The Rise & Fall of ECW (31 page)

D-Von with the title.

It worked, but not the way Heyman had hoped. The network constantly tried to place all sorts of restrictions on the promotion, its hardcore style and story lines. They also underfunded the shows, while expecting the same sort of production values that were featured in WWE and WCW shows—the very antithesis of ECW. Viacom also barely acknowledged the program in its promotion and advertising. In October 2000, ECW was canceled and replaced on TNN by WWE’s
Raw.

It also didn’t help that not only did Tazz leave before the TNN shows started, but ECW also lost one of its other major attractions—the Dudley Boyz. On August 16, the Dudley Boyz won the ECW World Tag Team title from Spike Dudley & Balls Mahoney, on a TNN show, then lost it to Tommy Dreamer & Raven, who had returned to ECW. Then the Dudley Boyz were gone, moving to WWE.

ECW was dealt another blow in March 2000 when Rob Van Dam broke his ankle and was sidelined for a few months.

Relations with the network got so bad that Heyman openly criticized TNN. He used the wrestler Cyrus to play a representative of “The Network,” who would come on the show and criticize ECW’s violence. Heyman also actually spoke out himself once in a promo on the show. “We hate this network,” he said. “We hate their guts for abandoning us. We hate their guts for not supporting us. We hate their guts for not advertising us, and we hate their guts for not having the balls to throw us off the air. And hey, in case you are watching this, network, I dare you to throw us off the air, because I am going to break every rule you put in front of us until you throw me off the air. This, my friends, is a shoot. You better take that $100 million you are going to give to Vince McMahon and spend it on attorneys, because I promise you, network, the war has just begun.”

But the war was over.

“TNN said they didn’t want any music videos on the show, and felt that our opening theme song was too demonic,” Heyman recalls. “They didn’t want references to hatred on the show. We can’t say, ‘I hate you.’ Intense dislike is what they preferred. It was horrible when we started on TNN. There was not one mention on the radio, not one press release, not one call to a newspaper. Nothing.”

It started off poorly. TNN officials didn’t like the opening show, so instead they showed Rob Van Dam vs. Jerry Lynn for the ECW World Television Title from
Hardcore Heaven 1999,
and a history of ECW.

Buffone says the TV deal was a bad one. “We had no commercial time and, basically, no money for the show,” he declares. “Yet they expected very high production values, which was a problem in itself because Paul did not want to change the look of the show and the integrity of the product.”

It was frustrating for the wrestlers, because they had believed that ECW was on the verge of breaking out when it got on network television, and it soon became apparent that it wasn’t going to turn out that way. “It turned out the ECW was nothing more than an experiment,” Mike Nova says. “Someone there knew that within a year or so, there would be a much bigger fish in the ocean to catch. They used ECW as a piece of bait. They used ECW to build a case for why they should go for WWE. I never saw a commercial for ECW on TNN, unless I was watching ECW on TNN. I remember seeing advertisements in national magazines for RollerJam and that Rock ’N Bowl thing. These were two shows that weren’t doing shit compared to ECW. I’ll never forget being down there in Florida once for a RollerJam show, and people were all over us and acted as if those RollerJam guys didn’t even exist. When it all went down, and they lost the network, then they did this big campaign to launch WWE, that was lousy. It was over then.”

ECW needed the television deal because of a number of other agreements the promotion had made that were tied to the network contract. “I can’t afford to lose the network, because the whole video game deal, the deal to do an album, the T-shirt distribution deal, and my home video license are all tied into the fact that I have a network platform,” Heyman explains. “All the licenses can be yanked if I lose my network, which I know I am going to do anyway, but I have to stay on long enough to find another network to carry me so I can keep my licenses. So the very network that is cannibalizing me is my lifeblood at the same time. They know I can’t leave the network without losing all my licenses, and therefore my ability to survive. What a miserable dilemma to be in.”

Heyman thought he had maneuvered a deal to get on USA Network, when, at the last minute, political pressure from conservative groups and others against network violence changed their minds. “I was waiting for the fax for the deal to get on another network when the decision was made not to do it,” Heyman says. “I got the phone call 9:01
A.M
. Pacific time that the deal was off. At that moment I knew we were dead. Before that moment, I never accepted the premise that ECW would have a mortality. I just thought we would always win. But when I got that phone call, I knew we were dead. I knew the clock was ticking.”

The demise was quick after ECW leaving TNN. ECW tried to get on another network but failed. There were more and more missed paychecks, and wrestlers leaving what they perceived to be a sinking ship.

But ECW wasn’t the only promotion on its way out. Eric Bischoff and WCW, without Ted Turner’s money, was also crumbling. It was now owned by Time Warner, who was looking to get rid of the promotion, which was losing a reported $80 million a year.

In January 2001, Bischoff and Fusient Media announced the acquisition of WCW from Time Warner-AOL. But that deal fell through, and two months later, WWE announced it had acquired WCW, which put Heyman’s rival out of business.

This was taking place while ECW was also about to disappear. The last ECW Arena show took place on December 23, 2000, with the final match featuring Steve Corino, the ECW Heavyweight Champion, against Justin Credible and the Sandman in a Three-Way Dance.

On January 7, 2001, ECW put on its final Pay-Per-View,
Guilty as Charged,
at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York, with an estimated 2,500 on hand. They saw Amish Roadkill and Danny Doring beat the Hot Commodity—EZ Money & Julio Dinero—for the ECW Tag Team belts; in a Three Way Dance, with tables, ladders, chairs, and canes, the Sandman defeated Steve Corino and Justin Credible to win the ECW Heavyweight Championship, only to lose it in a bout against Rhyno, and in a typical twenty-minute masterpiece, Rob Van Dam pinned Jerry Lynn.

Five days later, ECW held its last TV taping in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, and a few weeks later, the last ECW show took place in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Even at the end, with no prospects for another Pay-Per-View or anything beyond this show, some wrestlers believed Heyman would find a way to save the promotion.

“Everyone assumed it would just be a hiatus, that Paul was getting a new TV deal or something,” Mike Nova says. “After the show was over, we were all in the ring, toasting each other with beer. I knew I would never see half of those people again. I had hoped that that would not be the case. But the vibes were there that it was.”

The next Pay-Per-View was scheduled for March 11, but it never happened. On April 4, 2001, ECW filed for bankruptcy, and this supernova that had crossed the entertainment sky in the 1990s had flamed out.

There has been much debate about why ECW did flame out.

“I think ECW, unfortunately, got to the point where it was enough of a threat to WCW and WWE to be noticed and worried about,” Lance Storm says. “It got to the point where Paul had to offer us enough money to keep us from jumping. Unfortunately, he couldn’t afford it. ECW had gotten bigger than an indy, but it wasn’t quite the big leagues yet. There was this big void that it had to jump over. You couldn’t just bump the pay scale up a little bit. You had to jump all the way, and I think it was too much of a jump. Had he had some degree of immunity, and he could have taken smaller steps, I think he could have taken it all the way to the top. But it was too big a step to make in a short time.”

Announcer Joey Styles said he didn’t believe it was the TV contract that put ECW in the grave. It was the bidding for talent, and the timing of finally getting on a national stage. “I don’t blame the TV contract for the company failing,” Styles says. “Financially, everyone was being paid too much money. All of the top ECW guys could have gone to WCW and WWE and made more money, and some of them did. So Paul Heyman was forced to pay close to what they would have been paid to go somewhere else. Paul signed all these contracts, and also assumed that, being on national TV, revenues would grow, as would merchandise sales and DVD sales to cover expenses. But it took too long to get on the national stage. By the time we did, ECW looked like a poor man’s version of WWE. The product, at that point, didn’t matter anymore. We had lost a lot of our top stars to WWE and WCW. ECW was a shell of what it had been. It had nothing left. It was time for ECW to end. ECW needed to be on national TV five years earlier, and it didn’t happen.”

Mick Foley also believes that the promotion was past its prime when it did finally emerge as a national presence. “When people think about the glory days of ECW, they usually go back to when Funk was there and I was there,” he says. “But at that point we were barely out of Pennsylvania. By the time ECW became popular, they were like yesterday’s news. For a few years, they drew really well, but it was almost like it was off the aura and reputation they had already earned. Which isn’t to say the guys weren’t really working hard and having great matches and giving fans what they wanted. But it seems like their reputation was built up by guys who were scooped up in large part by WCW—and in my case by WWE. But I think the talent raids hurt.”

Tazz was one of those wrestlers who left, and he, too, believes it was the talent exodus that killed the promotion. “Talent getting opportunities to leave hurt ECW immensely,” he says. “You can’t fault other companies. At the time, it was a wrestlers’ market. You had three different companies to work for that were doing pretty well. Wrestlers had leverage, and this was a business. Guys like Paul Heyman will let you know that all the time, that it is a business. Some say WCW raided the locker room, but I don’t know if they raided the locker room. They just made offers to try to get guys whenever they could, so that WWE couldn’t get them.”

Bubba Ray Dudley, who had been involved in much of the business side of ECW in the final years, believes two factors contributed to the downfall of ECW. “It was an ultraviolent company that had its niche. Some people wanted to see it, but I don’t think ECW would have ever appealed to the masses, because it was too violent. The other thing was that Paulie wasn’t the best businessman, beyond the wrestling ring.”

Heyman claims while all of those other problems may have been symptoms of what led to ECW’s demise, he believes there was one reason why ECW isn’t still around today—a dispute between him and In-Demand Pay-Per-View over payments due. “The reason for the death of Extreme Championship Wrestling was because of an executive on the West Coast named Dan York, a senior vice president at In-Demand, who refused to pay well over $1 million to ECW that was back-owed to us over a year,” he says. “This was the delay game that In-Demand was doing. What they were doing, and what [boxing promoter] Bob Arum sued them over, was the fact that they promised in their contracts that within one year of your event you will get a final settlement and final estimated settlement, even if they don’t get the money. They have to collect it from the local cable companies. What was happening was they were eighteen to twenty-one months behind on their payments. I needed the money to survive. I had lost my network. Dan York said, ‘No. You will have to sue us, and if you sue us, we will take you off the air.’ At least with that money, we could have kept the door open and regrouped.”

As far as the references to his business practices, Heyman says he doubts anyone else could have kept ECW afloat for as long as he did. “When ECW was over, the total indebtedness of the company was $7 million, and $4 million of that was owed to my parents. So the indebtedness of ECW was really $3 million to outside vendors. We never had any money to float. Three million dollars, of which over $1.5 million came back to us in the bankruptcy negotiations with In-Demand. You are looking at a company that in seven years ran up a bill of $4.5 million, of which the majority of that money came in the last 18 months, a direct result of our terrible relationship with TNN. There were other promotions that lost a lot more—WCW lost $85 million—and we never had any financing. We were built from scratch

“Also, in the single most hypercompetitive era in the history of the industry, we survived for seven years. Nobody else could have done that. As for business acumen, nobody would have survived the wars that I got them through, or gotten the right players and the right pieces. Who could see the TNN deal coming? Nobody. Who would have survived all these things? We survived for a year and a half after going on TNN, and that was our death knell. Did I prematurely cause the death of the pop culture phenomenon that I created? No, I think it is a false notion.”