The Rise & Fall of ECW (23 page)

Sandman taking a Singapore cane to Raven.

Raven was a very creative force in ECW and everywhere he went. He had a great grasp of the psychology of wrestling and a flair for dramatic story lines. “He is a genius about the business, and loves wrestling,” Mike “Nova” Bucci declares. “He wasn’t a great athlete, but he was a master psychologist. The Raven gimmick was one of the top gimmicks of the 1990s, or maybe ever. He was like the Kurt Cobain of wrestling at that point. He went from being Scotty the Body and Scotty Flamingo to that. Raven was more like his true personality. He could look at people and know how to read them. He was very complex, but that is what made him Raven. He was also a lot tougher than people gave him credit for. In the opening of that show, he got a real shampoo job across his head from Dreamer when he was handcuffed to the cage. He would take his bumps and go through tables and was barb-wired a few times and bloodied. He would come in the back and flip his hair back, bloody, and laugh. He was really good at putting matches together.”

Raven had an idea for his feud with Sandman and was putting it in motion for the October
High Incident
show. “All week long, Raven and the Sandman had been trying to find an angle,” Heyman recalls, “and my way of dealing with these things was very simple. I’d say, ‘This Saturday we have to heat up your feud, so we do this angle where Raven sticks a cue tip in your ear, and you bleed from the ear.’ And you’d come back, ‘I don’t know, I don’t want to do an injury angle. I want to do something more personal.’ So I’d say, ‘Come up with something.’ I’d throw out ideas, and if someone else had an idea, I’d listen to it.”

Raven had been known for, among other things, a pose he would strike in the ring, as if he was being crucified, often standing over his victims after beating them. It was all part of the dark and deep Raven character, and was something that ECW had already played off of, in variations. In previous matches, Raven had handcuffed Tommy Dreamer to the ropes and beaten him with a chair. He did the same thing to Dreamer in a Steel Cage match, cuffing him in a crucifix pose in the cage while beating on him with a chair. The night of the Funk fire, at the end of the show, Raven had Dreamer on top of the eagle’s nest, with his arms outstretched, tied to the roof of the building, in crucifix fashion. So Raven wanted to take it one step further.

“Raven and Sandman called me when I was in the studio the week before the show, and they said, ‘We have an idea, we know how to heat this up,’” Heyman recalls. “We had done all this stuff with Raven and Sandman’s child and everything else. Raven said, ‘Sandman needs to be crucified for the sins of his child. So we crucify the Sandman at the arena,’ he said, ‘and really crucify him.’

“I said okay, because to me crucifying with Raven meant handcuffing somebody with his arms outstretched, or like what we did to Dreamer. Sandman calls me and says, ‘I’m really going to work on this and make it happen.’ I said, ‘Go ahead, by all means.’ I really didn’t understand what they were talking about.

“We got to the arena, and Sandman had the crucifix under the ring, and they went to do it, and it was in pretty bad taste. Two years later, it became the fashion to do it in wrestling, but even I thought it was in bad taste. I was sensitive to it. I’m Jewish. Raven’s Jewish. I didn’t want anyone thinking I was taking shots at their religion, because I really wasn’t.”

Sandman was proud of his work. “I made the cross for the crucifixion, cut it up, and brought it to the ring and everything,” he says.

But Stevie Richards, who, along with Blue Meanie and Raven, was tying Sandman to the cross laid out on the floor, had a problem with it. “The whole time I am doing it, me and Meanie are there, and Raven is like, ‘Tie him up, tie him up, put the cross up,’” Richards remembers. “I’m there going, ‘This is fucked up, man.’ Meanie said, ‘I know,’ I was saying, ‘This is bullshit.’ This was one time at the ECW Arena where the fans weren’t saying, ‘Go to hell’ or screaming. They were just quiet.”

Sandman was lifted up and held up on the cross while bleeding from his forehead. Raven stood over the scene in the ring. Sandman would later be carried out on the cross back to the dressing room.

“This is the most horrifying thing I have ever seen in my life,” announcer Joey Styles told the TV audience.

Kurt Angle agreed with Joey Styles, and what had been a tasteless moment had now become a controversial moment.

Angle had been a popular and successful amateur wrestler, a two-time NCAA Division I Champion and three-time NCAA Division All-American. He was also 1987 USA Junior Freestyle Champion, two-time USA Senior Freestyle Champion, and 1988 USA FILA Junior World Freestyle Champion. Angle went on to win the gold medal in the 100-kilogram (220-pound) freestyle wrestling competition in the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

Angle had emerged from those Olympics as a star, and was trying to find a way to capitalize on his stardom. A short stint in sports broadcasting in his hometown of Pittsburgh failed. He was reluctant to go into professional wrestling, but Heyman was trying to woo him, through a connection with Shane Douglas. “Shane told him it was professional wrestling, but on a whole different level,” Heyman recalls. “He said we had a character there who played an Olympic-style/UFC-style wrestler, with a lot of good wrestling moves—Tazz. We would like you to come and comment on the matches. If you think it stinks, say so. If you like it, tell us about it. We bring Kurt to the arena. At the time he had turned down Vince. He thought he was above professional wrestling.”

When Angle saw the crucifixion take place, he was outraged. “It offended me so badly that I got up in the middle of the show, went straight to Paul Heyman, and said, ‘I am leaving right now. I want you to send me my check, and if I am on TV with that crucifixion…if my name or face is seen on TV with that same program, you will be hearing from my attorney,’” Angle remembers. “Paul said he had no idea this was going to happen. I believed him. I figured at ECW there is a little more freelance. Wrestlers do whatever they want to do. Paul Heyman lets them. Then again, I wasn’t sure if I should believe him, because Paul Heyman could do that kind of thing. He is very controversial. I just remember leaving that arena so mad and so offended that they would actually do something like that. He told me he didn’t know. As a promoter, you are running the show, and if you don’t know what is going on, then you’re an idiot.”

Heyman said he tried to reassure Angle that he had nothing to worry about. “Kurt Angle comes up to me, and he’s pissed off. He said, ‘Why did that happen?’ I said, ‘Kurt, I need to talk to my guys about it before I talk to you about it.’ He said, ‘I’m offended by it. I don’t want to be associated with that. I work with church groups. I do endorsements. I better not be on that tape.’ I said, ‘Kurt, I’m not releasing the tape. We’re going to let that footage stay in the vault. I don’t want that angle to air.’ He said, ‘Well, if it does, I’m going to sue you.’ I said, ‘Okay, sue away, but it is not going to air.’ He said, ‘I have to leave now.’ I said, ‘Okay, thank you for coming. We’re going to use your commentary on the Tazz match and your appearance at the beginning of the show. I’m sorry that you are offended, and I hope to see you again under better circumstances. Good-bye.’ And he left, and that was it.”

But the fact that the Olympic gold medalist from the 1996 Olympics walked out of the show made it a pretty big incident.

Heyman told Raven to go back out to the crowd and apologize. Standing in the ring with a microphone in his hand, Raven addressed the fans. “Apparently, Tod Gordon and Paul Heyman—by acting without their knowledge—are offended at my use of religious iconography. And apparently I have offended quite a few people in the audience. Well, you people chose to respect Scott Levy’s privacy when I needed the personal time, so I chose to respect your privacy and your religious beliefs, and so for the people who I deeply offended, I apologize.”

Heyman said he understood why people might have been offended, and regretted it.

Sandman, though, thought it was an overreaction. “It had backlash because Kurt Angle was in the back, but I don’t think the fans gave a damn about that,” he says. “I think they liked it. The only backlash was Kurt Angle. If that would have happened a couple of years later, I would have told Kurt to fuck off. But at the time, I didn’t have enough power in the business to do something like that. There is no way I would have let Raven go out there and apologize for that. But there was Shane and Kurt, and Shane wanted to bring Kurt into ECW and all this stuff. If it wasn’t for Kurt being there that night, Raven would have never gone out and apologized. And if it had happened a couple of years later, I would have said, ‘No, you ain’t doing it.’”

Angle soon went into professional wrestling and became a star in WWE.

ECW was moving forward. They broke through an important barrier and got Request TV to agree to show the promotion’s first Pay-Per-View event, scheduled for March 31, 1997. It would either make or break ECW.

“Hugh Panero, who is now the president of XM Satellite Radio, was head of Request TV at the time,” Heyman recalls. “He listened to the fan campaigns. Our fans were bombarding them, just as they had bombarded the TV stations to put us on the air. Our fans waged a campaign—phone, fax, e-mails, petitions—to get us on Pay-Per-View, to both Viewer’s Choice and Request TV. Viewer’s Choice was still passing. They still thought we were real, and we weren’t adhering to a script, but we were, as much as WCW or WWE was, but they thought this wasn’t predetermined. They thought this was violence by anarchy. But Request TV decided to put us on the air. As soon as we announced our first Pay-Per-View date, which was Sunday night, March 31, 1997, in Philadelphia, WCW, wanting to come in and blow us away, booked a
Monday Night Nitro
live for the very next day in Philadelphia. We knew we scared people with this Pay-Per-View, even though we were only on Request TV. We are moving forward. We are finally going to do it. We are finally going to see Tazz vs. Sabu, we are finally going to see the Raven-Dreamer blow-off, we are finally going to see all these different things.”

Or so they thought. A young man who had dreams of being a star in professional wrestling—a misguided dream for a tragic figure named Eric Kulas—would disrupt those plans and put the entire company in jeopardy.

ECW was doing a tour of the New England area in the fall of 1996, and on November 23 made a stop for a show in Revere, Massachusetts. One of the features of the night was to be a tag team bout between The Gangstas—Mustafa & New Jack—and the team of D-Von Dudley & Axl Rotten. However, Axl could not make the show, so Heyman was faced with the problem of having to cancel one of the prime matches and anger local fans.

Enter 5-foot-10, 350-pound Eric Kulas. He was a fan at the arena that night in Revere, and when word went out that Axl Rotten would be a no-show, Eric and his father made the case to Heyman that he could be a substitute wrestler for the match. He claimed to have been trained by Killer Kowalski and said that he had wrestled on local independent shows. Kulas had obviously been hoping for a shot like this. He said his wrestling name was Mass Transit, and he had a bus driver’s suit on hand for his uniform.

Heyman asked for indentification to prove he was of age, and Kulas gave him an ID that turned out to be fake. He was only 17. Heyman said he was also told by a wrestling midget named Tiny the Terrible that he knew Kulas and that he had wrestling experience and was supposedly one of Kowalski’s top students. Well, that was phony, too. He was hardly a top student, and his only wrestling experience was a gimmick he did with midget wrestlers like Tiny.

The plan was for Kulas to bleed, so he would have to, as they say in the business, blade himself—meaning cut himself with a blade. According to ECW’s version, Kulas said he didn’t know how to blade and asked New Jack to do it. That, it turned out, was like leading a lamb to slaughter.

The fans were not particularly happy to see this unknown, fat kid in the ring dressed like Ralph Kramden, instead of Axl Rotten, and being ECW fans, they let him know about it, which resulted in a shouting match between Kulas and the crowd before the action even started. When Kulas was finally in the ring and face-to-face with New Jack, he was in trouble. Out came the weapons. New Jack hit the kid with a crutch several times, then a guitar and a toaster got smashed over his head. As Kulas was laid out on the canvas, New Jack pulled him up into a sitting position and then used his knife to cut into Kulas’s forehead—much deeper than a typical cut.

Kulas began screaming as the blood gushed from his forehead and he tried to get away, but New Jack grabbed him and tried to bodyslam him. He couldn’t, because Kulas was too heavy. So New Jack put Kulas on a table, went to a corner, climbed to the top rope with a chair, and came crashing down on Kulas’s now crimson head. As paramedics rushed into the ring, New Jack got on the microphone and started talking some brutal trash. “I don’t care if the motherfucker dies,” he said. “He’s white. I don’t like white people. I don’t like people from Boston. I’m the wrong nigger to fuck with, bitch.”

As they carried Kulas from the ring, his father was screaming at Heyman, demanding an ambulance, yelling at New Jack, and threatening to sue. The incident would eventually grab headlines and create a huge buzz throughout the industry, and would wind up in court. Here is Paul Heyman’s version of what happened that night:

“Axl Rotten couldn’t make the show. Something happened. Backstage there was a kid who claimed he was trained by Killer Kowalski in Boston. He had a résumé that claimed he was about 21 or 22 years old. One of the referees said he knew the kid. He said he had seen him on independent shows. He was big, about 400 pounds, a fat white kid, about 5-foot-9, a big blubbery guy from Rhode Island. He was dressed up like a bus driver, and he looked like Ralph Kramden. He called himself Mass Transit.

“Well, he had a phony résumé, and he was illegally working some shows in Rhode Island, but the referee never knew it. This kid came in with a midget called Tiny the Terrible, a pretty well-known midget. I asked Tiny, ‘You know this guy?’ Tiny said, ‘Yeah, he is one of Kowalski’s top students and has been wrestling for a couple of years. Sure, I will vouch for him.’ So I put him out there with D-Von against The Gangstas. Before the match, New Jack says to him, ‘Do you want to cut a blade?’ The kid says, ‘No, can you do it for me?’ It wasn’t really done that often that you would let somebody else cut you, but it wasn’t so out of practice that it was a heinous violation of the wrestlers’ code. I myself let someone cut me. Jerry Lawler cut me when I was 21 years old.