The Rise & Fall of ECW (19 page)

T
he first big event in 1996 took place at the ECW Arena on House Party 1996, on January 5. Paul Heyman was adding new stars to the promotion. It was an interesting mix—wrestlers wanting to be part of this new phenomenon in the business, as their colleagues tell them stories about the freedom and excitement of working in ECW. Then the courting by WCW and WWE of the growing stars of ECW, which forced Heyman to try to keep the pump primed with fresh faces.

Rob Van Dam was a fresh face. And he would certainly make an impact.

His real name was Robert Szatkowski, and he was born on December 18, 1970, in Battle Creek, Michigan. A remarkably blessed athlete, Van Dam was trained by Ed Farhat—the Original Sheik and the uncle of Sabu—and started in the business in 1990 on the independent circuit in and around Michigan. He moved up in 1992, signing with WCW as Robbie V, but left two years later and went back to the independents, also wrestling in Japan. Like so many wrestlers of this era, it was in ECW that the 6-foot, 235-pound Van Dam found his character and the freedom to create his high-flying style. It would be a style that would be the dominant feature in ECW until the end of the promotion. He would hold the ECW TV title for nearly two years until he had to give it up because of a broken leg. Van Dam’s nickname in ECW, among others, was “The Whole Fucking Show.”

He would make his debut against Axl Rotten, but his style was more suited for an opponent he would face later on that month in another ECW show—Sabu. They would be linked together during their time in ECW, both as bitter rivals because of their similar high-flying styles, and partners as ECW Tag Team title holders, capturing the belts twice.

“Rob Van Dam was great friends with Sabu, and he is another guy who I’ve seen do things physically that I have never seen another human being do,” Tazz says. “He was amazing. Rob Van Dam and Tommy Dreamer, I don’t think there was anyone who loved ECW more than those two guys. The passion that Rob and Dreamer had for it were bigger than anyone’s passion—maybe even more than Paul’s. They loved the company, and I guess that is why those two guys stayed there so long. I think they need to be commended for that.”

Also at
House Party,
The Public Enemy defeated The Gangstas; Bad Crew went to a no contest with Tony Stetson & J.T. Smith; Sabu beat Stevie Richards; Bubba Ray Dudley beat Jimmy Del Ray; 911 & Rey Mysterio, Jr., defeated The Eliminators; Tazz beat Hack Myers; Sandman successfully defended his ECW Heavyweight title against Konnan; and Too Cold Scorpio beat Mikey Whipwreck for the ECW TV belt.

Cyberslam 1996
on February 17 at the ECW Arena would include a classic high-flying match between Sabu and Too Cold Scorpio that ended in a thirty-minute time draw, and also the start of one of the most dramatic feuds wrestling had ever seen—Sandman and Raven. Raven defeated Sandman for the ECW Heavyweight Championship, and their storyline would stun many observers.

ECW’s
Big Ass Extreme Bash
on March 9 at the ECW Arena featured the introduction of some new faces and the exit of a very familiar one. Adding to the
lucha libre
style of Rey Mysterio and Psicosis, Heyman brought in Juventud Guerrera, another Mexican wrestler who faced off against Mysterio in a classic Two Out of Three Falls showdown.

He also featured a recently arrived performer, another new and very talented international wrestler, this one from Canada, by the name of Chris Jericho, who would defeat Tazz on this show by disqualification.

Jericho—born Christopher Keith Irvine on November 9, 1970—was part of a generation of Canadian wrestlers who learned the business from the Hart family in Calgary. He made his debut in October 1990 and worked his way around various independent shows and in Japan before coming to ECW.

“I used to watch wrestling when I was a kid growing up in Winnipeg, Canada,” Jericho recalls. “When I was about 14 years old, I decided I wanted to be a wrestler. There was this school run by Stu Hart, a famous wrestler and promoter in Canada, the father of Bret and Owen Hart, and I wrote him a letter. They ran an ad on the show about their pro wrestling school. I wrote that I wanted to go to school there. They said you had to be 18 to go to school there. I graduated high school when I was 17, then I went to college and then went to wrestling school in the summer of 1990. I focused my attention on that from the time I decided that was what I wanted to do. I had played hockey and water polo, baseball, soccer. I was always involved in sports.

“After I graduated from wrestling school, I started getting myself booked at independent shows around Calgary and Alberta and western Canada. I eventually started wrestling in Japan, and did some wrestling in Mexico.”

He wanted to wrestle in America, though, and had his sights set on ECW. He would have come there a year earlier, if Paul Heyman had answered his messages, Jericho says.

“I had known Mick Foley from shows in Japan,” Jericho explains. “He told me to make sure that I called Paul Heyman. I was also friends with Chris Benoit, and he told me the same thing, call Paul Heyman. I started calling Paul in February 1995 and never got a return phone call from him. A few times I spoke to his ‘roommate’ Dave, who was really Paul but just disguising his voice, pretending that it wasn’t him. I kept calling and leaving messages. At one point in the summer of 1994 I got a message saying that if I could make a plane that night, I could be booked on an ECW show. But it was impossible. I couldn’t make a plane, it was too late. But that wasn’t even Paul who called me. It was Chris Benoit. I kept calling, and finally he returned my call in February 1996. It took me one year to get him on the phone. The first words he said were, ‘I’ve been trying to get ahold of you for the longest time.’

“I had watched ECW because I had a friend who got the MSG network up in Calgary,” Jericho continues. “It was developing a cult following, and people were really getting into it. It was so offbeat, the way they did things. But until you actually got there, you really couldn’t see how crazy the fans were. I had sort of an international name for myself. I had been a fairly big star in Japan, and these fans were pretty knowledgeable, even though the Internet was fairly new. They learned about other wrestlers through tape trading and newsletters and such. So they heard of me and knew who I was.”

Jericho’s first ECW bout was in Reading, Pennsylvania, pairing him with Rob Van Dam against The Eliminators. “We were going crazy and having a real Japanese-style match, with 101 moves all over the place,” Jericho recalls. “People starting chanting, ‘Five star match,’ during the match, and that was kind of cool, because that was a real insider term, meaning you’re having a great match. So to have that chanted for me my first match was great.

“The next night I was in Queens, and I wrestled Rob Van Dam in a singles match. It was one of those matches where we tried to do too much too quick, and at one point I did something that didn’t look too good. I think I missed a little bit with a kick, and then I got one of those ‘You fucked up’ chants my second night there.”

Jericho credited ECW with giving guys like himself—smaller, athletic wrestlers—a shot in the business. “I was part of the second wave of guys that came and then left,” Jericho says. “The first wave was Dean, Benoit, and Eddie Guerrero. The second wave was myself and Rey Mysterio and Juventud Guerrera. Ten years ago there were a lot of guys in the business who got international experience and no one had seen them or heard of them before, but they got a lot of different experience because they wrestled all around the world. Today everyone works the same and acts the same. Back then working in Mexico and England and Japan really gave you different styles.”

The
Big Ass Bash
also marked Cactus Jack’s farewell to ECW, and, appropriately, it was in a match against Mikey Whipwreck. “Fans clapped and cheered for Cactus Jack, despite their brutal reaction to him in recent weeks because of his turn to heel, because they were recognizing his work in ECW and his commitment to hardcore wrestling,” Heyman remembers. The match was a brawl, with Mikey Whipwreck taking a beating. The two wrestlers hit each other with chairs and all sorts of weapons, and Cactus Jack ended it with a piledriver. The crowd stood and paid tribute to Cactus Jack, as he picked Mikey Whipwreck up and hugged him before raising his hand. Joey Styles declared, “This is the Cactus Jack that we want to remember. This is the Cactus Jack that we love.” Other wrestlers celebrated, and that was the end of Cactus Jack in the ECW.

For Blue Meanie, it was a night to remember. “The most special memory I have of ECW was the night Cactus Jack walked up to me and Stevie Richards and said that we would be a part of his farewell to ECW,” Meanie says. “That meant a lot to me. Here I was, barely two years in the business, and someone who I idolized was asking me to be part of something that was special in his career. Me and Stevie looked at each other like, ‘Is he for real?’ When we did it, I was high it felt so great. I idolized Mick Foley. I still idolize Mick Foley. He was a great wrestler and a great friend. When I think about that night, it still raises the hair on my arms.”

While Heyman was bringing in new talent, he was also working on staying ahead of the competition and also expanding the promotion and its television exposure, all with the goal of getting on Pay-Per-View. Those goals were not always compatible.

“Vince is making its product edgier, and it is noticeable,” Heyman states. “WCW is picking away at our talent. The obvious need to get on Pay-Per-View is there, but we are still being held back, because of two reasons—UFC [Ultimate Fighting Championship] is having so much trouble getting legalized in so many states, and people are confusing us with mixed martial arts fighting. Bob Guccione’s son, Nick, opens up a competing group to Ultimate Fighting Championships called Extreme Fighting. What happens is the media picks up on that word and says, ‘All this Extreme and Ultimate fighting is human cock fighting.’ So all the state athletic commissions and Pay-Per-View companies say, ‘You’re Extreme, so you’re real.’ We say, ‘No, that’s extreme fighting. We’re just like WWE and WCW, we just have an edgier product.’ We are having a lot of licensing problems and clearing problems, and we can’t get on Pay-Per-View. And this is the time for us to get on Pay-Per-View.

“So I make the decision of getting into the more adult-themed wrestling business, to turn it up a notch,” Heyman explains. “I will start doing story lines that are really mature. I don’t mean pornographic or in bad taste. I am going to take my wrestling show and make it for college kids and older. Not only more mature story lines, but more intelligent story lines. So with Raven as the champion, I make the decision to do a couple of things. One is to continue the Dreamer feud. Another is that we are going to pull off an angle with Raven and the Sandman that is so outside of the traditional boundaries that wrestling has done, that it is going to be shocking. And number three, I am going to do some stuff that people are going to have to talk about.”

The Dreamer-Raven feud took an unprecedented turn when ECW introduced the issue of pregnancy into the story line, claiming Beulah McGillicutty was pregnant. Beulah made this revelation public while arguing with Stevie Richards—Raven’s lackey—in the ring.

“That night was amazing,” Dreamer recalls. “When Raven heard that she was pregnant, he turned and blasted Stevie Richards, who was always nice to Beulah, and she said, ‘It’s not him.’ And then she pauses and says, ‘It’s Tommy’s.’ The place lit up and it was like a soap opera.”

When Beulah said the baby was Dreamer’s, Raven pushed her into a corner, grabbed her by the hair and started choking her. Of course, Dreamer came into the ring to rescue Beulah and started pounding on Raven. “As I was beating him up, a fan handed me a blueberry pie,” Dreamer says. “I took a big bite of it, DDT’d him and laid him out, and left with the girl.”

This angle went on for a while, and, since Beulah wasn’t really pregnant, at some point they had to find a way out of the pregnancy story line. “Either we are going to have to take her off TV for six months and then come back and say she gave birth, or we are going to have to get out of this,” Heyman remembers. “In the meantime, we were going to split Kimona [who once did a striptease on top of the ECW arena to keep the fans happy while the ring was being repaired] away from Raven, because she was becoming a real pain in the ass. We were going to phase her out. We came up with a thing with Shane Douglas, to get him into a three-way feud with Raven and Dreamer.”

“I have a match with Raven coming up,” Douglas said in a TV promo. “Just so everyone understands, I am not Tommy Dreamer’s best friend. I want to fight Tommy Dreamer. And I know a secret about Tommy Dreamer that he doesn’t want to hear—that Beulah McGillicutty has been cheating on Tommy Dreamer. And I know the truth about the pregnancy. I am going to tell everybody the truth at the arena before my match with Raven.” The last thing you heard on TV before the match was Raven saying, “I just found out what the secret is, and I still love Beulah McGillicutty, and I want her back. No matter what you have done, if Dreamer won’t accept you, I’ll take you back.”

Following that, before Raven and Douglas fought for the ECW Championship at the arena in Philadelphia, Douglas, with Beulah, Dreamer, Raven, and Kimona in the ring with him, grabbed the mike and dropped the bomb.

“I’m going to tell the secret. Beulah McGillicutty is cheating on Tommy Dreamer.”

“Who is he?” Dreamer asked.

“Oh, it is not a he, Tommy Dreamer, it is not a he,” Douglas said.

Then Kimona ran over to the mike and yelled, “It’s me.”

The place was in an uproar. Kimona walked over to the corner where Beulah was standing, and Beulah grabbed her and gave her a passionate kiss as they fell to the canvas. They were rolling and kissing on the mat when Dreamer picked them both up, with the fans chanting, “ECW! ECW!”

Dreamer was holding both of them by the hair, one in each hand.

“What do you say, Dreamer?” Douglas asked.

“I’ll take them both on, hardcore,” Dreamer declared, and he planted kisses on both women, with the fans roaring their approval at this scene.