The Rise & Fall of ECW (28 page)

But there was only one match the fans in the arena that night were waiting for—Dreamer vs. Raven. They would get much more than that.

The match between Dreamer and Raven would end with Dreamer driving Raven into the mat, climbing on top of him, hooking his leg, and then going for the pin. As the fans count one, two, three, Dreamer wins and the arena erupts as Dreamer’s hand is raised in victory.

The fans are chanting, “ECW! ECW!” and the lights go out. They come back on, and Sabu is in the ring. He attacks Dreamer. Sabu shoots Dreamer into the ropes. Dreamer ducks underneath and hooks a DDT on Sabu. The lights go out again, and when they come back on, it’s Rob Van Dam—the outsider, Mr. Monday Night—in the ring. Van Dam and Sabu double-team Dreamer and shoot him into the ropes. Dreamer ducks underneath, turns around, hooks a double DDT on them, and the lights go out. When they come back up, Jerry Lawler is standing in the ring.

Dreamer tries to get through to Raven.

Then The Gangstas’ music starts playing for the next match, but they are stopped in the aisle. Everybody stops. Bill Alfonso is out there and points to where the announcers are. Shane Douglas and Francine are standing up there.

Alfonso takes the microphone, points to Douglas, and says, “So tell me, Franchise, do you want to defend ECW?”

The crowd roars, “Yes!” But Douglas gets on a microphone up on the stage and says, “This has nothing to do with me. You want to mop the floor with everybody? Be my guest.”

So the beating of Dreamer continues. Sabu and Van Dam and Lawler are whipping on everyone. The fans start chanting, “We want Tazz! We want Tazz!”

Tazz, with a towel around his head and Team Tazz following, starts walking slowly toward the ring. All the heels are running from the ring when Tazz gets there, and he clears the ring without raising a hand.

Tazz was scheduled to face Sabu in a rematch from
Barely Legal.
Sabu gets back into the ring, and their match starts. After about twenty minutes, Tazz puts the Tazzmission on Sabu, and Sabu can’t escape it. In a desperation move while they are both on the canvas and Sabu is about to be choked out, Sabu kicks his legs up and floats back over Tazz. Sabu is passing out from being choked out, and Tazz, not releasing the hold, has his own shoulders down on the canvas. He is counted out. Sabu beats Tazz, but is choked out in the process. Sabu is unconscious, even though he is the winner.

A very angry Tazz stands in the ring with his hands on his hips. Shane Douglas, who is still on the stage, gets on the mike and says, “Excuse me, but you lost your match. Get the fuck out of my ring.”

The fans erupt, because it was unheard of to talk to Tazz that way. Going into
Barely Legal,
Tazz was the heel and Sabu was the babyface. At
Barely Legal,
they both turned. Tazz became the babyface and Sabu became the heel.

“Excuse me?” Tazz says.

“You heard me,” Douglas says. “You lost your rematch. You’re in my ring. Now get the fuck out of there.”

“Maybe you would like to come down here and get me out of this ring,” Tazz shot back.

Fans start chanting, “Tazz is gonna kill you, Tazz is gonna kill you.”

“Shane, since I just lost, I guess I have to redeem myself,” Tazz says. “Let me give these people a memorable moment. Usually I would stand here and say I could choke you out in five minutes. But since you are part of the Triple Threat and have that TV title up there, how about I make you tap out in three?”

“You’re on,” Shane says.

Douglas comes down and gets in the ring, and he and Tazz go at each other. About two minutes into the match, Tazz hooks the Tazzmission hold. Douglas is trying to hold on, and the clock is ticking down. With about five seconds left, Douglas taps, and Tazz becomes the new TV champion.

Even by ECW standards, this was something that fans at the arena had never seen before.

“When Raven was leaving ECW to go to WCW, that was the night I finally beat him,” Dreamer says. “I beat him one, two, three, I raised my hands, the lights went out, the lights go back on, and Jerry Lawler is in the ring. Jerry Lawler”—with his crown on his head and his king’s garb—“then beats the crap out of me. The guy from WWE is now beating up the guy who represents ECW, so one feud ended, and one feud started.

“To me, it was like the night Eric Bischoff showed up on
Raw,”
Dreamer points out. “How dare Eric Bischoff show up there. Just like how dare Jerry Lawler show up on ECW. And he put a beating on me. Jerry Lawler canes me in my testicles and knocks me out with a cane shot. I was knocked out, and then Jim Cornette woke me up by hitting me with a tennis racket. I had to go to the hospital because they thought I was going to have a rupture, and I had to have a couple of cc’s of blood pulled out of my testicles that night. It was another part of being hardcore. Jerry apologized for it later. He bolted after the show because there was that much heat.”

At one point, Cornette is in the ring with Lawler, beating on Tommy Dreamer. Lawler takes the mike and yells to the fans, “This hall ought to be built out of toilet paper, because there is nothing in it but shit.”

Lawler said it was not the typical heat they generated. “They had seen the ECW guys invade
Raw,
but I could tell by the reaction that they never thought that a WWE wrestler would come to the ECW Arena,” Lawler says. “So when I showed up, it was really sheer pandemonium. It was legitimately dangerous. They were that upset. I don’t often get scared or in fear for my safety, but that night I was.”

“Jerry Lawler had a huge impact, because he stood for everything ECW was against,” Dreamer explains. “I stood for everything ECW stood for, and Jerry Lawler stood for everything WWE stood for. It was a clash, the Yankees vs. the Red Sox.”

The impact accomplished exactly what Heyman wanted it to. “Nobody remembered that Raven was leaving,” he says. “We repositioned everybody. Terry Funk was our champion, but you knew that wasn’t going to be forever. Tazz is the TV champion, and that became the focal point. Sabu and Van Dam were now the hottest heels in the universe, and they were affiliated with Jerry Lawler. Tommy Dreamer was now Mr. ECW himself. The Dudleyz and The Eliminators were carrying the tag team division, and everyone was kind of repositioned. June seventh was the big turning point, because now everybody had their sense of purpose again, and everyone was back on course. It was one of the hottest summers we ever had. Before that, the summers weren’t as hot. Here it was, June seventh, hot as hell and ever hotter. That was how we recovered from the postpartum depression of
Barely Legal.”

But the next crisis was always around the corner in ECW. This time, it was the rumor that Tod Gordon, the founder of Eastern Championship Wrestling and now a figurehead commissioner for ECW, was suspected of secretly recruiting for WCW. So Heyman fired him.

“Supposedly we had a mole in our locker room,” Dreamer says. “We all had to be paranoid, because we had WCW and WWE breathing down our necks to try to take our talent. Everyone was trying to knock us down, and Paul is very paranoid. He broke into Tod Gordon’s cell phone and played all the messages of all the guys calling him. Me and Tazz were at Paul’s house, and we couldn’t believe it was going on. It was Terry Taylor. It was Bill Alfonso. They were just talking, ‘Great deal, man, we can bring this all in.’ They were going to do an ECW invasion.”

About the mole, Heyman says he couldn’t be totally sure what the truth was. “I don’t know the real story behind it. I have an idea. Other people have a different perspective. But you never really know the truth behind it. You never really know people’s motivation for getting on the phone and saying, ‘You know what is really happening here?’ You don’t really know. So you don’t really know the truth about situations like this.’”

In a TV interview, looking close-up at the camera, Heyman told the fans that Gordon was fired. “My name is Paul Heyman, and I am executive producer and talent coordinator for Extreme Championship Wrestling. It is a job that was given to me on September 18, 1993, by the founder of this promotion, Tod Gordon. It is therefore my responsibility to inform the public that, with a heavy heart, earlier this week, ECW accepted the resignation of Tod Gordon as commissioner of Extreme Championship Wrestling. Citing increasing pressures as father of four children and running a family business, Tod could no longer assume the responsibility as ECW’s commissioner. We here at Extreme Championship Wrestling wish Tod nothing but the best in all of his future endeavors, and we want to let him know that we intend to make him proud as we carry on his vision of ECW.”

Heyman also wanted to fire Bill Alfonso, but Fonzie, as he was called, was very popular with ECW wrestlers. He managed to save his job by putting on a memorable match—man on woman. “We all loved Fonzie and didn’t want to see him go,” Dreamer says. “He had a great match with Beulah McGillicutty and it saved his job.”

The match took place on
As Good As It Gets,
on September 20, 1997, at the ECW Arena, and it was a bloody brawl. At one point, Alfonso’s face was bloodied as Beulah beat on him in the corner. Alfonso then beat on Beulah in the corner. Later both of them were outside the ring, and Beulah threw Alfonso over the steel guardrail. Then, with Alfonso lying head down, hung over the ropes in a corner, Beulah took a chair and laid it across Alfonso’s face. She ran to the other corner and then ran back and slid feet-first into the chair on Alfonso. The fans went wild, chanting “ECW! ECW!” Later Alfonso tried to bodyslam Beulah, but she took his legs and caught his head, flipping him over on his back. She lay on top of the bloody Alfonso and got the pin and the win.

“Beulah McGillicutty was involved in five of the most intense minutes in ECW when she had that match with Bill Alfonso,” Heyman recalls. “They beat the crap out of each other. They had a phenomenal match. Here’s Beulah, who was not a wrestler, and here’s Bill Alfonso, who was 135 pounds and a former referee, and these guys had an amazing fight, and to this day, if you ask me to name one of the hardest-hitting battles in ECW, it ranks right up there with anything else I have ever seen.”

While the action was still intense in the ring, behind the scenes, Heyman was calling on the wrestlers who had been ECW stalwarts to be part of the business operation as well.

“ECW not being a huge company at any point in time, a lot of us participated and had other duties besides being wrestlers,” Tazz remembers.

Bubba Ray Dudley welcomed the chance to be part of the business end. “I would do deals with the arenas. I would call up and say, ‘This is so and so, and I would like to book a show for ECW.’ I got an education in the wrestling business outside of the ring, and what I truly loved about the company is that I was given the opportunity to do that.”

“I had two roles,” Tazz says. “I designed all of our logos and merchandise. I don’t have an art background or anything, but I just had a knack for it, and Paul said, ‘Why don’t you do this, design our stuff?’ I came up with all the sayings on the backs of the T-shirts, all the logos and colors. Merchandise was a huge thing for us. The guys made a lot of money with their T-shirts and stuff.

“I also ran the ECW wrestling school, which was known as the House of Hardcore. We ran a very, very tough, old-school type of dojo. No joke. Out of hundreds of applicants, I think three or four people graduated from ECW House of Hardcore. Paul wanted a school and wanted me to run it, and he did not care if it made money or not. He wanted to just get a couple of guys that respected the industry and knew great fundamentals, and were tough. That was what he wanted, and that is what he got.”

Dreamer would move the merchandise. “I would bring all the T-shirts to all the shows,” he says. “I would physically drive them. We had a warehouse. Me, D-Von Dudley, and Nunzio would load up the van for the fans to purchase the T-shirts. After the shows we would drive home, and that Monday load all the T-shirts. We would have bandages on our foreheads, and we would carry the T-shirts back into the warehouse.

“I would collect the money from the concessions, and sometimes I would walk out with $20,000 or $30,000 in my pocket. The girls who would work for me were the wrestlers’ wives and wrestlers’ girlfriends, people who I trusted. Every single wrestler pretty much had a different job.”