Read The Rise & Fall of ECW Online
Authors: Tazz Paul Heyman Thom Loverro,Tommy Dreamer
The Rise & Fall of ECW (29 page)
“We used to answer phone calls, take credit card orders, ticket orders, mail out tickets, field fan calls,” Stevie Richards says. “We were like the fan line—answer questions, give out show dates, make mailing lists, all that stuff. It was kind of funny, because people would recognize my voice because I sort of have this distinct voice, and they would say on the phone, ‘Man, you sound just like Stevie Richards. What is your name?’ I had to make up an ECW office name, and my office name was Lloyd Van Buren.”
During this time, ECW starting running a successful series of bimonthly Pay-Per-View shows, the last one being
Better Than Ever
on December 6 at the ECW Arena. With more than 1,600 in attendance, Chris Candido & Lance Storm defeated Doug Furnas & Phil Lafon and Balls Mahoney & Axl Rotten in a Three Way Dance to win the ECW Tag Team titles. The Dudley Boyz beat New Jack & Spike Dudley, and Sabu & Rob Van Dam defeated Tommy Dreamer & Tazz. The promotion had turned the corner in 1997, and was ready to take off in 1998.
Dreamer and Van Dam.
“Once we had
Barely Legal,
then we started banging out the Pay-Per-Views, making money,” Tazz says.
However, ECW had to struggle to hang on to its talent.
“The wrestling industry in 1998 was like the dot.com industry—inflated—and the pay scale went off the charts,” Heyman explains. “Something had to burst. We had guys turning down hundreds of thousands of dollars to go elsewhere and stay with us, and there comes a time when it is just not fiscally responsible to your own family. We had to step up and get advertisers and sponsors and licensing.”
What they needed to do was to take the next step up from Pay-Per-View—get on a national television network.
Chapter NineAlbatross TV
E
CW
seemed to be flying as high as a shooting star. It was coming off a banner year, 1997, where it made it onto Pay-Per-View and put on a series of classic story lines, the likes of which the industry had never seen before. It had gained much national attention for a promotion that was operating not out of any corporate headquarters, but out of hotel rooms, basements, and car trunks.
But ECW was still the little kid on the block battling the two big boys, WWE and WCW, and there was no time to stop and enjoy the good times. ECW needed to keep growing, evolving, and also battling to retain what they had already achieved. Everyone was taking notice of this popular promotion. And at least one of the big boys, WCW, seemed determined to put ECW out of business, with constant talent raids. While ECW talent would also leave to join WWE, Heyman still enjoyed a reciprocal relationship with McMahon’s company and used it well.
Al Snow returned to ECW in 1998 by way of that reciprocal relationship, and this time his stay would be a historic one for him and ECW as well.
Snow had been with WWE for about two years, and was not pleased with the way he was being used. He was looking to quit, and asked for a release from his contract. McMahon refused, but Snow went to his good friend, Chris Candido, to lobby Heyman to bring Snow back to ECW. Heyman spoke with McMahon, and though Snow was still under contract to WWE, he was now working in ECW.
Snow’s angle at the time was trying to convince fans that he had a nervous breakdown over the frustration about his career. “The fans there were very sophisticated and educated in wrestling,” Snow says. “They knew me and knew my career and my history, and at that point in my career, I was very frustrated, and figured that, as fans, they would know that. Anybody who had been doing what I had been doing for as long as I had been doing it, and had not had any big success, or as little success as I had, would eventually crack. I started reading books on abnormal psychology and started working on different things in the ring to show that I was having a breakdown, like talking to myself, and nothing was really working.”
Then one night at the ECW Arena, while getting some pictures taken for a Japanese wrestling magazine, Snow saw a Styrofoam head lying among the various items in the back of the building, and had what could probably only be described as an epiphany.
“I remembered Mick Foley screwing around in a car one night with Sid Vicious, Bob Holly, and myself, with this Styrofoam head that he carried his Mankind mask on, to keep its shape,” Snow says. “He was treating it like his girlfriend. He was making sexual innuendos to it, joking around.
“I remembered a story about a woman who was paranoid and schizophrenic, and she had transferral disorder. She had multiple personalities, but she transferred the sickness onto inanimate objects. She heard voices coming from them. I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to start carrying this head into the ring, talk to it, and treat it like it was a real person.’ When I first started talking about coming to ECW, I was talking about maybe shaving the words ‘Help me’ in my hair. So instead I painted the words ‘Help me’ backwards, on the head, as a subconcious cry for help.”
It changed Snow’s career, and has become his signature gimmick—Al Snow with Head—to this day. “I would wrestle a match, totally as a babyface, and at the end of the match, if I lost, I would beat the living shit out of the Styrofoam head,” Snow says. “I would piledrive it, and flip out. People started booing me. They were upset I was beating up this Styrofoam head. So I did it more and more. I found a few more heads to use.
“One night in New Britain, Connecticut, fans would bring things to the building for wrestlers like New Jack to use in the ring,” Snow recalls. “Somebody brought a beautician’s mannequin head for New Jack to use in a match. Spike Dudley and Mikey Whipwreck got it and gave it to me, and that is the head that I have used ever since. Paul E. came to me one night, a few weeks later, in Stamford, Connecticut, on Halloween, and he said, ‘You are going to be the next pulp babyface.’ He had plans to put me with Sandman the next night at the arena but in a match with Paul Diamond, and he dislocated my shoulder severely. I was off for six weeks, so I couldn’t work the
November to Remember
Pay Per View, and Candido again—boy, do I owe him—during the production meeting proposed that we do a pre-tape in the back with me in the locker room and the head. ECW didn’t really do pre-tapes, Paul E. let me do it, and that one promo took off for me from there.”
ECW started selling Al Snow “Heads” as merchandise. “One night in Asbury Park, New Jersey, they had 4,000 Styrofoam heads,” Snow says. “For my entrance, they would use the strobe light effect when I would come out. When I came out with the lights all shut off and pitch black, with the strobe going, all you saw were these white heads moving up and down. It was an amazing sight.
“Every night a majority of them would come flying back at me in the ring. To this day, I can do anything at all, and all the fans want to see is for me to hit somebody with that head. I was setting up a way for me to work an angle with the head, to get jealous about it, because when I said, ‘What does everybody want, what does everybody need, what does everybody love?’ Here is a guy who spends his whole career wanting to achieve recognition and success, and he finally does, but what do they really want and need and love? It’s not him. It’s the Head. That was fine with me. The Head can’t cash the checks.”
ECW was thriving on creative, offbeat promos like the Head, and also taking the hardcore persona to another level. Tazz carried that hardcore banner, and Rob Van Dam continued to emerge as the ECW’s other top attraction, with his high-flying style and his legendary battles with another athletic performer, Jerry Lynn. The two battled each other in an August bout that was considered by many to be ECW match of the year.
But it was one night at Asbury Park that would result in the best moment of 1998, and perhaps the signature moment for ECW—certainly a moment that has been seen over and over again in ECW intros and promotions. It was the
Living Dangerously
show, on March 1, 1998, featuring Tazz against the big man, Bam Bam Bigelow, who was a member of the Triple Threat at the time, for the ECW TV title.
“In ECW I had tons of physical matches,” Tazz explains. “A lot with Sabu, Rob Van Dam, and Tommy Dreamer. But this one—against Bam Bam—was right on the top as far as a guy who really dished it out to me. This was probably my second favorite ECW match. It was kind of cool being 5-foot-8 and 240 pounds, and I was the favorite. Bam Bam was the underdog in his own hometown, and he was 350 pounds and about 6-foot-4. That was kind of intriguing. I was a fan favorite at the time in ECW, no matter where we went. I was a New Yorker, and you know people in New Jersey don’t like New Yorkers, and we were in Asbury Park, New Jersey, his hometown. He was a big-bad-guy villain at the time, and there were a lot of Bam Bam fans there, which was cool.”
As the match was about to begin, announcer Joey Styles set the stage: “Despite the fact that Bam Bam Bigelow is the fan favorite here in his hometown, Tazz wanted it that way. Tazz loves to defy the odds. This matchup is not about a big paycheck, it’s not about making a statement on Pay-Per-View, it’s not even about the World Television title. This is personal.”
It was a brutal match. Early in the bout, Tazz nailed Bigelow, knocking him out of the ring and sending him crashing down on the timekeeper’s table and all the way to the floor. Bigelow came back and smashed Tazz into the steel ring post several times, and then, in the ring, powerbombed Tazz. It went back and forth, in and out of the ring. Tazz picked up a fallen Bigelow out of the ring and dropped him into the seats over the steel guardrail. Tazz went down on the floor as well, hitting the back of his head on the steel guardrail.
“It’s a small miracle that Bigelow is moving, and that we can’t see Tazz’s brain,” Styles said, marveling at the action.
As the brawl continued, both wrestlers hit each other with tables, chairs, and even a street sign that Bam Bam found under the ring. Then came the classic moment that stunned everyone watching. With both wrestlers in the ring, Bigelow tried to pick Tazz up and slam him, but Tazz grabbed him from behind and locked him up around the neck with the Tazzmission hold. Bigelow was tapping out, but the referee couldn’t see it. Bam Bam fell back and both wrestlers fell right through the ring and onto the floor below, as the fans went crazy, in awe of what they just saw. They started chanting, ‘ECW! ECW! ECW!’ Bigelow climbed out of the hole in the ring and lay on the mat. Tazz started to climb out, but Bigelow pulled him out and covered him. The referee counted to three, and Bigelow was the winner.
“I locked the Tazzmission, and Bam Bam was so strong, he was holding me up on his back like I was nothing.” Tazz recalls. “I was choking him out, and he threw his weight back and we both fell through the ring, and the fans couldn’t believe it. Eventually he came out of the hole first, pulled me out, beat me, and became ECW TV Champion. That was a historic moment in ECW, and I was fortunate to be part of it. It was awesome. It was also awesome wrestling Bigelow. I loved wrestling Bam Bam. I learned a lot from him. When he came in, Bam Bam was a big guy from the heyday, a star, and we were still plugging away in ECW. Bam Bam helped some guys out. He helped me out. I respect him a lot.”