The Rise & Fall of ECW (7 page)
Read The Rise & Fall of ECW Online
Authors: Tazz Paul Heyman Thom Loverro,Tommy Dreamer
“There would not have been an ECW without Terry Funk,” Heyman states. “He was the only veteran from that era who had the reputation of being legitimately tough, but also had the business sense that, ‘I’ve got to get the next generation ready for there to be a business, for there to be an industry for me to leave something behind to.’ Terry had that mindset. A lot of the veterans back then were unwilling to get the young guys ready, a lot of the veterans were still clinging and clutching to their spots…I want to be ‘the’ tough guy, I want to be ‘the’ champion, ‘the’ top guy. Terry Funk said, ‘I can make him, I can make him, too…Let me make him, I’ll do something special with him,’ and he did, with everybody he worked with.”
Once Sabu beat Funk for the title, Shane Douglas went on the Eastern Championship Wrestling show and called Funk out.
“Let’s get one thing straight,” Douglas said before the camera. “I am the number one contender. I’m young. I’m good-looking. I’m The Franchise. I’m not some old guy like Terry Funk, hanging on. I’m not some guy clinging to the last vestige of my career.”
Funk walked on and said, “Don’t ever disrespect me again. You may think I’m like all these other old guys, but I will smack you in the mouth.” Funk then proceeded to slap Douglas around on the show, which set the stage for Eastern Championship Wrestling’s next event,
Holiday Hell,
on December 26, 1993. With about a thousand people at the arena, Mr. Hughes beat Sandman; Rockin’ Rebel defeated Don E. Allen; Kevin Sullivan & Tazz beat JT Smith & Tommy Cairo to retain the tag team titles; Chad Austin pinned Pitbull #1; Pat Tanaka pinned Rocco Rock in a Body Count match; Shane Douglas pinned Tommy Dreamer, who then later won a Lights Out Battle Royal; and Sabu beat Funk—with a little help—in a no-disqualification bout to win the ECW heavyweight crown.
Sabu taking it to Funk once again.
“It’s Sabu vs. Funk again for the title,” Heyman recalls. “This time, just as Terry Funk is about to win the championship, Shane Douglas comes out and knocks him out. Shane Douglas knocks out Terry Funk, and Sabu wins the match. Now we go on TV and find out that this enraged Sabu, because Sabu’s uncle was the Original Sheik, who trained both Sabu and Rob Van Dam. Joey Styles told the story. Sabu is furious because the one man that the original Sheik could never beat was Terry Funk. And here was Sabu, going to beat Terry Funk all on his own, and Shane Douglas is going to take credit for it. So Sabu is looking for Shane Douglas. And Terry Funk has been deprived of his title, so he is looking for his title. And Shane Douglas is pissed at Terry Funk because Terry Funk embarrassed him, and he is also gunning for Sabu because Shane Douglas wants the title.”
The tension is building between Sabu and Douglas. “We do a TV taping the first week of January,” Heyman says. “There was this huge blizzard, and we had to offer free beer and hot dogs just to get a hundred and fifty people into the building. It was a free taping, free beer and free hot dogs on a Sunday afternoon, with nine inches of snow out there, and we only got a hundred and fifty people. But we gave them a forty-five-minute match between Shane and Funk in which both guys were just covered with blood, and nobody wins—which we never did, because from the moment I took over, there was a winner and a loser in every match. We didn’t do disqualifications, we didn’t do countouts, because I hated that, and if we did, it meant something. Here we were, four months in, and we did our first nonfinish. When the match was over, we had Sabu attack them both.”
That December
Holiday Hell
match was noteworthy for one other reason—it marked the major show debut of a 6-foot-6, 270-pound wrestler from Tampa with a Hulk Hogan connection named Mike Alfonso who would come back years later and become ECW Champion Mike Awesome, who pinned Randy Starr.
Paul with Mike Awesome.
“I watched professional wrestling as a teenager,” Awesome said. “I was always interested in it. My Dad’s sister married Hulk Hogan’s brother, and they produced a son who was about a year younger than me, my cousin, Horace Hogan, who also wrestled and whose real name is Michael Bollea. He and I grew up together. Because his uncle, Hulk Hogan, became a popular wrestler while we were in high school, my cousin got interested in it. We talked about it, and it got me interested in it.”
So Awesome began training with Steve Keirn in Tampa, and made his debut on February 26, 1989, at the Eddie Graham Sports Complex in Orlando. He would eventually wind up in Japan, which is where he found his ECW connection. “I was working in Japan, and so was Sabu,” Awesome recalls. “We became friends, and he started working with ECW. He came back to Japan and told me, ‘Mike, there is this company, it is really cool, and you have to work there.’ I was pretty busy in Japan and not really that interested in it. But he finally talked me into it. I used my own frequent-flier miles to go to Philadelphia and wrestle an ECW match. After that, Paul agreed to use me.” Awesome would leave ECW and then come back, as did many wrestlers over the years.
The seeds were being planted for change in 1993. They began to take root the next year.
Chapter ThreeGoing Extreme
T
here was a momentum building now in Eastern Championship Wrestling for something special to happen, centering on the heavyweight championship and the three stars involved in the developing storyline. Terry Funk is looking for Shane Douglas. Funk is looking for Sabu. Sabu is looking for Douglas, because Douglas stole the title, and Shane is looking for both. So for the February 5, 1994, show at the ECW Arena in Philadelphia, Heyman came up with the notion of doing a three-way match, or what they called a three-way dance—three wrestlers battling each other in the ring. Typically, in such a match, the first wrestler to score a pin on somebody wins. Heyman came up with something different, and it would forever be known as
The Night the Line Was Crossed.
“Three guys start, somebody gets eliminated, and then the two survivors fight it out until there is only one winner, so you are guaranteed two losers and one winner in one match,” Heyman explains. “Usually these matches were done in Mexico. It was more of a Mexican specialty. Sometimes they were very exciting, and usually they were a real clusterfuck. But now, my concept was, with these three guys, let’s make this different than any other three-way match that anyone has ever seen. Besides the fact that we are going to have two losers and one winner, what else can we do?
“The theory was that when the match was over, Sabu would be a cult hero, Funk would continue to be the legendary hardcore hero, and Shane Douglas would emerge as the one hated guy in ECW, and since he was our champion, that was the way I wanted it. The only way to do it that I could think of and the only way to shock people and the only way to create a worldwide buzz and get press in Japan and all over the Internet and let everyone see that it took a lot of balls to do—I took three heels, turned two of them in one match babyfaced, made one guy the heel of the promotion, and put the title on him. My figuring was to have no falls in the match. Go the complete hour and do a draw. It could be a great match, you could have that whole place going crazy at the end.” (A match with a time limit that plays to a draw is called a Broadway.)
The match turned out to be more than Heyman and Tod Gordon and everyone in Eastern Championship Wrestling could hope for—a pivotal first step for the new era of wrestling.
“The whole night was amazing,” Heyman says. “Everything clicked. It was one of those shows where everyone was on their game, and the audience was going nuts and loving every moment of it. Then we had that match. They wrestled a brilliant match, and we layered the match so at the end you would be cheering for the two guys and dying for someone to beat Shane. The last 30 seconds the people were on their feet going crazy, and when the bell rang and people had just realized they saw a sixty-minute match, the whole building just stood up, and instead of chanting, ‘Sabu! Sabu!’ or ‘Terry! Terry!’ everyone chanted, ‘ECW! ECW!’ It was one of those moments in life where everyone understood something special happened. After all this hard work, we were an overnight sensation. As the audience chanted louder and louder, ‘ECW! ECW!’ we all realized we had just hit it.”
The promotion quickly capitalized on the event. The TV show featured all the chanting and celebration after the match, with Styles offering the perspective on the night: “For those of you who were not at the ECW Arena this past Saturday night, you may have missed what many are now calling the greatest wrestling match to take place in this country in quite some time. Forget the stupid gimmicks. Forget the showboating for the camera. Wrestling has returned to the United States of America.”
A press conference was held after the show, with twelve Japanese photographers on hand, and flashbulbs going off. Funk appeared before the cameras, his face covered with blood.
“I love this more than I can tell you,” Funk said, breaking down and crying. “My father died in the ring. My family has owned the Amarillo, Texas, territory for years, and I have always wrestled to earn a living, but no promotion has ever captured my heart like this one. I love ECW with all my heart. I love the ECW fans. I love the ECW promotion, and I love all the young guys in the back who have fire in their eyes that is unmatched.”
A few minutes later, Shane Douglas came into the press conference. Appearing before the camera with Styles and Gordon, Douglas, wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers hat, standing there with Sensational Sherri Martel, let his feelings be known, blasting with both barrels: “I’ve got a couple of words for you. Tonight I took the so-called self-proclaimed Terry Funk, and I beat his ass right in the center of the ring. I took Sabu, the crazy man of wrestling, and I beat his ass in the center of the ring. I sent them both back to the dressing room, Mr. Gordon. As a result of that, I want you to declare me right now in front of this TV camera, in front of the entire world, as the ECW Heavyweight Champion—to prove I am The Franchise. Sherri, you saw it, the whole world saw it. Philadelphia, you witnessed it live. Professional wrestling as it was meant to be—ass-kicking, take no names, beat the hell out of whoever is in front of you. Terry Funk, I smashed your knee to oblivion. When I took you with that chair outside of the ring, even the crazy man Sabu and his people looked at me and said, ‘Oh my God, it’s the end of an era, finally put to rest the Funk family.’”
Tod Gordon tried to interrupt Douglas, but he pressed on: “You keep your mouth shut. You can fire me if you want to, you can take me out of this territory if you want to. But you can’t stop The Franchise. Someplace, sometime, I will be heavyweight champion.”
Funk walked in and said, “I don’t understand what you are doing. We all walked into this match with a reason for the audience to hate us. And when the match was over, everyone chanted, ‘ECW!’ Didn’t you feel that magic? Aren’t you proud of yourself tonight? Why are you being such a jackass?”
Douglas looked at Funk and said, “You know, you’re right. I feel terrible about myself. And as a matter of fact, my conduct is not befitting a champion. And Terry, I want to hand you this title belt.”
Douglas handed Funk the title belt, and Funk acted like he didn’t know what to do with it. He said, “Why are you doing this?”
“I’m only handing you the title, you old piece of crap, because I know how much pleasure I will get taking it back from you,” Douglas replied.
Funk took the title belt and threw it in Douglas’s face, and Douglas smacked Funk. They got into a big fight, and everyone went crazy.
“It was such a realistic-looking press conference, and everybody bought into it,” Heyman recalls. “Now, that is where ‘The Line Was Crossed.’”
It was vintage Shane Douglas—angry at the powers that be and the slights he felt he had been dealt during his career.
“Shane Douglas was pissed off at WCW and Ric Flair and would say anything on the mike and vent his frustration with the industry,” Dreamer explains.
He wasn’t the only one who was frustrated over the business. “If you watch early ECW, Paul Heyman was pissed off and hell bent to take down WCW,” Dreamer states. “I believe when Paul left WCW, he was actually supposed to come and do the whole Paul E. Dangerously for Vince, but he was just waiting, and then he started with the whole ECW thing. Paul had painted Eric Bischoff and WCW as the most vile people and organization that you could ever work for. You were joining the Taliban if you joined WCW and Eric Bischoff. Eric Bischoff was Satan.”
Heyman doesn’t dispute that view of WCW: “I didn’t like them and they didn’t like me. I didn’t like the way I was treated. They didn’t like the way I treated them back. I pretty much told them to go fuck themselves when they were treating people like shit. And I don’t think they enjoyed that. This was during the Bill Watts administration, and Bill wasn’t really a people person.”
After
The Night the Line Was Crossed,
there was more reason to look toward the future than to live in the past. Dreamer says you could tell that it was a turning point for the promotion: “At the end of the match, all the fans were standing on their feet and applauding all the wrestlers’ hard work. It was, like, go time for this company. You knew something special was here, and we started running more and more towns after that.”
And things were moving quickly. “We took off like a rocket from there,” Heyman says.
The word was spreading, via the limited Internet available in the early stages of that mode of communication. Eastern Championship Wrestling was starting to get requests for tapes not just from the entire United States, but also from Japan and Australia. Fans there had heard about the shows in which wrestlers were put through tables and ladders were used as weapons, and all sorts of extreme performances, and they wanted more.
Heyman ran into resistance when he went to do a show in New York with Jim Crockett, with whom Heyman was supposed to eventually work on a new national promotion to compete with World Championship Wrestling and World Wrestling Federation when Heyman was done with this “temporary” Eastern Championship Wrestling job. “Jim Crockett didn’t understand it as much and started to second-guess everything,” Heyman states. “ ‘Why would this guy bring a table into the ring, and why wouldn’t this be a disqualification?’ Well, it would be a disqualification, except people hate disqualifications, and I’m not going to have the referee call for a disqualification. I’m simply going to have them fight it out. This is a pseudo-scripted version of Ultimate Fighting, but it is in a wrestling ring. It is not real, but we are not going to do disqualifications and stuff. We are going to give them a winner and a loser, because that is what people wanted to see.
