thought they could whip our ass. They would come in the back, and we would say to them, ‘Look. Go home. We’re gonna kill you.’ And if they didn’t listen, then we killed them. Not literally, but they probably thought we had.

“I think just about everywhere we went, it would get out of hand,” D-Von says. “The fans would take the storyline to another level. It was as if whatever we were doing in the ring to whomever, they wanted to join in and kick our asses. Every time we went to the ring, we had to watch our backs. We knew that once we realized what we had and what we were doing, we knew we had something special. So just about every night, especially in the last three years of ECW, when we were at our strongest, we knew we had to watch ourselves. It wasn’t unheard of, even if they knew they were going to get killed, for some fans to want to jump us, either going to the ring or outside the ring or in the parking lot. Just about every night it was like that. ECW story lines were so emotional and people embraced them so much and the fans let us know that the Dudley Boyz, we hate their guts and we want to see their ass kicked. We made that happen.”

The Dudley Boyz would hold the ECW Tag Team titles eight different times. “How Bubba and I took off so quickly and rose so far was unheard of,” D-Von says. “We were just on the same page. We wanted to accomplish the same things. There was no jealousy, and that helps make a great tag team and how we stayed together for so long. Arguably, we are considered to be the best tag team in the history of the business, because of the fact that there is no Road Warriors, no Rock ’n’ Roll Express, no British Bulldogs, no Hart Foundation—all of those great teams—there are no teams from that era wrestling today. Each generation gets bigger and more competitive. Whether the tag teams of yesterday could be successful today? Some people would say yes. But the Dudley Boyz were no slouches. Whoever was in front of us, we took on. Whether it was hardcore in ECW or with style and attitude in WWE.”

What also made the Dudley Boyz so appealing was their versatility and work ethic, according to Ron Buffone. “D-Von and Bubba worked their asses off,” Buffone said. “They could go from one week to the next of hardcore matches: being lit on a table, putting someone through a table, with thumb tacks or fire. They were a great tag team.”

There was one more Dudley yet to come in 1996, perhaps the most creative character of the bunch, because no one would have ever mistaken 5-foot-8, 170-pound Matthew Hyson for a professional wrestler who would be known as Spike Dudley.

Born on August 13, 1970, in Providence, Rhode Island, Spike grew up watching Saturday-morning wrestling with his three older brothers, who all would engage in their own matches following the TV shows. Spike became a huge wrestling fan, going to local shows whenever he could. But he figured he would always be just a fan, given his size limitations, and didn’t make any career plans to go into professional wrestling. He went to college to become a schoolteacher and, at the age of 21, moved to San Francisco to teach third-grade children.

Shortly after he arrived, Spike saw a television commercial for a wrestling school, and considered the possibility that while he might be too small to be a wrestler, he might be able to train to be a referee or a manager, and maybe turn his wrestling obsession into his livelihood. “I called the place, and they said, ‘We’ve trained for everything, so come on down,’” Spike recalls. “So I went down and met them and signed up and started classes. I was training to be a manager at that point, but they throw everybody together in the beginning. Everyone learns to take the bumps and the falls and all that. So I was training with the wrestlers. After about seven weeks, I was the only one among the twelve students left. All the other ones—the big guys—had dropped out. The teacher said, ‘Hang around a couple of more weeks, we’ll get a few more students and start another class.’ A month or two later, they got another ten to twelve guys to sign up, and they started the class all over again. After a month or two, the teacher said, ‘Screw this manager stuff, you’re fun to watch as a little wrestler. We’re going to make a wrestler out of you.’ I said, ‘Cool, whatever.’”

After about a year of training, Spike started wrestling on the California independent circuit and began honing his craft and putting together some impressive shows over the next two years. He wanted to move up and out, so he made a videotape of his best work. “I had put a little money into it, and it was a nice, professional job with music and editing,” Spike explains. “I sent it out to every promotion I could think of—World Wrestling Federation, WCW, Japan, Smoky Mountain, ECW—any promotion that was out there.”

Spike had quit teaching at this point and was working for a financial printing firm in downtown San Francisco when he got a call from Tazz. “He said, ‘We got your tape and we like your work. What is your deal?’ I told him I had this job out in San Francisco. He asked, ‘Would you be willing to move to the East Coast?’ I said my job has offices all over the country and I said I could probably transfer, so I would be willing to move to the East Coast. He said, ‘What we would like to do is see some complete matches, and we’ll get back in touch.’”