Read The Rise & Fall of ECW Online
Authors: Tazz Paul Heyman Thom Loverro,Tommy Dreamer
The Rise & Fall of ECW (15 page)
“Perry Saturn would scare me to death,” says Mike Nova, who would also join ECW in 1995. “Him and John, Perry would have to treat him like a kid. Kronus was the best natural athlete I ever saw in the ring. He was 6-foot-2, nearly 300 pounds. I remember all of us in the ring one day fucking around with a crash pad. We were trying to do the Shooting Star Press, the Billy Kidman move, and none of us really had the balls to do it. He went up to the ring and did it, not only effortlessly, but he did it three-quarters of the way across the ring. He and Too Cold Scorpio were two of the greatest flyers I had ever seen.”
Saturn and Kronus broke in as a team with the United States Wrestling Association in 1993 and won the tag team titles there in 1994. Heyman brought them into ECW, where they were managed by Jason and won the tag team belts three times in the promotion and created some of the action-packed, brutally fought feuds in the ring with The Gangstas and The Pitbulls. Saturn also worked as a trainer for ECW’s wrestling school, House of Hardcore. The team would break up after Saturn tore knee ligaments in 1997. When he returned, he decided he didn’t want to team with Kronus any longer.
In the middle of all the chokeslams, the tag team battles, and the wild scene taking place that September night at the ECW Arena, Heyman introduced Rey Mysterio and Psicosis to ECW fans.
When Mysterio and Psicosis got to the arena, Heyman met with them.
“Hi, how are you guys doing?” he asked. “Thank you so much for coming. Konnan tells me all about you. Put your match together and I will get back to you later.”
Heyman left them alone for about twenty minutes and then returned and said, “Do you guys know what you want to do yet?”
Mysterio asked, “What are our parameters?”
Heyman replied, “You have none. If you both went to heaven, and God said, ‘Put on the most entertaining match to simply blow me away, and I’m giving you one chance to do it, or you both go to hell, but if you do it, you and your families will be up here in heaven with me,’ what match would that be?”
He walked away again, leaving the two wrestlers stunned. If this was WCW or WWE, they would be going through a carefully planned and choreographed match.
Before the show started, Mysterio came up to Heyman and said, “Please, you’ve got to tell me what you want.”
Heyman said, “Okay, here it is. Steal the show. I am giving you the platform. You can go into the rails, you can use tables and chairs. Be smart, though. Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should, and just because you should do it doesn’t mean you have to, and just because you have to do it doesn’t mean you’re going to. Steal the fucking show. Do it any way you have to—wrestle, brawl, bleed, fly, anything you want. Show these people you are the best in the world. Rey, do you believe you are the best in the world?”
Mysterio answered, “I believe I’m one of them.”
Heyman turned to Psicosis and asked, “Do you think there is any better heel than you?”
Psicosis answered, “No, I think I am the best in the world.”
Heyman kept trying to ease their fears. “Okay, so twenty chair shots ain’t your style, right?”
Psicosis said, “No.”
Heyman went on. “Ten tables ain’t your style, right?”
Psicosis said no again, and Heyman replied, “But maybe one table, one chair, maybe one kick to the balls. Be smart. How much time would you like? Is thirty minutes too long?”
Psicosis answered, “Yeah, thirty minutes is too long.”
So Heyman asked, “Is twelve too short?” to which Psicosis replied yes, and they agreed on twenty minutes.
Heyman looked at them and said, “Okay, go home when it is right. You want to make me look good, right? Here’s what I want. I want Rey to win. I want Rey to win with a finish that nobody has seen here before.”
Mysterio told Heyman, “I do this thing, man. I stand up on the top rope, the guy runs at me, I flip over his shoulders, I come up with a sunset flip, we both flip twice, and I end up hooking his legs. I did it once and people loved it.”
Heyman said, “Okay, that’s your finish. Now that we know it, I don’t want to tell you anything else. My ring is your canvas. Paint me a Picasso. If you are over, then you are invited back for all my shows. If you’re not, then you tried. This is me giving you a chance to have the most famous match of your lives. Go for it.”
Heyman said he had nothing to lose by leaving them on their own to make the match. “I knew if they gave me a classic, people would think I was a genius. If they bombed, then people can say I tried. If I am wrong, then I am wrong, but at least I took the risk, and if I am right, I am the guy who gave them the chance. They will make me look good.”
Mysterio and Psicosis went on to steal the show with their high-flying, fast-paced
lucha libre
match. “It was fabulous, and it saved me, because now people knew if they wanted to watch extreme
lucha libre,
they had to watch my show,” Heyman declares. “Now I have all the Hispanics in New York watching me, too. All of a sudden we are getting all these orders for tapes from Texas and California because they want to see these guys. And it also sent a message—anyone can leave ECW. We will replace everybody. Earlier in the year, we replaced Sabu and didn’t miss a beat. Now we lose three of the greatest wrestlers in the world—Benoit, Malenko, and Guerrero—and on the very next show, we replaced them with two Mexican wrestlers that Vince and Bischoff thought could never get over. They were seen as midgets. Someone said to me, ‘You’ve got midgets on your show. Jumping beans, jumping beans.’ But people were blown away.”
Mysterio recalls his introduction to ECW: “Konnan spoke very highly of me and Paul Heyman brought me in. I owe Konnan so much and he is still a very close friend and neighbor of mine. He has a brilliant mind for the wrestling business.
“I remember walking in that first day and asking Paul, ‘What can we do? Can we use tables or chairs?’” Mysterio says. “Paul answered, ‘Do whatever you guys want. Just go out there and have a good time.’”
One month later, Mysterio and Psicosis would meet in a much-celebrated Two Out of Three Falls match that would overshadow all their others, in particular because Psicosis would be the winner. “That Two Out of Three was perceived as the last match, even though it wasn’t,” Heyman explains. “It was perceived as the blow-off, you put the heel up clean, no cheating, just let him win. That was so risky because people were, ‘Oh my God, it will kill Rey.’ But it wouldn’t kill Rey. It would help make him, because it would show people you never know who will win between these two. You have to give credibility to Psicosis because he is so good.”
A description of how each fall was won shows the acrobatic
lucha libre
style that captured the attention of fans: The first fall is Mysterio’s. He nails it by taking off and goes flying out of the ring, over the top rope and into Psicosis, who is out of the ring, knocking him back over the guardrail and into the seats. The crowd is going wild, chanting, “ECW! ECW!” Mysterio gets up and climbs into the ring slowly, looking as if he is hurting. Psicosis is even slower getting up, but both wrestlers eventually get back into the ring. They start hurtling back and forth against the ropes, then Mysterio dives into the air, grabs Psicosis with a flying leg scissors, and flips him over, then gets the quick pin.
The second fall goes to Psicosis when Mysterio does a cartwheel and wraps his legs around Psicosis’s head. He throws Psicosis to the mat. Psicosis gets up and Mysterio comes flying backward off the ropes for another leglock around Psicosis’s head in a springboard moonsault from the second rope, but this time Psicosis drives Mysterio into the mat with a Tombstone Piledriver, which nearly puts Mysterio out. Psicosis holds Mysterio down for the count. Psicosis wins the second fall, as Mysterio lies nearly motionless on the mat.
In the third and final fall, Psicosis whips Mysterio into the steel rails. Psicosis picks Mysterio up and slams him into another rail. Psicosis sets up a table, lays Mysterio out on it, gets a chair from a fan in the crowd, and slams the chair into Mysterio’s stomach. Psicosis then gets back in the ring and climbs to the top rope, jumps, and lands on top of Mysterio with a leg drop, breaking the table. Psicosis picks Mysterio up and tosses him back into the ring. He takes Mysterio’s head, puts it between his legs, and delivers a powerbomb. As Mysterio lies on the canvas, Psicosis brings a chair into the ring and smashes it over Mysterio’s chest and face. Psicosis lays the chair on top of Mysterio, climbs to the top rope, dives off, and backflips onto Mysterio and the folded chair lying on top of him. Psicosis gets the cover and the victory over Mysterio.
This kind of action existed in an atmosphere in which Heyman let the wrestlers—the artists—paint their own picture. “It was one of the only companies that really had no restrictions on time limits or moves,” Mysterio recalls. “It was just go out there and do what you do best, which was wrestle.”
But that was just one part of ECW—the wrestling. The talking was a big part of the success of the promotion, and Heyman was about to welcome someone who would talk his way into ECW history and launch his own remarkable career in the process.
Chapter FiveRuth and Gehrig
S
teven Williams—born December 18, 1964, in Victoria, Texas—was a typical tough guy from the Lone Star State. The 6-foot-2, 250-pounder played football at North Texas State University and then went to work at various odd jobs. Eventually, wrestling seemed like a good fit for him, and after being trained by Chris Adams, he made his debut in 1989—not as Steve Williams, because there was another wrestler with that name, but instead taking the name Steve Austin, after the nearby town.
“Stunning” Steve Austin wrestled in Texas with the United States Wrestling Association for two years and in 1991 joined WCW, where he began to make a name for himself, winning the TV title and hooking up with a faction in the promotion called The Dangerous Alliance. That group, which featured Rick Rude, Larry Zbyszko, Bobby Eaton, and Arn Anderson, was led by a colorful, outspoken manager named Paul E. Dangerously. Paul E.—Paul Heyman—would leave WCW, but Austin stayed and continued to move up in the promotion, holding the WCW Tag Team title with Brian Pillman on a team known as the Hollywood Blondes. That was the first incarnation of Steve Austin—a tough but pretty-boy blond. It was not the persona that would make him one of the biggest stars in the history of the business.
Austin went on a tour of Japan in 1995, where he suffered a severe injury—a torn tricep. Soon after, he suffered another injury—this one much more personal. His boss at WCW, Eric Bischoff, fired him over the phone, a move that angered Austin.
The word spread to Heyman that Austin had been fired. “The fact that he had been injured and Bischoff fired him, that was a real shitty move,” Heyman states. “I figured Vince would give him a job. I managed Steve in WCW—not his legitimate manager, but his wrestling manager—and I thought, given the right platform, Steve would be a huge star. I had a great relationship with Steve. There was a WCW magazine back in the fall of 1992, and I used to write a column called ‘The Danger Zone,’ because I was Paul E. Dangerously. I wrote an entire column that Steve Austin, by the year 2000, would become the biggest single star in the business. I knew it.”
Heyman called Austin when he heard the news. “Hey, how are you doing?”
“Hi, kid, what is going on?” Austin said, in that gruff, readily identifiable voice of his.
“I heard you got fired.”
“Yeah, the motherfucker, he fired me on my answering machine.”
“What?”
“His secretary called me and fired me on my answering machine.”
“Come on,” Heyman said.
“Paul, I was sitting here at home drinking a beer,” Austin said. “I didn’t hear the phone ring. There was a beep from the machine and I heard, ‘Steve, this is Jeanie Engle calling for Eric Bischoff. Please call Eric Bischoff.’ There was another message, ‘Steve, this is Jeanie Engle calling. Eric Bischoff needs to talk to you.’ And then another one that said, ‘Hi, Steve, Jeanie Engle calling. Eric said don’t bother calling him back, just wanted to let you know we are going to send your release papers. Thank you for your contribution to World Championship Wrestling. We wish you all the best luck in future endeavors. Bye.’ End of message.”
“You mean they fired you on your answering machine?” Heyman said in disbelief.
“Damn right, motherfuckers.”
“So when do you start for Vince?” Heyman asked, anticipating that Austin would be recruited by McMahon.
“Two problems,” Austin said. “My arm is still all fucked up and I’m still rehabbing, and I got a couple of months left to go.”
“What is the second problem?”
“Nobody’s called me.”
Heyman was stunned. “Wow.”
“You called me,” Austin said.
“Do you want to work for me?”
“Fuck, yeah, I want to work for you. I love your show.”
“Really?”
“Fuck, yeah.”
“Steve, I want you to show people what you got.”
“I’m sitting here with a beer in my hand and my feet up on the sofa. What do you need from me?”
“Just come in here and tell your story.”
“Okay, who do you want me to tell it to?” Austin asked.
“Everybody. Come up here and rip those motherfuckers to shreds.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“No, you’ve got to air that.”
“Fucking A, I’m going to air that,” Austin said, excited about the prospects.
“Anything you want to do, just let your personality show,” Heyman offered.
“I’ll do it under two conditions. Number one, I want to have my first match back for you, and I want to wrestle Mikey Whipwreck, and I want him to beat me in the middle of the ring.”
Heyman laughed. “Okay, why would you want that?”
“Because that’s business,” Austin said. “I love that kid and the way he works, and it would be a pleasure to work with him.”
Heyman wanted to take the heavyweight championship out of Sandman’s hands, and they figured, why not put it around Mikey Whipwreck’s waist? “I needed Sandman back to being a babyface, and the way to do it was to take the title off him and have him just beating the fuck out of people, because when he loses everything is when people love him. So when he lost that title and started caning the fuck out of people, they loved him again.”
Austin appeared on the scene doing some of the greatest promos ECW had seen, as this former WCW star went on TV and ridiculed and ripped his former bosses. He wore a black wig and imitated Bischoff, saying things like, “Welcome to
Monday Night Nyquil.”
He would work to hone his promo style in ECW, where he would also find the inspiration that would lead to the character that would later make him a star—Stone Cold Steve Austin.
Another future wrestling superstar would tape a set of promos that summer that would make wrestling history—Cactus Jack. They began at
Wrestlepalooza 1995,
on August 5. Raven, Stevie Richards, Snot Dudley, and Big Dick Dudley were scheduled to face Tommy Dreamer, Luna Vachon, and The Pitbulls in an eight-man tag team bout. When Cactus Jack arrived at the ECW Arena that night for his match, he got a surprise from Paul Heyman.
Heyman wanted Cactus Jack—Mick Foley—to turn heel. “I was planning on talking to Mick at that show about turning heel at one of the upcoming shows,” Heyman says. “But we had an eight-man tag team match booked, and Luna Vachon missed her flight in Florida, and we fired her. She was one of Dreamer’s partners. Mick was scheduled to do a run-in in another match. When he got to the building, he had been stuck in some heavy-duty traffic and got there right before the show.”
Heyman pulled Cactus Jack aside and said, “I am sorry this is not a long-term conversation. I wanted to sit down with you after the show tonight. But I want to turn you heel. I want to turn Cactus Jack heel.”
Foley didn’t give it much thought. “That was almost unthinkable because I was such an established figure in the hardcore world, and would presumably be a difficult guy for the fans to boo,” Foley declares. “But I just looked at him and said, ‘Okay, let’s do it.’”
Tommy Dreamer, with the ring emptied out at this point in the match, finally got his nemesis, Raven, and delivered a DDT. As he went for the pin, Cactus Jack—supposedly Dreamer’s tag team partner—came into the ring and kicked Dreamer in the head. Then he lifted Dreamer off the floor and did a double DDT on a chair. Cactus Jack grabbed Raven and pulled him on top of Dreamer for the pin. The crowd was stunned.
If ECW fans were shocked, they were blown away, as were even the other wrestlers, by two promos Cactus Jack would shoot later that month and in September: the anti-hardcore promos.
Here is the one Cactus Jack shot in August:
“I’m going to take you back to a deciding point in my life—a time when I believed in something. A time when I thought that was my face and my name made a difference. Do you remember the night, Tommy Dreamer? Because it’s embedded in my skull, it’s embedded in my heart, and it’s embedded in every nightmare that I will ever have. As Terry Funk took a broken bottle and began slicing and dicing Cactus Jack, the pain was so much that—I’ll be honest with you, Tommy—the pain was so much that I wanted to say, ‘I quit, Terry Funk, I give, I wave the flag, and I’m a coward—just please don’t hurt me anymore.’ Then I saw my saving grace. You see, Tommy, I looked out in that audience, my adoring crowd, and I saw two simple words that changed my life: ‘Cane Dewey.’ Somebody had taken the time and the effort and the thought to make a sign that said, ‘Cane Dewey.’ And I saw other people around, as every moment in my life stopped and focused in on that sign and the pain that shot through my body became a distant memory, replaced by a thought which will be embedded in my skull until my dying day! Cane Dewey. Cane Dewey. Dewey Foley is a three-year-old little boy, you sick sons of bitches. You ripped out my heart, you ripped out my soul, you took everything I believed in, and you flushed it down the damn toilet. You flushed my heart, you flushed my soul, and now it sickens me to see other people making the same mistake. You see, Tommy Dreamer, I have to listen to my little boy say every day, ‘Daddy, I miss Georgia,’ and I say, ‘That’s too bad, son, because your dad traded in the Victorian house for a sweatbox on Long Island. Your dad traded in a hundred-thousand-dollar contract, guaranteed money, insurance, respect, and the name on the dotted line of the greatest man in the world, to work for a scumbag who operates out of a little pissant pawnshop in Philadelphia.’ You don’t expect me to be bitter?