The Rise & Fall of ECW (16 page)

“Tommy, when you open up your heart, when you open up your soul, and it gets shit on, it tends to make Jack a very mean boy. And so, I say to you—before I take these transgressions out on you—to look at your future and realize that the hardcore life is a lie, that these letters behind me are a blatant lie, that those fans who sit there and say, ‘He’s hardcore, he’s hardcore, he’s hardcore,’ wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire, you selfish son of a bitch! But I want you to understand, Tommy, though he’s hurt you time and time again, Raven wants you to understand that the hatred I have in here is not for you. No, no—far from it. You see, Tommy, I’m not doing this because I hate you—I love you, man! I only want the best for you—but when I hear that WCW called up your number and you said, ‘No, thank you’—well, it makes my blood run cold. As cold as that night in the ECW Arena. And so I got a moral obligation. You see, Tommy, I’m on a path of righteousness, and righteous men wield a lot of power. So if I’ve got to drag you by your face to that telephone and dial collect and say, ‘Hello, Eric, it’s me, Cactus, and though I know I’ve burned my bridge, and I’ll never be taken back with open arms, I’ve got a wrestler who would gladly trade in his ECW shirt for a pair of green suspenders. And Tommy, just think of that sound in your ear when Uncle Eric says, ‘Welcome home, Tommy Dreamer, welcome home.’”

He followed that with another memorable promo in September 1995:

“You know I’d like to apologize for my behavior. I’m embarrassed, certainly, I feel a little stupid about the way I acted on this show a few weeks ago. It’s just that I get a little emotional when I talk about wrestling, because wrestling’s been my livelihood for the past ten years. It’s enabled me to live out my childhood dream. So for me to come out on a show such as the ECW television program and badmouth the wrestlers there—well, I’m sorry. But I think in order to understand what’s going around my head, you have to understand where I come from and what my goals were when I got into wrestling.

“See, back in 1985, there was a program called
20/20
that challenged the wrestling industry, which kind of portrayed it in a negative light. Tommy, if you’re listening, try to understand that I was about the biggest wrestling fan in the world. And for me to stand in front of that television set and see people running down a business that I loved and held dear—even though I knew very little about it—to see my friends laughing at me saying, ‘That’s what you want to get involved in?’ That night I went to bed not with visions of sugarplums dancing through my head, but of broken bones, of battered bodies and bloody corpses, saying to myself, ‘If it’s the last thing I do, if I have to hold myself up for a human sacrifice, the world will respect professional wrestling.’ Oh, and that dream came true—yes, I’ve sacrificed myself for the past ten years, leaving the better parts of my past lying on concrete floors from Africa to Asia to South America to right in the middle of the ECW Arena. And what’s it really done? Where have we really come to?

“Lying in a hospital bed in Munich, Germany, seeing my ear being thrown into a garbage can, not being able to take it on the trip back because I didn’t know the German word for ‘formaldehyde.’ And having a nurse walk into my room, looking at that piece of my body that’s lying at the bottom of the garbage, and saying, ‘Es ist alles Schauspiel!’ which means, ‘It’s all a big joke!’ Excuse me! I didn’t know you opened up the diseased lung of a smoker and said, ‘Oh, my golly, I thought smoking was supposed to be good for you!’ Do you open up Terry Funk’s nonfunctioning liver and say, ‘Hey, I didn’t know that four decades of heavy drinking took this kind of toll!’? So, if they show that much respect for other patients, what made me any different? Because I was a wrestler. And professional wrestling will never be respected, no matter how many teeth I lose, no matter how many ears I lose, no matter how many brain cells have to die. And so it comes down to the point where it’s just not worth it, and, Tommy Dreamer, you’ve got to start looking at this realistically.

“Wrestling is a way to make a living—nothing more and nothing less—and as long as it’s strictly business, well, you may as well be cuddled in the welcoming arms of World Championship Wrestling. Because ECW fans will be the death of you. You see, they realized, and they were smarter than any of us, that they rule ECW wrestling—not us. What happened, Tommy? You came back from All Japan wrestling with your trunks and your boots and said, ‘By golly, I’m really going to wrestle.’ Did Giant Baba hand you a dozen eggs and say, ‘Here, crack these on Jumbo Tsuruta’s head’? You’re a disgrace to the profession, Tommy, you’re becoming a damn fool. And I can’t sit back and take it, because I’ve got a moral obligation. Tommy, try to understand—I am but a fouled experiment in human sociology, and I can accept that. But never in my sickest dreams did I imagine that there would be other wrestlers taking dives onto concrete floors, committing human suicide on my behalf—like I’m the patron saint of all the sick sons of bitches. Is that all I stand for, Tommy? Is that all I stand for, to stand in an arena where J.T. Smith lands headfirst on the concrete and hears the fans yell, ‘You fucked up, you fucked up?’ Well, fuck you. Who the hell do you think you are?

“We’re not a wrestling organization anymore—we’re the world’s damn biggest puppet show. I’ll be damned if I’m going to walk into an arena and let any of you call my match. One, two, three—jump. One, two, three—jump. Well, not me, because I’m nobody’s stooge, and Tommy Dreamer, if you had a little bit of pride, or a little bit of common sense, you’d understand that those people don’t love you—they laugh at you! You took some of the worst beatings the sport’s ever seen, and they still laughed in your face. And to think that I stood there with my arm around you and endorsed you, saying, ‘He’s hardcore, he’s hardcore, he’s hardcore.’ And for that I deserve to die a terrible, painful death, Tommy, because I feel responsible. And I got to go to bed at night, and I’m not sure where I’m going to spend eternity. And you, Tommy, are my salvation. Because, by delivering you to a better organization, where you can be appreciated, loved, and held with just the littlest amount of respect in the Turner family, then maybe there’s a chance for me, too. Please, Tommy, for my sake, think it over, because a yes to Cactus Jack would mean a great deal to me—and a no—well, I’d have to take that as you putting a big A-OK stamp of approval on my eternal damnation. I’m counting on you, you selfish prick. Don’t make me hurt you, because I can. Don’t make me do it, because if I do, with God as my witness, it won’t be in front of those little scumbags at the ECW Arena—it’ll be just me and you, Tommy, and you won’t know when it’s coming, and you won’t know where. So unless you want to damn me to the depths of hell, answer my call and say, ‘Okay, Cactus, you win. I’ll put on the suspenders, I’ll groom that mustache, and I’ll call Uncle Eric and say, Count me in.’ Because not only would you be doing yourself a big favor—not only would you be helping your life, you’d be saving mine. You’d be saving…mine.”

Foley describes his process for getting in the right frame of mind for those promos as pretty much like method acting: finding a motivation for the character. “I was told once that a heel—a bad guy—has to believe he is right. No matter how flawed his logic, in his mind, his actions have to be justified. I simply thought back to a fan that was holding up a sign that said, ‘Cane Dewey.’ I kind of laughed it off when I saw the sign, but when I mentioned it to my wife, she almost got physically sick. I thought about the fan who had gone home and actually took the time to write a sign and encourage me to beat a 3-year-old kid. I made it very real in my mind. So the approach I was taking was that the fans wanted too much out of us, and that I was apparently the only one who caught on to it, and it angered me that Tommy Dreamer wouldn’t accept WCW’s invitation to join their crew. It was almost like I was the Jacob Marley of the ECW, and was the only one who realized the bad road these wrestlers were on. And there was some legitimacy to that.

“I was offering myself up as an example of someone who had messed up in his wrestling life, who had burned his bridge in WCW, and I have to say that WCW worked much better in an anti-hardcore program than WWE would. While our fans may not have liked Vince McMahon, at least they respected him. But they had a hatred and lack of respect for Eric Bischoff, who was the head of WCW. I was looking at the idea of trying to redeem myself by helping others, and I, like a lot of people, was always a little scared of religious zealots, so I became one, and worked a little religious zealotry into the mixture. I basically got angry because of Tommy Dreamer turning down my offer of help. He was dooming me to eternal damnation. I was trying to redeem myself, and couldn’t do it without his cooperation.”

Foley declares that it was the atmosphere in ECW that helped him create such promos. “What was nice about it was that you could really experiment with it and come up with some far-out ideas, and fans listened. They really listened. There were actually two sets of these anti-hardcore promos. There were the hardcore anti-hardcore promos, like the ones I was telling you about, where I had seen the light, claimed I was hardcore, and did it in a fashion that was very much not to the fans’ liking. I was trying to figure out how to get the fans to really hate me, and I just systematically took away everything they liked about me. If they liked the beard, I shaved that. If they liked the hair, I wore it neat and in a ponytail. If they liked the hardcore image, I would take that away and do nothing in a match.”

And Foley credits Heyman for creating that atmosphere. “It was awesome to work with Paul Heyman. He gave me all the room I needed, almost complete creative autonomy. He would be in the room when I would do the interviews. It was not as if he was not aware of what was going on his show. He loved it and encouraged me. I don’t know if he ever took issue with what I said, and there were times when I was doing the anti-hardcore hardcores, as opposed to doing the hardcore anti-hardcores, that we had to stop the cameras several times because I was laughing so hard. For example, I would say, ‘What is the wimpiest possible food someone could eat?’ and Paul would say, ‘A watercress sandwich,’ and I would do my interview and say something like, ‘Wait a minute, I believe I have a piece of watercress stuck in my teeth,’ and I would attempt to floss using the microphone cable, because I was missing a couple of teeth, and I would say something like, ‘See, I’m missing teeth because I’m hardcore,’ that type of thing. I had my daughter’s birthday party, and I was grossing kids out because I was missing an ear. They were polar opposites, there was really intense stuff and really hokey stuff. ECW fans accepted both of them.”

The promos didn’t just blow away the fans. The ECW wrestlers were amazed as well by the creativity. “When Mick Foley became a heel, that was a huge moment in the business,” Tommy Dreamer says. “He had been this hardcore icon, and I brought him in as my partner, and he pretty much did a whole thing where he said hardcore wrestling gets you nowhere, and he was beating me up not for hate, but for love. I had offers to go to WWE and WCW, and he was trying to tell me, ‘Take the money, because the fans don’t care about it.’ He was pretty much saying how much his body hurt, and that he lost his ear for what? What are you going to do when you retire and all this. He cut his greatest promos against me, and his favorite promos as well, which was all anti-hardcore stuff, which, coming from Mick Foley, was something amazing.”

Sandman, who was not easily impressed, was in awe of Foley’s ability to create heat. “Cactus Jack was one of the smartest guys I met in the business and did some of the best promos in the business,” he states.

Ron Buffone was there to shoot those promos and knew they would have an impact. “You know when you are holding that camera and you are shooting a promo, you know when you have something special,” he explains. “You know when you feel it, that this is great, and sometimes you are looking through the viewfinder thinking, ‘Wow.’ I always got that feeling with Steve. I got that feeling with Cactus. The stuff that he would do was brilliant. The stuff he came out with, ‘Where did that come from? Wow!’”

So, at the same time, ECW had Steve Austin and Mick Foley—two of the future legends of the business—doing some of the best interviews ever seen in wrestling, for this blazing-hot Philadelphia-based wrestling promotion that had started out of a sports bar but was now making the big boys sweat.

“I had Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig,” Heyman recalls. “I had the greatest home run hitter and the greatest RBI guy. They were the best. It was phenomenal. The beauty of it all was that it allowed me to air them in their entirety or break them up amongst the pulp fiction montages we were doing. So I could air a nine-minute Mick Foley interview, or I could air a minute at a time, and intersplice other people around him, because you were always waiting for the next shoe to drop on the interviews. It was tremendous television.”

One of those greats, Austin, made his presence felt during the October 28, 1995, ECW heavyweight title bout—a Ladder match—between Sandman and Mikey Whipwreck. As usual, Sandman’s intro took about twenty minutes, but it was a sight to see, set to the Metallica song “Enter Sandman.” He strutted around the arena with Woman in tow, smoking a cigarette and drinking beer—a version of Austin before he became Stone Cold.