The Rise & Fall of ECW (5 page)

Sabu v. Terry Funk.

Sabu, whose real name is Terry Brunk, was born December 12, 1964, in Detroit. He was born into wrestling royalty, the nephew of Ed Farhat, a wrestling legend known as The Sheik who became a star attraction in the Midwest, using the persona of a wild man from the Middle East who used foreign objects to cut up his opponents, objects that many times wound up being used on him, as witnessed by the scar tissue The Sheik had on his forehead. His biggest claim to fame was the fireball that he would throw in the faces of his opponents to blind them.

The Sheik had brutal matches with all of the historic names of his time in the ring—Freddie Blassie, Bobo Brazil, Bruno Sammartino, Jack Brisco, Dory Funk, Jr., and many others, in arenas like Madison Square Garden, the Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, and the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles. His home field, though, was Cobo Hall in Detroit, where he was also a promoter. The Sheik would also go to Japan to run a promotion there, and had some legendary matches against the Funks there as well. He even had a brief run in ECW before retiring at the age of 74 in 1998. He died in 2003.

The Sheik also trained a number of wrestlers, including Scott Steiner, Rob Van Dam, and his nephew, Sabu. As a wrestler, Sabu would carry with him the old-school mentality of his uncle and a style that would also incite and excite fans—without flames shooting out of his hand.

“I wanted Tazz to come in and wrestle with this guy I saw in Japan called Sabu,” Heyman recalls. “He had a real hardcore cult following because he had scarred up his whole body by diving into barbed wire. I looked at Sabu and was mesmerized by him. He had a total disregard for his own being, and he looks like he will fight you to the death. To me, in developing the aura of ECW, Sabu was the main key to it all, because here was a guy that we could put up his picture on television, and people would say, ‘That’s different.’ So I called Sabu and hired him, with the promise that when Jimmy Crockett and I started up and went national, he was coming with me. We would go together and make something happen. I wanted Tazz to come in and make Sabu look great.”

They both wound up looking great. “We tore it up,” Tazz says. “We did some wicked stuff. After that, I was booked for the next six and a half years. I ended up being in the right place at the right time, wrestling the right guy. Sabu was not selfish in that match. We went about twenty-minutes, and we went berserk. It was the beginning, for me and for Sabu.”

Heyman also picked Tazz’s brain for other prospective wrestlers on the independent circuit to build a new stable for Eastern Championship Wrestling, and Tazz told him about a good-looking kid from Yonkers named Tom Laughlin, later known to wrestling fans as Tommy Dreamer.

“I wrestle him at all the Northeast independent shows and we have a pretty good routine down,” Tazz told Heyman. “I can suplex this kid on his head every night and never hurt him. The kid is tough as hell and takes a beating like no one I’ve ever seen. He is a pretty boy, so you will have to toughen him up, but he can take a beating.”

Born February 14, 1971, Dreamer was 7 years old when his father, a hockey fan, sat down one night to watch the New York Rangers face the Montreal Canadiens. But the game had been snowed out, so instead they ran wrestling from Madison Square Garden, and after watching Bob Backlund wrestle Bulldog Brower, Dreamer was hooked. He wanted to be a professional wrestler.

A solidly built athlete at 6-foot-2 and 260 pounds, Dreamer played high school football and one year of football in college, but he never lost his desire to become a wrestler, and would sign up to train with Johnny Rodz, the same trainer who had taught Tazz and other future ECW wrestlers. “I got my brains beat in two days a week, Mondays and Tuesdays,” Dreamer said. “Then I started working the indies, like everyone did. I got a few tryouts with the World Wrestling Federation at the time. I showed up one day in the ECW arena and was booked ever since.”

Dreamer wrestled Tazz in his debut and lost, in a match every bit as good as Tazz had advertised it would be. After that match, Heyman called Dreamer a few days later and told him to come to the studio in Paoli, Pennsylvania, where they were editing the show for television. Heyman sat down with Dreamer in the studio and they watched his match together.

Heyman pointed to the screen, specifically to four people who gave Dreamer a standing ovation after the match.

“Did you see this?” Heyman asked Dreamer. “These people believe in you. This is Philadelphia. This is something. You have it.”

Dreamer dismissed Heyman’s little pep talk, but at the end of that TV show, Heyman had it close out with this line: “Wait a minute, wait a minute. These hardcore, bloodthirsty fans of Philadelphia are giving Tommy Dreamer a standing ovation. Maybe there is hope for ECW after all.”

This would be a battle that Dreamer would fight throughout his early days of ECW—getting fans to accept him. Eventually, that would come on one memorable night.

“The fans respected my wrestling ability, but this was the 1990s, and they couldn’t get over that I looked like a Buff Bagwell type, the prototypical babyface,” Dreamer explains. “They couldn’t get over my looks. No matter what, they would heckle me because of my looks. I wore suspenders. I had a shiny robe. They wanted to like me, but this was Philadelphia, where you had the Broad Street Bullies, and I guess they doubted my toughness.”

Heyman didn’t have much there when he took over booking Eastern Championship Wrestling. But he did have one guy whose toughness nobody doubted—a 6-foot-2, 250-pound bar owner named Jim Fullington, who would be known as the Sandman. He grew up in the Philadelphia suburb of Broomall playing football, basketball, and baseball and, like most kids, watching professional wrestling on television.

“I always wanted to be a wrestler since I was a kid,” Sandman observes. “In 1989, there was this guy named Joel Goodhart who started this little company in Philly called Tri-State Wrestling Alliance, and I went to one of his shows. He was opening up a wrestling school, so on March 6, 1989, I started at this wrestling school, and by June 9, I had my first match.”

Goodhart came up with the name Mr. Sandman for Fullington from a billboard off Interstate 95 near the arena for a bedding company called Mr. Sandman. He was pushed as a surfer, wearing green neon pants and carrying a surfboard in the ring. It was getting him work—he got some matches in Memphis under Jerry Lawler’s promotion there—but it really didn’t fit his personality.

“Jim Fullington was a big guy who hung out in neighborhood bars with his friends, drinking, and getting into fights with each other,” Heyman says. “The loser would have to pay for drinks. He was a guy that enjoyed fighting, and didn’t take it personally. He was a salty guy.”

Fans could see through the surfer boy image, and Heyman could see that nobody was buying into it. “The Sandman came out to the ring with a surfboard, with Beach Boys music playing,” Heyman recalls. “And the crowd would shit on him. This would be like Mel Torme opening up for Pearl Jam. It wasn’t going to happen. It was horrible. And he was for shit as a wrestler. He wasn’t very good in the ring.

“But the guy had a look, and he had charisma. He would sit around my locker room, smoking cigarettes and being very polite, thanking me for the opportunity to work here tonight, saying all the right political things. Then he would let loose something like, ‘I just want to wrestle my match, get out of here and get drunk.’”

One day, Heyman and Gordon were talking about what to do with the Sandman, and the idea came up to show the fans that locker room attitude. “I say to Tod, ‘I’ve got to let this guy go. He is dragging down the show.’ And Tod says, ‘But it is a shame that he can’t get this personality over to the public.’ He would be sitting there in the locker room in those body-building pants, sweatpants with printed designs, a ripped-up T-shirt, and smoking a cigarette.”

What happened after that—who came up with what idea—is a matter of debate. Sandman remembers, “Tod Gordon convinced Paul to let me come out drinking a beer, and then smoking a cigarette.”

Heyman says he told Gordon, “Why can’t we present that to the public? Why can’t he go out there and smoke a cigarette and drink a beer and be a bum? People like that. That is half of our audience. Let’s present this guy as a guy who comes on and says, ‘You know what I did yesterday? I smacked my wife in the mouth, and without her mouth, how am I going to make a living this week?’ I said to Tod, ‘He will be a cult hero. And you could make him a heel or a babyface any time you wanted.’”

So Heyman sat down with Sandman and said, “This Beach Boys thing ain’t flying. I want to turn you into a new character. I want you to be you, just be an embellishment of yourself.”

Sandman was willing to give it a shot, if it meant he would keep wrestling. After all, it wasn’t much of a stretch. But he didn’t think it would have the impact that it eventually did. “I didn’t think it would be as big as it was,” he admits. “It would be real easy for me to say now I thought it would be that successful, but really, I was just happy I was wrestling back then. I didn’t have a clue. I was new to the business.”

He listened to a few people who were not so new to the business—Mick Foley and Terry Funk—and began to have faith in the character and develop it, particularly his entrance, a legendary performance to the Metallica tune “Enter Sandman.” “They were the ones that showed me how I identified with the fans,” Sandman explains. “I was the guy at the end of the bar, drunk, who wants to play you in a game of pool, and then when you beat me, I want to beat you up. Everybody could identify with my character. It was hard to identify with some of these other guys. Everybody wants to be the tough guy at the end of the bar.”

And so ECW found perhaps its standard-bearer for the future of the promotion. “As much as anyone else, Sandman was the embodiment of Extreme Championship Wrestling,” Heyman recalls. “He was a huge part of our shows, the whole music entrance and smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and smashing the beer can until he bleeds from the head before he ever starts the match. His matches became secondary. Here was just a tough guy looking for a fight. People loved him.”

There was another wrestler who had just arrived at Eastern Championship Wrestling whom Heyman would utilize and probably get more out of than any other promotion Troy Martin has ever worked with in his long wrestling career. After all, in ECW, Martin—known as Shane Douglas—was called “The Franchise.”

Douglas, born November 21, 1964, in Pittsburgh, began training to be a professional wrestler under the legendary Dominic DeNucci. He began wrestling in 1982 and would gain some attention as one of the stars of the Universal Wrestling Federation. He went on to WCW, as part of a team with Johnny Ace called the Dynamic Dudes, but that fizzled, and Douglas—a talented wrestler with strong opinions and ideas about the business and his career—returned to the independent circuit. As has been the pattern of his career, Douglas bounced back and forth between the smaller and larger promotions. When he was briefly with WWE, Douglas won the TV title but struggled to be noticed. Going back to WCW in 1992, Shane won the tag team title with Ricky Steamboat. A year later, shortly after losing the belts to the Hollywood Blondes—Brian Pillman & Steve Austin—Douglas left WCW again and this time landed in Eastern Championship Wrestling, where he quickly became heavyweight champion in the summer of 1993. He would prove to be one of the building blocks of the new ECW.

Heyman was building up the faces of the promotion. But he needed a voice—an important part of any wrestling show. Ray Morgan was the legendary voice of the WWWF, and then the young Vince McMahon became part of the identity of the promotion as an announcer. Gordon Solie was one of the most popular figures in wrestling in much of the South from his work behind the microphone. A young kid growing up in, of all places, Stamford, Connecticut—the home of WWE headquarters—wanted to be the next Gordon Solie, the next big voice in professional wrestling.

Joe Bonsignore—who would be known to ECW fans as Joey Styles—was born in the Bronx, but his family moved to Connecticut when he was in middle school. Around that same time, Styles saw his first wrestling match on a 13-inch black-and-white television in his bedroom—the Wild Samoans against the Strongbow brothers for the tag team title. “I was hooked after that,” Styles says. “My dream was to be a pro wrestling television announcer.”

Styles picked Hofstra University to go to college for two reasons: it had a strong communications program with their own television studio, and it was close to the offices of the Pro Wrestling Illustrated family of magazines. He hoped to get an internship there to get his foot in the door of the business. While he was going to school, Styles wrote for the school newspaper, worked in the sports information department, and got his wrestling magazine internship—which got him backstage to a WCW show. It was there he met Paul Heyman.

“I worked for SportsChannel New York one summer, and I took a tape of my work there and showed it to Paul, and he liked it,” Styles remembers. So, not long after Styles graduated from Hofstra in June 1993, Heyman began assembling the ECW talent, and made Styles his new announcer.