The Rise & Fall of ECW (24 page)

“New Jack went too far and he cut the kid too deep, and he gave him a good gash across his forehead—nothing that hasn’t been seen before in wrestling, and nothing that some guys haven’t done to themselves, to be honest. But the kid panicked and started screaming. The kid’s father was at ringside, and the father didn’t know he was going to be bleeding. The kid was bleeding pretty bad, but it was from the forehead, which always looks bad but it is not life-threatening. But it does looks bad, and when you are sweating it gives you the crimson mask effect, the blood dripping down your sweaty face. The blood is gushing out of the kid’s head. New Jack pins him and says his stuff, he’s playing his role. The medics are putting towels on this kid’s head and the kid’s father is screaming, and the kid is screaming that he wants an ambulance, so we get him an ambulance. But it just didn’t seem like that big of a deal. It seemed like a kid got cut too deep and kind of panicked. He was inexperienced, and New Jack shouldn’t have cut him that bad, but it happens in this business. The kid is being taken out of the arena, Tommy Dreamer is holding his hand. The kid, playing heel for the audience, gives everyone the finger. Dreamer says, ‘What are you doing?’ The kid says, ‘I’m playing the bad guy. Don’t I have heat?’ His father came in the back and raised hell. He got into a shouting match with New Jack. I said, ‘Send me the bill.’ He got fifty or sixty stitches. It happens.”

The ramifications went far beyond a hospital bill. Nearly two years later, Kulas’s family sued ECW and New Jack for physical and psychological damage. They charged that Kulas did not know he was going to be cut, and that he nearly died in the ring. They also charged that Heyman told a reporter that it was an initiation for him into the ECW family. ECW denied the charges. New Jack said Kulas
did
know what was going to happen and gave his approval to be cut. New Jack also claimed that the father knew what was going to happen from talks backstage. New Jack claimed that you can see Kulas puffing his cheeks, a way to increase the bleeding. Jerome Young, a.k.a. New Jack, claimed that his first two attempts to blade did not work. This is due to the fact that Kulas had never bladed before. When he tried again, he accidentally pushed too deep and that caused the massive bleeding. New Jack’s act on the microphone was introduced as evidence, as well as a shoot interview he later did, talking about how he loved to cause pain and violence. But Kulas claimed he suffered scarring from the incident, although there were no visible scars. In fact, Kulas was walking around backstage and talking to other wrestlers before going to the hospital. His conflicting accounts would result in a decision in favor of ECW and New Jack.

Four years later, the story of Eric Kulas came to a tragic end. On May 12, 2002, he died at the age of 22, reportedly of a heart attack.

“New Jack basically beat him up pretty bad,” D-Von Dudley said. “It was the scariest thing I have ever seen in the ring. Lawsuits followed. New Jack was acquitted of everything, but it was a scary moment.”

John “Pee Wee” Moore, an ECW referee who was in the ring that night, says there was plenty of blame to go around for the incident. “He [Kulas] entrusted himself to another wrestler, which is something that you don’t do unless you truly know the person. He wasn’t trained properly, and New Jack cut him, got him real good. I wasn’t in the ring at the time, but I was there. He was in serious condition. He shouldn’t have been in the ring in the first place. The police come and want to charge New Jack with felony assault, but he was gone. That was something I will never forget. Being in the middle of that when the cops are looking for one of us, who they think tried to kill a guy in the wrestling ring. He shouldn’t have taken advantage of him like that, but the guy shouldn’t have tried out if he wasn’t ready. You need to have a mental toughness in the ring and realize that anything can happen, and if it does, you can hold your own with who you are in the ring with. These are tough guys, and guys who aren’t tough shouldn’t get in the ring.”

Heyman would have loved to have the incident slip under the radar, but the wrestling media ran with it, and it became a huge controversy. As a result, ECW’s first scheduled Pay-Per-View event—a huge step for the promotion, one that probably meant its very survival—was canceled.

It was a knife in the heart of ECW.

“I was asked by some of the local media there about it and I said I didn’t think it was that big of a deal,” Heyman recalls. “We were concerned that somebody could make an issue of this, so Steve Karel notified the Pay-Per-View companies. He said, ‘We had an incident. We wanted you to know about it. It is probably going to get some publicity. It shouldn’t affect our relationship.’ We sent them a tape.

“I get a phone call that week from a wrestling publication called the
Pro Wrestling Torch.
A guy named Wade Keller asked me about it, and I made the statement, ‘The Pay-Per-View companies have been notified. Tapes have been sent.’ Keller decides to verify the story. But when he speaks to Hugh Panero, he says, ‘Paul Heyman says that you have viewed the tapes.’ That is not what I said, and I had witnesses to prove it. I said, ‘We have notified the Pay-Per-View companies, and the tapes have been sent.’ I never said ‘watched’ or ‘reviewed’ or ‘analyzed.’ I said
‘sent,’
and they were.

“Keller decides to make an issue out of it. He asks, ‘Since Heyman says that you watched it, do you condone it?’ While this is going on, the kid’s family hires a lawyer, and they want to know, ‘Why was this kid thrown into a wrestling match when he was only 17 years old?’ How the hell did we know? The father said, ‘I didn’t bring the kid there to wrestle in a match. I brought him there to be a spectator in the matches. He had never wrestled in his life,’ which was a lie. He was there to be a spectator. In a Ralph Kramden outfit that he had in a truck that he had to change into? When I met him, he was wearing a sweatsuit.

“They hire a lawyer, issue a press release, and now the Pay-Per-View companies have a controversy on their hands and a reporter breathing down their throats, so they suspend the March 31 date,” Heyman explains. “The day I get the phone call that the date has been suspended is Christmas Eve 1996. I get this phone call from Request TV, ‘Just so you know, we are going on vacation until the end of the first week in January, and then we can discuss whether or not we can get you on the 1997 schedule, because as of now, your Pay-Per-View has been officially postponed.’ So the thing that I have everybody in ECW hanging onto, this dream, the reason why all these people are turning down the other companies—we had already shot our angles and we are heading into the matches on this—this dream of Pay-Per-View has been pulled away on Christmas Eve, with no hope of discussing it for several weeks. It was devastating. It was the worst kick in the balls we could have suffered. Everyone was walking about like deer in headlights.”

While this was going on, Heyman was still trying to keep the talent pump primed. In November, he brought former “Thrillseeker” Lance Storm to ECW. Storm was another Canadian wrestler out of the Harts’ school. “I got into wrestling as a fan when I was in high school in the 1980s,” Storm recalls. “I was probably a fan for about five years before I got into the business. I was going to a university, studying to be an accountant, but I just wasn’t enjoying it anymore. I played volleyball at the university. I had a coach I hated. I didn’t enjoy university anymore, and didn’t want to spend another three years there. So I started looking at other options. I considered wrestling, while I was still young enough to give it a go. So I withdrew from university, and six months later [in 1990] I was in Calgary being trained [by Stu Hart and the Hart family].

“I was working in Japan for a company called WAR,” Storm says. “Chris Jericho had left WAR and was working in ECW. So when he went from ECW later to WCW, I was talking to him and realizing that WAR might be on its last legs, from a business standpoint, because it was having money troubles. I talked to Chris and told him I was looking for a job in the States. He said, ‘Why don’t you call Paul in ECW? He knows your work, and I am sure he would love to hear from you.’ So I give him a call and a month or two later, he called me back, and I was in.”

Storm says he got a warm reception from the ECW wrestlers when he arrived, but a cool one from the fans. “It was weird. The first time I worked there was at the ECW Arena in Philadelphia. A lot of wrestling companies, when you are there for the first time, you feel like you are the odd man out and not part of the group yet. But ECW, after my first match, I walked back into the locker room area and was greeted with a round of applause and welcome from the owner, and really felt like I was part of the team, even though it was my first time there. I had a few friends there that I had worked with from other companies, which helped, but it was really a welcome group effort by everyone.

“Your first time in, fans are pretty hard on you,” Storm notes. “They felt like it was their show, and that you didn’t belong, and you really had to earn your stripes, so to speak. But they appreciated and loved the wrestling, as long as you were willing to work hard, they were willing to accept you. It didn’t take long for that to happen there, and it was great, a real intimate relationship. They loved the sport as much as we did, and it was fun.”

The door was open to both newcomers and well-known veterans, who Heyman welcomed and gave an opportunity to perform however they wanted to, an example being Steve Austin’s promos. “Ravishing” Rick Rude was a very popular wrestler, a former WWE Intercontinental Champion who had retired because of a neck injury he suffered in a match against Sting.

But he came back to the ring at the start of 1997 to play a role in ECW. He was a masked interloper who harassed Shane Douglas, and would later hook up with Douglas and the Triple Threat. He became a color commentator, and would be involved in another groundbreaking concept in ECW—cross-promotion promoting.

Heyman was working on some unprecedented cross promotion with World Wrestling Federation. McMahon and Heyman worked together, but with different goals. Vince was battling WCW in the Monday Night Wars, while ECW was battling everyone for attention. So they began talent exchanges, with wrestlers from each promotion showing up at the other’s shows.

“Vince’s curiosity with ECW started at the
King of the Ring
in Philadelphia, where Mabel was crowned King of the Ring, and the entire arena is chanting ‘ECW! ECW!’ with great passion and anger at Vince McMahon,” Heyman explains. “Vince is coming back to Philadelphia to do
Mind Games,
and obviously we had such momentum at the time, it would behoove his business to acknowledge ECW.”

McMahon certainly had become intrigued by the upstart promotion. “I heard about ECW, this other wrestling organization,” Vince says. “I kind of dismissed it at first. Then it started making a little more noise. ECW didn’t have a lot of distribution, as compared to our product or WCW’s product. Nonetheless, when we brought one of their stars into the fold, you would hear a smattering, and sometimes more than a smattering of ECW chants. So there was something there. Why not incorporate it? Why not try to do something with it and see where it goes? I wouldn’t have done the same with WCW, but, this was a good way to broaden the business.”

They had different reasons for collaborating, but it was seen as a way to help both promotions. “It’s not going to help us to be embraced and endorsed by Vince McMahon,” Heyman declares. “It’s going to help us to rebel against Vince McMahon. So we came up with a way where everybody won.”

So ECW wrestlers showed up at September’s
In Your House: Mind Games
Pay-Per-View in Philadelphia. During the opening bout on the card—Savio Vega vs. (Justin) Bradshaw in a Strap match—Sandman, Tommy Dreamer, and Paul Heyman were seated at ringside. When Vega fell out of the ring, Sandman stood up and spit beer on him, prompting security to “forcibly remove” the ECW trio from the building. During the live broadcast, Vince McMahon even made reference to this “local outlaw wrestling franchise” that was “creating a disturbance.”

“Hey, wait a minute, what is this?” McMahon said on the telecast. “There is a local wrestling organization here in Philadelphia, and obviously trying to make a name for themselves here…. These Philadelphia wrestlers wrestle in a bingo hall.”

The next night, Tazz interrupted
Monday Night Raw
by jumping over the guardrail at ringside and holding up an ECW sign.

“We were never in the locker room,” Tazz states. “Basically we would corral in the parking lot, the ECW guys, and we had ECW guys sprinkled throughout the arena, because we didn’t know if Vince’s guys were going to try to jump us. We didn’t know what the deal was. But I don’t think very many people knew, besides Vince McMahon, what was going to happen.

“I remember that night jumping that guardrail and security trying to stop me,” Tazz points out. “A guy who was a photographer tried to stop me, saying, ‘No man, it’s not worth it, it’s not worth it.’ I was instructed by my boss and a couple of other people, anybody gets in your way, get them out of the way. I just said to the photographer, ‘You don’t want to do this.’ I shoved him out of the way and he broke his shoulder.”