The Rise & Fall of ECW (6 page)

“He was trying to get work as a heel commentator, and nobody would return his calls,” Heyman recalls. “I told him, ‘Listen, heel commentator you are not. But a play-by-play announcer, which you could be very competent in, you could be. Instead of using one of the retread guys, I want to use you. You are someone no one has ever seen before. And I want to come in with a whole different way of doing things. When you see something exciting, I want you to scream, and when we shoot you we will tilt the camera MTV style, and zoom in on you.’

“‘I don’t want your commentary to be like all the other guys,’” Heyman recalls telling Styles. “ ‘I want you to speak to the audience and not just yell at the audience, and when the match gets exciting, scream your head off. I want you to wait for things to happen. I want you to look at what everyone else is doing, and I want you to be different. I want you to wear the nicest suits you can find, but don’t be arrogant about it. We are going to give you a different image than anyone has ever seen in wrestling before. You are going to be Bob Costas. You will have Al Michaels’s enthusiasm and Bob Costas’s professionalism surrounded by all this insanity.’ I never wanted him to be part of the hype or part of the show. I wanted him to be the Rock of Gilbraltar. In the middle of all this insanity is the voice of reason, Joey Styles. I brought him into this small editing studio in Paoli, Pennsylvania, and we started to craft our TV shows for SportsChannel Philadelphia.”

Heyman needed someone to help him produce a new version of wrestling on TV, something befitting the new cultural era the country had embarked on. Later on that first year, he found someone in New York: a 29-year-old production whiz named Ron Buffone—who didn’t know a lick about wrestling when he met Heyman.

“I grew up in the Bronx, and was not a wrestling fan,” Buffone admits. “I hated it. I went to Iona College. I was majoring in computer information and sciences, and I hated it. I was in a band, and the band needed a music video. I took a couple of broadcasting courses, and did the music video for the band, and thought this was pretty cool. I could get into this. So I changed my major and graduated from Iona in broadcasting. From there I started my own company.”

He would meet Heyman, who was looking for all new faces for ECW, both at the microphone in front of the camera and in the studios, and Buffone fit the bill—eager and looking to get in on the ground floor of something special. “When I met Paul, he was very personable,” Buffone says. “He came with a couple of T-shirts and hats, and said, ‘You guys hungry? Let’s get some Chinese food.’ So I liked him instantly. He gave me free shirts and hats and fed us. At the time, I didn’t know who he was. I had never heard of him from WCW or anything. I learned all about what he had done afterwards. Paul has a million stories, and I would hear all these stories, and would be laughing behind his back sometimes after he left at some of his stories, like, yeah, right, because they were so hard to believe. Then I learned in the years I was in the business and started meeting the people he was talking about, I found that those stories were true.”

Buffone had converted his old bedroom in his parents’ home in Pelham Manor, New York, and eventually the ECW production work would move from the Paoli studio. They would hang an ECW banner on the wall of the Buffone basement family and run Styles through his voice-over work on the shows, and this small unit would start producing revolutionary work in the wrestling business.

“Productionwise, Ron Buffone is amazing,” Heyman says. “He and I would fight from day one, and you would think we were going to get into a fistfight, nose to nose, but they were all productive because we loved each other so much. I would say something like, ‘Let’s build this music video and let’s change the tempo of this to match that, and I need the whole screen to shake.’ He would spend twelve hours, without me there, creating this effect where the whole screen would shake.

“I would say, ‘Let’s do that with The Public Enemy,’ and he would say, ‘No, they never shook things up, Shane Douglas shook things up, let the shake be on Shane.’ I would say, ‘Okay, I understand that, but this is why I want it with The Public Enemy,’ and he would say something like, ‘If it is going to be The Public Enemy, shouldn’t it not only shake, but shouldn’t the whole thing turn upside down?’ Anything that I envisioned in video, with about $150,000 in equipment when these hip-hop artists were using multi-million-dollar studios, Ron Buffone could match anybody. He was a genius, and putting me and Ron in the same room to discuss producing a television show was dangerous. I was changing television as much as I was changing wrestling. We are doing more videos and effects and different graphic packages, and from the shitty little graphics package that Ron has, he is putting on graphics that match the NFL’s graphics, with a $1,500 kit. The guy was amazing in terms of what he could pull off, productionwise.”

Styles remembers with fondness the simplicity and uniqueness of their production work in the Buffone household: “You would do some work in the studio, then maybe walk over into the kitchen and read the paper. Ron’s mother and father, who owned a restaurant for many years, would cook some of the greatest Italian food I ever had. Then we would go downstairs to the basement and do our on-camera work. There was a banner behind us, and I was looking at Paul Heyman sitting in a plastic lawn chair, with an ironing board as a table, with notes, telling me, ‘Okay, I need a sixty-second on-camera saying this, or a thirty-second on-camera saying this,’ and I would go ahead and would nail it. The show would be built through the night, or during the day while I was at work. I was going to either come in first thing in the morning, at five
A.M
., or be there seven at night after work, depending on when they got done. I would come in and do the voice-over first, and then with the holes left in the show, I would go downstairs and do my on-camera work and they would be inserted into the show as I would leave and sprint to catch the train to my regular job. A lot of times I would go in at about eight at night and work through the night, then wash my face and brush my teeth and go to my regular job with no sleep. That was the way it worked for years.”

Heyman’s first Eastern Championship Wrestling show was called
Ultraclash,
on September 18, 1993, at the ECW Arena in Philadelphia, before a crowd of more than a thousand fans who got a small taste of the future of wrestling.

In that show, Terry Funk and another wrestling legend, Stan Hansen, beat two other veterans, Kevin Sullivan & Abdullah the Butcher, by disqualification in a Bunkhouse match; Headhunters beat up Miguelito Perez & Crash the Terminator in a Baseball Bat match; The Public Enemy defeated Ian Rotten & Jason Knight; Tony Stetson retained the Pennsylvania Heavyweight Championship with a win over Tommy Cairo; Sal Bellomo beat Richard Michaels in a Strap battle; Super Destroyer #1 defeated Super Destroyer #2 in a Mask vs. Mask match; The Dark Patriot defeated JT Smith in a Scaffold match; Tigra won a Battle Royal; and Eastern Championship Wrestling Champion Shane Douglas beat Sandman to keep the title.

Heyman’s influence on the show would be more apparent in the next promotion, a two-night event called
NWA Bloodfest, Parts 1 and 2.
There were not as many people in the crowd at the ECW Arena on October 1 and 2 for those shows, but they got a better look at Eastern Championship Wrestling, Paul Heyman-style.

About three hundred people saw Rockin’ Rebel pin Richard Michaels; Malia Hosaka beat Molly McShane; Paul Diamond & Pat Tanaka, known as Bad Company, defeated Ian & Axl Rotten; Tony Stetson & Johnny Hotbody kept their Eastern Championship Wrestling Tag Team titles by beating Bad Company; The Public Enemy, Rocco Rock & Johnny Grunge, defeated Silver Jet and Gino Caruso; Sandman pinned Metal Maniac; Abdullah the Butcher, Terry Funk & JT Smith beat Don Muraco, Jimmy Snuka & Kevin Sullivan; then Sullivan and the Butcher fought to a double disqualification. Funk pinned Snuka in a Steel Cage match to win the Eastern Championship Wrestling TV title, and, in one of the most talked-about matches, Sabu pinned Tazz, still known as Tazmaniac.

One night later, back at the ECW Arena, Sullivan beat Abdullah in a Steel Cage match; The Public Enemy defeated Ian & Axl Rotten and Bad Company in a Triangle Steel Cage match; then Bad Company beat The Public Enemy in another tag team bout, and the Rottens defeated Don Allen & Chad Austin; Tony Stetson & Johnny Hotbody beat Sandman & JT Smith to retain the tag team titles; Sullivan pinned Caruso; Sir Richard Michaels beat Rockin’ Rebel by disqualification; Snuka pinned Austin; Tazz pinned Tommy Dreamer; and in two ECW Heavyweight title bouts, Champion Shane Douglas defeated JT Smith by disqualification to retain the title, and Sabu pinned Douglas to win the title.

Though the crowds were not big, these shows were all about the TV product that Heyman was about to launch. “We just changed the way everything is done in Philadelphia,” Heyman says. “We blast out Sabu. We blast out Tazmaniac. We do a match where Tommy Dreamer loses to Tazmaniac, but he took such a beating and kept kicking out, and taking a beating and kicking him out. It was an hour of television where every single segment, the bad guy won. We are heading toward our formula that there really are no bad guys or good guys, just guys that people will pay to see. But we had to do this slowly. So in every segment the guy that they didn’t want to win won. In the final match Tazz wins, but it took such a beating to beat down Dreamer, that as we are going off the air and the music is winding down, the audience gives Dreamer a standing ovation.

“Joey Styles did all of his commentary in postproduction with my direction,” Heyman recalls. “I knew the images we wanted to portray. It was all about getting over the letters ECW, you are watching ECW, this is ECW, and Joey has the line, ‘On a night when nothing went right, on a night where so many heroes fell from grace, Tommy Dreamer, even in losing, has shown more dignity than anybody else here in this bingo hall tonight. Maybe there is hope after all.’

“For some reason, that resonated, and people just started calling the hot line and flooding us with requests,” Heyman says. “People went nuts over this TV show, which was something they hadn’t seen before in wrestling. We had no formula for TV. I wiped the slate clean on formula. I put on the best sixty minutes that I could produce every week, in whatever way we could, and because we were postproduced, that means that I could tape a match and never air the match. I could make it into a music video. I would splice together highlights of a match with a video, and air it, so you get to see the wrestlers in a different light.

“We did something different that is revolutionary to this day, and nobody understands how we did it, called the ‘Pulp Fiction,’ and the reason it was called that is because it always came back to that original premise,” Heyman says. “We would shoot after the show, six hours worth of interviews, and I would chop them up. So you come into an interview segment, and we did our interviews different from what had been done before. I gave them thirty interviews, all jammed up, so it would be something like, ‘Hi, I’m The Franchise, Shane Douglas, and don’t forget, I’m coming down on November thirteenth, and my opponent, I’m going to kick his ass and you’re going to like it,’ and then boom, I would go to his opponent, in a totally different setting, and he would attack Shane Douglas…then I would go to The Public Enemy and they would say something like, ‘Oh, Johnny, what are we going to do on November thirteenth? I don’t know. Rocco, it is going to be a great fight,’ and boom, you go to someone else, and they say something like, ‘I don’t like Philadelphia cheesesteaks,’ and boom, you go back to Shane Douglas. You chop up these interviews and everybody is in different locations. These could go anywhere from six minutes to fifteen minutes on any particular subject, and everybody would have face time on television. Usually, it would only be the top stars who had face time on television. Well, then how do you get your young guys out there? So Tazz would talk and Dreamer would talk, and everyone would have air time.”

One time, Heyman aired a thirty-minute sitdown interview, documentary style, with Shane Douglas about his career and ambitions—totally out of wrestling character. “I want to be known as ‘The Franchise,’ and I will have to prove myself,” Douglas said. This show ran for thirty minutes in a sixty-minute show, without commercials.

“At the time, wrestling was trying to be such professional television that it was such a standard formula,” Heyman says. “We kicked that out of the window. We come back from a break, and who knows what you were going to see? You might see an interview, a match, a music video, you never knew. We intentionally threw formula out the window and intentionally every week gave you a totally different type of show than what you saw the week before. The only thing that was consistent was that it was episodic—the storylines continued week to week. This guy is on a winning streak, this guy is on a losing streak. This guy is stalking this other guy’s girlfriend, this guy’s girlfriend is talking to this other guy. The storylines were consistent and long-term, but the formula for the show was Coke one week and Sprite the next.”

Heyman held his first supershow—
November to Remember
—on November 13, 1993, at the arena, with a crowd on hand of about a thousand people. Sandman and Jim Neidhart fought to a double disqualification; Kevin Sullivan beat Tommy Cairo in a Shoot match; Johnny Hotbody & Tony Stetson defeated Ian & Axl Rotten to retain the tag team title, and then Johnny Gunn & Tommy Dreamer beat Stetson & Hotbody in a double pin to take the tag team title; in a singles match, Mr. Hughes pinned Johnny Gunn; Malia Hosaka beat Sherri Martel by disqualification; Salvatore Bellomo defeated Rockin’ Rebel in a forfeited Chair match; The Public Enemy beat Bad Company in a South Philly Hood bout; Tazz pinned Tommy Dreamer; and in an Eastern Championship Wrestling Television title match, Sabu & Road Warrior Hawk defeated Terry Funk & King Kong Bundy, and when Sabu pinned Funk, because of stipulations made before the bout, Sabu won Funk’s title.

“We did a thing where Sabu ended up beating Terry Funk for the heavyweight title,” Heyman recalls. “I went to Funk and and asked him, ‘Who do you want to make?’ And he said, ‘I want to make Sabu.’ And he says, ‘I want to make Shane Douglas, too.’ I didn’t take it that we would make one guy first and the other. I figured Terry was so great, we could make them both.