More Than Just Hardcore (32 page)

So Tod wanted to open a new company, and he wanted me. I said, “Tod, it’s not gonna work. You’re gonna lose your ass, and I don’t want to see you lose your money.”

But he was determined, and he wanted to know if I’d come on board, so I agreed.

When it first started, it was Eastern Championship Wrestling. I didn’t want to put the time into booking it, so he called Eddie Gilbert to come to work and book.

Eddie ran our first show, held in a gymnasium. That show was the biggest fiasco that I have ever witnessed in my life. The dressing rooms were full of wrestlers, non-wrestlers, hunchbacks, fat girls, skinny girls, a very few pretty girls—just the damndest menagerie of humanity you could imagine. One guy I remember was the Sandman. He was there. And he was godawful! He was one of many who became good workers, but who was just the shits that night.

The weather was bad, too, so they didn’t have that many people there. We just had a few hundred for the first ECW show. That show was so rotten, you just wouldn’t believe it unless you were there.

After my match I grabbed the microphone and said, “You know, I know this show wasn’t the greatest, but you people bear with us, and I promise we’ll put you on a better product.”

And they did—the fans stuck with ECW.

The morning after the show, we were trying to get out, but we were snowed in and ended up stuck at the hotel for two more days. And Eddie Gilbert and I spent those two days creating stuff for ECW. Some stuff in wrestling today is a byproduct of an idea from Eddie Gilbert. People have no idea how influential his ideas really were.

Something else that became popular at ECW shows was something I had popularized—going through tables. Randy Savage was the first (to my knowledge) to send someone through a ringside table when he piledrove Ricky Morton through one in 1984, but I truly think me doing it to Flair in 1989 was what put tables on the map. And when I did it I wasn’t even aware that Savage and Morton had done it in Memphis five years earlier.

But a kid named Terry Brunk was the one who really made the tables into a staple of his arsenal. Terry was the nephew of my old friend Ed Farhat, The Sheik. He wrestled as Sabu. The stuff Sabu did from the top rope and his moves through tables were practically unheard of in wrestling in the early 1990s when I first encountered Sabu at an independent show. No one had ever seen moves like the backdive off the second rope into the bodypress. He was a real creator and a real innovator in that ring. Every time you see someone do a highflying move using the ropes as a springboard, you are watching someone imitating a Sabu invention.

He would also sell that stuff. He wouldn’t do some crazy move and then pop right back up. He made sure the fans understood the physical price he was paying by selling every move he made. The generation of guys who borrowed things from Sabu overdid it and killed a lot of those moves by doing too much, too fast, but Sabu’s in-ring performance was great. I’m not going to say his work was faultless, but it was damn good.

The first time I saw him, I immediately realized what a huge influence he would be. How could he not? Hell, 80 percent of his matches were things that have never been seen before.

Anytime I went to an ECW show, I tried to do more than was necessary. Sabu did the same, and so did Shane Douglas. We all had a common desire to make the company. We were going to extremes, so it was appropriate when they renamed it Extreme Championship Wrestling.

That “extreme” approach was very influenced by what Onita had done in Japan. Onita himself had started out with a lot of influences (of which I was one, all modesty aside), but he had become a very innovative figure himself, and he had a lot of influence on the business. ECW would never have gone the route it did, if not for the success of FMW, and WCW and the WWF ended up copying aspects of ECW to change up their product, so Onita had a pretty profound effect on wrestling.

The “E” in ECW became “Extreme” in 1994, after a tournament for the NWA world title that occurred while I was working in WCW (more on that in a minute).

The NWA title, supposedly the same title my brother and I had defended in the 1970s, was up for grabs in a tournament in the ECW Arena in Philadelphia. ECW champ Shane Douglas won the title, but then threw down the NWA belt and declared his Extreme Championship Wrestling title to be the only real world’s title.

By that time, the NWA was some group of independent promoters who had bought the belt. Maybe it was the NWA belt, in strictly legal terms. That wasn’t the NWA world heavyweight championship I remembered, though.

The whole thing did somewhat belittle NWA promoter Dennis Coraluzzo, who I liked, but I just chalked that up to the kind of things that happen in the wrestling business that I had no control over. Dennis and Paul E. had their little fight going on, and that was kind of the culmination of it.

Shane Douglas almost became the face of ECW after that, though, along with Sabu and, later, Tommy Dreamer, Taz and Rob Van Dam. It was just the most amazing bunch of workers, many of whom came out of nowhere to become big stars. That happened because Paul E. allowed them to develop their own characters.

Shane was very good at the time, and I always thought he did an excellent interview. He spent a great deal of time with his promos. You know, some people can do those very easily, very naturally, and without a lot of preparation. For others, it doesn’t come as easily, and they have to work a little bit on them. I wouldn’t say promos ever came very easily to me—I was always one of the guys who put a lot of work into them.

Over the years, Sabu’s contributions to wrestling have been forgotten by a lot of people, it seems, and his historical importance is undervalued by many so-called wrestling “experts.” Sabu has also gotten something of a reputation for causing problems in the locker room, but I can tell you I never saw a problem with him. And in the 1990s, there was no one else protecting the business anymore, except Sabu, sometimes to his detriment. He wasn’t about to appear in Beyond the Mat, because he felt it would be exposing his character in ways he didn’t think were right. He truly believed in retaining an air of mystery, something that’s all but gone in this era.

Sabu’s another guy who’s doing pretty well on the independent circuit, but he’s busting his ass for his money.

So I ended up in the ring with this great, underrated innovator for a barbed wire match that was the main event of an ECW show on August 9, 1997, called Born to Be Wired. That show was one of the worst deals I ever got myself into.

Very shortly into the Born to Be Wired match, Sabu took a bump into the corner and got himself hung up into the barbed wire. When he pulled free, the barbed wire tore his bicep at least six inches. His actual bicep muscle was showing, and blood was pouring out.

Sabu asked his ringside manager, Bill “Fonzie” Alphonso, for some tape, wrapped up the arm and went back to the match. At that moment, I had no doubt—I was in there with a rare breed of cat. Later in the match, I went through the ropes and got my neck tangled in the wire. I was seriously choking out, until someone grabbed a pair of wire cutters and cut me loose. I’ve been in some tough barbed wire matches with Cactus, but this was probably the roughest one I’d ever been in.

Things happen in barbed wire matches. You can’t call what’s going to happen, either. You have control over yourself, but you can’t control where that barbed wire is going to snag you. Anytime barbed wire is strung up around the ring, those wrestlers are in a dangerous situation, and when you take a bump into barbed wire, you’re endangering yourself.

Every time I’ve been in one of those matches, I haven’t spent my time in the dressing room bullshitting with the other guys. I sit and I think about it. I’m totally concentrating on it.

But as much as that barbed wire hurt, an ECW match I had with Cactus Jack a couple of years earlier was even worse. During the match, Cactus brought back the flaming steel chair, like the one we had used in Japan. Unlike the one in Japan, however, the seat mat on this one flew off in mid-swing, flaming. It flew out of the chair, as Cactus swung and hit the top rope while I rolled out of the ring. When the burning seat came loose, it landed on me, outside the ring.

Now, every time Cactus tells this story, he says he hit me with the chair, and then I said, “Hit me again.”

My ass! I sure as hell didn’t want to get hit again with that damn thing! Why the hell would I have been rolling out of the ring, if I’d wanted to get hit again? Once was enough!

Anyway, the seat landed on the back of my arm and just roasted it. And I must say—that was a pretty good roasting.

After it happened, I went into a nonstop rampage, cussing and screaming at anyone within earshot. Friends, wrestlers, doctors, promoters and nurses had to listen to my diatribes, and I bet I could be heard a block away. I called Cactus a “dumb son of a bitch” and many other, colorful things. Of course, I called him later, at his home, and left a message for him on his answering machine, to patch things up.

The bottom line was, and is, Mick is Mick. We’ve been up and down the pike together and have conceived of so much wild crap together, that stuff like that wasn’t going to make us turn against each other. Shit happens, especially with extreme gimmicks like ECW used, and those matches could be very dangerous.

Mick also elevated a lot of guys. One of them was Tommy Dreamer. Tommy didn’t have an easy row to hoe in this business. He wanted to be in the business more than anything in the world and was willing to do anything to get into it, and to stay in it. He turned into a good piece of talent, and his feud with Mick helped the ECW fans see that fully. Tommy was a good soldier to Paul E., and always put the business first.

Yes sir, Tommy was a good soldier, taking orders from a so-so general. Paul E. had good, creative ideas about the business, but some of his ideas about financial success for the boys didn’t exactly work out the way they should have. But he couldn’t help that—there was no way he could make all the guys a living and still balance the books. The money just wasn’t there.

Hell, they had a lot of good soldiers there in ECW. And the reason for that was that they were motivated, and not just by Paul E. Yes, Paul was a great motivator, but they were also motivated by the question, “What else is there?”

The guys knew the answer to that question, and they knew they had to hang on from week to week. There was no alternative. But guys who could make something of themselves in ECW generally went on to greater successes in one of the bigger companies. Even today, there are a lot of guys making big money in WWE who should be thanking their lucky stars that they got to be a part of that little organization, because that was how they got their feet in the doorways of this business.

Take Perry Saturn. He and John Kronus had a lot of success in ECW as a tag-team called The Eliminators. Saturn later went on to WCW and the WWE They were one hell of a team, and really gelled as a team. Some guys just complement each other and make good teams, becoming more together than either one could separately. The Eliminators produced their asses off as a team for ECW. But when they went their separate ways, neither one was as successful as they’d been together. It was like watching The Kangaroos when I was a child— you put Al Costello and Roy Heffernan together, and you had a great team. Split them up, and what did you have? When Don Kent replaced Heffernan on that team, The Kangaroos were never the same. That’s not a knock against Don, but they just weren’t The Kangaroos.

Another great tag team in ECW really hit it big as a team in the WWF—the Dudleys, Buh Buh Ray and D-Von. Those two guys worked their asses off in ECW, and kept it up when they joined the WWF in 1999. Their hard work paid off, but if there were no ECW, they would have had no place to show off their talents.

But ECW was also a place where a lot of innovations took place. One of those was the triangle match (which WWE calls the “triple threat” match today). The first one was between me, Shane Douglas and Sabu. The trick of that kind of match is timing, because you must pace yourself in such a way that it doesn’t come out looking like a clusterfuck. But you can’t plan it all out beforehand. You have to just get out there and dance, and that’s what we did. I don’t think the three of us sat down beforehand and discussed even one spot.

We ended up working to an hour draw between the three of us, and it was dancing at its best. We did three-way sleeperholds and a lot of other inventive spots. All three of us were really on that night.

The idea of the triangle match came about in a conversation between Paul E. and me, and we started working out how to start the match (with two guys and one waiting to tag in, or three in the ring at once). There have been a lot of those kinds of matches since then. In most of the ECW ones, they had elimination rules, where the last guy not to be pinned was the winner. When the WWF started doing the matches a couple of years later, the winner was the first man to score a pinfall on one of his two opponents. I actually think WWF’s way might have been better, because in the elimination version of the match, you have to have two guys get beaten, when you really only need one fall to get across the excitement of the match. The WWF way also created exciting scenarios, such as when one guy has to make a save for another guy he also doesn’t want to win, just to keep him from getting pinned and the match from ending.

ECW might have started with Tod Gordon, but it had become Paul E.’s baby. He lived and breathed it 24 hours a day. I still don’t know what happened with the change in ownership to Paul from Tod, but the last I knew, they were still talking to each other. I don’t know if there was a dispute between the two, or if Tod just decided he wasn’t going to sink another dime into it and let Paul E. buy him out.

Paul E. is the kind of guy you can be extremely mad at, the kind of guy who’ll do something that will make you want to punch him right in the nose. You walk into the arena looking for him, and there he is. Before you can even get to him, to punch him out, you can’t do it, because you’re laughing before you reach him, and he’s telling you something new and absolutely silly. He just has that way about him. That’s just Paul E.—a very charismatic person. Not charismatic in the sense of being a TV character, but in walking around dealing with him personally, he has a tremendous personal magnetism.