The Rise & Fall of ECW (27 page)

Raven vs. Terry Funk.

“The close-ups were what the fans wanted to see. The Pay-Per-View company didn’t want us to be too extreme, but we always pushed the envelope. Paul would play nice for the first half and then give me the go-ahead to do the show the way we normally would. Then there were times when the guy would be screaming, ‘I’ll pull you off the air. If you do that again, there will be no next Pay-Per-View. But you have to let the product be the product. That is what the Pay-Per-View companies didn’t understand, even during the first Pay-Per-View. After that, it was history.”

In the ECW TV title bout, Shane Douglas kept the belt by beating Pitbull #2, but the crowd was nearly as caught up in anticipation of the next match as it was about the match they were watching. After waiting a year for it to happen, Sabu and Tazz would finally square off in the ring.

“For one year, I mocked Sabu, I called out Sabu,” Tazz recalls. “I did everything physically possible and mentally possible to taunt Sabu. I beat guys up in the ring and called them Sabu, the whole nine yards. And Sabu wouldn’t come out to face me. And then finally when he came out to look me face-to-face—the lights went out, then they went on—and we were in the same ring for the first time in a long time. The fans knew we would face each other at
Barely Legal.
It was a great moment, and we made each other in that match. I’ll never forget it.”

Ring announcer Bob Ortiz gave it the proper introduction: “Ladies and Gentlemen, Extreme Championship Wrestling presents the grudge match of the century.”

Near the end of the bout, Tazz picked up Sabu and slammed him over the guardrail and into the first few rows of seats in the crowd. He then picked Sabu up and slammed him over a table. Then Tazz got Sabu in the ring in the Tazzmission hold, and Sabu finally surrendered.

“The match couldn’t live up to the hype, and we had a really good match,” Tazz says. “We had better after that, but there was just so much hype and pressure going into that match. We worked hard, and it was a physical match. This was our first Pay-Per-View, and we were the featured match. There was a lot of pressure on us, a lot of pressure on everyone. There was a lot of pressure on Raven, and on Terry Funk, and he was a veteran. I remember being stressed out that day, but I remember having a ton of fun.”

Sandman thinks he has the win over Funk.

After the match, Sabu and Tazz stood together in the ring, acknowledging each other and the fans, with Sabu raising Tazz’s hand in victory.

“It was a phenomenal moment for the company, and I was fortunate enough to be part of that promotion and in one of the main events and wrestle my archnemesis, Sabu,” Tazz declares. “It was a great moment.”

The finale sealed the deal. First there was a three-way match between Sandman, Stevie Richards, and Terry Funk, with the winner getting a chance to go on to wrestle Raven, the ECW Heavyweight Champion, for the title. This night would be a tribute to hardcore and everything that ECW stood for, so it was the icing on the cake to have the veteran legend who helped bring ECW to that point be crowned the champion.

“For me at the time, being 24 years old and living only ten minutes from the arena, to be in the main event with a legend like Terry Funk and a hardcore legend like the Sandman, an ECW icon, was unbelievable,” Stevie Richards says.

“Before the match Terry Funk asked, ‘How are you feeling, Steve?’” Richards recalls. “I said, ‘I don’t know what the hell I am doing here, Terry. You have all these amazing athletes who have made a name for themselves, and Paul Heyman picked
me
to be in the main event for this match.’ Tommy Dreamer wasn’t even wrestling that night. I am thinking, ‘What did I ever do to deserve this? This is unbelievable.’”

Dreamer did the commentary for the main event: a match between Funk and Raven for the ECW Heavyweight Championship. Funk pinned Raven, and the night was complete. “It’s over. It’s over. He did it. He did it,” commentator Joey Styles yelled. Fans went wild, celebrating with a bloodied but jubilant Terry Funk.

“What a story,” Heyman exclaims. “The impossible dream. This broken-down old man, Terry Funk, comes up against this unstoppable badass young punk Raven. In interviews before this showdown, Raven says to Funk, ‘You remind me of my own father, you want to abuse me, you drink, you do this.’ Oh my God, it was just so emotional, and for Funk to win it, it was the culmination of all of our dreams, the impossible dream taking place in front of your very eyes. For everything Terry did for us, he deserved it, truly deserved it.”

The Pay-Per-View customers nearly didn’t see it. First, the show was under a strict time limit by Viewer’s Choice. “If we went one minute over that time limit, I think we would lose all the money because they couldn’t do the replay or some other issue,” Buffone recalls. “They didn’t want that to happen. So the media director is in the truck screaming, ‘Ron, bring this thing home.’ I have Paul saying, ‘I’m not cutting this match short. The fans will get the product that they paid for.’ And meanwhile, we are getting closer and closer to that time limit. We gave the fans the show they deserved and didn’t compromise any matches by making them end early.”

For Heyman to do that—stick by his guns—he needed some help from Raven, because there wasn’t much time remaining for the final bout against Funk.

“The three-way match went long,” Heyman remembers. “I am giving time cues, and Raven, who had become a bundle of nerves, was now the coolest guy in the building. He was standing behind me saying, ‘It is cool, I will bring it in. I will do this match in twelve minutes.’ Another minute goes by, and he says, ‘It’s okay, I can do this match in eleven minutes.’ He was cool as a cucumber, and he pulled it out.”

Then, as if there wasn’t enough drama, literally seconds after the match ends and the show goes off the air, there is an explosion, and then the lights go out.

“The transformer, the power supply or whatever, blew up ten seconds after the Pay-Per-View was over, and if that had happened during the Pay-Per-
View, it could have been just a big catastrophe,” Richards explains. “Our first Pay-Per-View, and people won’t even get to see the whole thing. They won’t get to see Terry Funk win the ECW world title.”

“If the show had run three seconds longer, we would have lost the feed,” Tommy Dreamer says. “The building couldn’t handle all the power we were pumping out. But we made it there. It was like we won the World Series. We were going nuts, as if the home team finally did it.”

“There was this enormous bang, and the TV lights go out,” Heyman remembers. “The generator lights stay on, but the TV lights go out. ‘What the hell was that, a bomb?’ I am asking in the headset, ‘What was that?’ And I am getting nothing back. I am being handed another pair of headsets. They had switched in the truck to the other headsets. Ron Buffone says, ‘The generator blew.’ Fifteen seconds after we went off the air, the generator blew. And the backup generator blew with it. The blowout was so bad it got both generators.”

It didn’t matter, though. ECW had pulled it off—their first Pay-Per-View—and the emotions poured out.

“Everybody back there was so emotional,” Richards says. “I cried and kept crying. It was a very emotional time, and a lot of people say things about Paul Heyman. But he put in twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week into this, to get that Pay-Per-
View off. It looked as if ECW was about to springboard to another level. I’m sure it was exhausting emotionally, physically, and mentally. He probably cried for a good week.”

“We all cried, because we worked so hard to get there,” Heyman says. “Terry Funk cried, because even in his fifties, he realized he made this thing happen.”

Joey Styles was overcome with emotion. “The first Pay-Per-View was, to this day, the greatest professional night of my life. We had the Pay-Per-View booked, then got run off because of the New Jack incident. But then we got back on Pay-Per-View. It was my first time going live, and if you can’t call something live, you’re not a real announcer. I prepared long and hard, especially for the Japanese wrestlers who were coming in, and I knew I was making history because I was going to be the first announcer to call a live Pay-Per-View in any sport, without one or two color commentators. I knew everyone in the industry would be watching. It would be the beginning of my career as a wrestling announcer, or the end. There would be no safety net. I would succeed or fail. I would put my performance that night, with no color commentator, up against any performance by any pro wrestling announcer in the history of this business. I think it was as good a job as anyone had ever done.

“I remember feeling such a sense of relief after the show. I walked down from my broadcast position, which was over the front door, and as I came down the steps—my fiancée was there—I broke out in tears. I had never started crying out of happiness in my life.”

While everyone was backstage hugging and crying in the dim lighting still available, the fans were still celebrating in the arena and demanding more, yelling for Heyman to come out and make a speech.

“I didn’t appear on the Pay-Per-View,” Heyman says. “I didn’t make any public appearance. I can’t do a speech because there is no microphone. I go back into the dressing room and say, ‘We are going back out in the ring and take a curtain call. And just so you guys know, they want a speech, but we have no microphone.’ We get out to the ring, and the ovation lasted about ten minutes. The whole building is chanting, ‘ECW! ECW! Thank you, Paul,’ and everyone’s name individually. This is picking up momentum, getting louder and louder. It is amazing. I am waiting for it to die down and to get a mike. I held up my hand and hushed the crowd. Everyone got quiet. We talked to them for a couple of minutes and said, ‘Thanks.’ Nobody slept for a week. Then everybody slept for a whole week.

“When everyone woke up the next weekend, nothing was the same,” Heyman says. “Tazz was now
the
star. Raven was no longer the top dog in the promotion. Van Dam, though a heel, was clearly going to be the top guy.”

Nothing was indeed the same. It turned out that a week after
Barely Legal,
Raven was talking to WCW and took an offer from them. There would be little time for ECW to rest on its laurels. Now they had to figure out how to keep moving forward with what they had accomplished, and deal with the changes in this volatile business, such as having a talent like Raven leave.

“The mindset that had permeated the company, being the little company that could, dramatically changed,” Heyman explains. “Now we knew that we could. Now it became, ‘Okay, how do we dip into this money pool?’ The business was exploding. How do we get our piece? It was all of us thinking this. In some ways it was a natural evolution, and in some ways a real downfall for the promotion at the time. I was not going to try to hold on to Raven. We had a run with this character that very few could ever duplicate, so I let him go. It was a situation I was faced with two years later with the Dudleyz. As much as they brought to the table, it was time to let them go. I refused to bid for Raven, and wanted to get him out. I didn’t want to keep him in my locker room to recruit. That was my biggest concern. When someone was leaving, I wanted to get them out of there, because of the fear of recruiting.”

Raven’s leaving created some tension inside the promotion. “I remember the time period of just being crazy,” Dreamer says. “How could these people, your friends, be doing this? Raven was the first person who called me and he was like, ‘You want to come?’ We actually got into a fight about this because he thought I told Paul, and I never told anyone.”

Heyman, though, used Raven’s leaving to squeeze out the climax to the long-running story line of Dreamer and Raven. “We had a tremendous opportunity here,” Heyman explains. “We had gone two and a half years with Raven beating Tommy Dreamer every time. Now we had a chance for one of those great moments, where Dreamer would finally get the victory over Raven.”

ECW also started to have more story lines with World Wrestling Federation. “I was using the platform to publicize more of our stuff,” Heyman says. “Van Dam was getting over so big, so we used him on that, and called him Mr. Monday Night. He is getting over on their TV, a homegrown guy on our shows pretending to be a WWE guy. He is with us, and really getting over as a heel.”

ECW began building up their next major show (not Pay-Per-View),
Wrestlepalooza 1997,
with Dreamer vs. Raven being the main attraction, but there would be a surprise that Heyman was laying the groundwork for. “I discussed an idea with Vince,” Heyman says. “What if Jerry Lawler invaded the ECW Arena? What if an outsider formed a faction within ECW? We did what is in many ways one of the fastest paced, one of the wildest rides we ever took, with
Wrestlepalooza ’97.”

The June 6, 1997, show was at the ECW Arena, with Shane Douglas beating Chris Chetti to defend his TV title. Then The Pitbulls defeated Little Guido & Tracy Smothers, the Dudley Boyz bounced Sandman & Balls Mahoney, and Terry Funk successfully defended his ECW Heavyweight crown against Chris Candido.