The Rise & Fall of ECW (9 page)

Foley said spitting on the WCW title created some hard feelings at the rival promotion. “That show caused a lot of friction between me and WCW, because they thought I was faking the back injury, which was not something I had ever done, and I also ended up spitting on the WCW Tag Team title. They didn’t seem to care for my rationale that I was trying to show that despite the fact that I had left ECW with my championship title, I had also felt like I left it without my pride and dignity, because Sabu had proved to be the more extreme of the two of us. Over at WCW, they weren’t into philosophical discussions when it came to saliva on their beloved belts. I still maintain that the people in charge would not have been so upset, Ric Flair in particular, if they had actually seen the interview instead of just hearing about it. What I was doing, I was saying that the tag team belt was important to me, but not as important as my pride, which I felt like I had lost that night in the ECW arena. I was told, ‘Hey, help these guys out.’ And I wanted to help them out not only with what I could do in the ring, but with what I could do with the mike. I thought Sabu deserved to be established as the top guy, and I thought I would do what I could to make that happen.”

Heyman says that Foley’s coming over to ECW was not because of any talent exchange, but because of legal actions taken against WCW over copyright infringement. “We ended up many different times nailing WCW on a lot of different things,” Heyman says. “WCW violated our copyrights by putting on shows; for example, they had a show,
When Worlds Collide,
which was also the title of a show we had done earlier. We sued them, but we sued successfully so many different times. It was almost always settled out of court, but they kept on coming after us in different ways and stepping on their own johnson. One thing that happened was that we were given access to Mick Foley. He came in as Cactus Jack and came on our television show. He worked a match with Sabu, and Sabu beat him. This was a dream match, because Cactus Jack was the god of the hardcores. He was known the world over as the best hardcore wrestler, and now Sabu beats him.”

Cactus Jack heads over the rail into Terry Funk and the crowd.

The next month—
Heat Wave 1994
on July 16 at the arena—Sabu & Tazz defeated The Pitbulls; Tommy Dreamer beat Stevie Richards, then lost to Mr. Hughes; Sandman beat Tommy Cairo; Ian & Axl Rotten defeated Rockin’ Rebel & Hack Meyers; Mikey Whipwreck defeated Chad Austin; Shane Douglas beat Sabu; and in a Barbed-Wire match, The Public Enemy defeated Terry & Dory Funk, Jr. They followed that up with
Hardcore Heaven 1994
on August 13. Chad Austin beat Tommy Cairo; Hack Meyer defeated Rockin’ Rebel; Tazz and Jimmy Snuka beat The Pitbulls; 911 defeated Mr. Hughes; Sabu defeated Too Cold Scorpio (the series of matches between the two over the years would be one of the highlights of ECW); Cactus Jack and Terry Funk wrestled to a no contest; and there would be one more match—one more moment in what was becoming many big moments in a promotion that was the talk of wrestling fans. This was the night when the Sandman defeated Tommy Dreamer in a legendary Singapore caning that helped put Dreamer over with the fans.

Dreamer lost to Sandman, and the loser had to be caned. Sandman delivered one blow after another, yet Dreamer, bloodied, kept getting up. At one point, he walked over and grabbed the microphone from Woman and said, “Thank you, sir, may I have another?” He walked over to the rope to be caned again. As it went on, the fans chanted, “Tommy! Tommy!”

“It hurt, taking that beating with the cane,” Dreamer recalls. “What they do now, those canes have little ties around them, and when you have the ties, if they are pulled tight, it has the impact of a bat, and if they are pulled all the way up, it still hurts, but it is less of a blow. Sandman and I, being retarded, we just kept them tight the whole time. We didn’t know if you moved it up, you could lessen the blow. It hurt, but I knew what I had to do. When adrenaline took over, and I saw the fans…the first couple of canes, they were cheering, but then as it went on, even my worst critics were yelling, ‘Tommy, stay down!’ They could see my blood, my back opening up, and my lips quivering, because I was in pain. They were yelling, ‘Stay down!’ They couldn’t believe I was getting up. It was kind of like a real-life Rocky situation, where they wanted Rocky to stay down, but he kept getting up and kept on fighting. I know that was Paul’s initial reaction, because I was Italian. ‘This kid is tough, and this is Philadelphia and all that.’

“That was a turning point in my career, but it was also a turning point in ECW,” Dreamer says. “It was a form of redemption through violence for me and for the fans. It is the best drug in the world, that rush from the fans. It is amazing. That is what always kept me going, pretty much—the fans.”

Ron Buffone said you could see the transformation among the fans after that caning. “Once Tommy took that horrendous caning from the Sandman, when he said, ‘Thank you, sir, may I have another?’ the fans decided he wasn’t just a pretty boy,” Buffone recalls. “The fans respected that you were willing to put your body on the line. And ultimately, the fans make the wrestlers. If you are not getting the response you want from fans, then you are not doing your job, and Tommy certainly did his.”

Sandman also remembers it as a turning point, for the both of them: “Tommy Dreamer and I made each other.”

But ECW would be known for taking a storyline and playing it to a level never seen before in wrestling—which is what they did with Sandman and Tommy Dreamer.

At an October show at the ECW arena two months later, the feud was supposed to come to a climax with an I Quit match. Fans were stunned when during the match, as Sandman lit up one of his customary cigarettes, Dreamer shoved it in his eye and used Sandman’s Singapore cane to cane him across the face. As the story went, Sandman was blinded by the cigarette and the caning, which led Dreamer to stop attacking him and start yelling to Woman, “I didn’t mean it! I didn’t mean it!” Sandman was writhing on the floor, a towel covering his face. Other wrestlers, both babyfaces and heels, were hovering over him, showing their concern. Sandman was wheeled out of the arena on a gurney by Heyman and paramedics. Even a savvy crowd like that at the ECW Arena couldn’t quite make out if what was going on was real or not. And what happened after that only made the whole thing seem more real. Woman screamed at Dreamer, “You bastard! You son of a bitch!”

Remarkably, Sandman carried the story to the extreme, staying home for a month, and nobody saw him around town. “He never left his house,” Heyman says. “He never answered his door. His wife answered the door. It was unheard-of back then for somebody to stick to the storyline to this degree.”

On the next show, Woman declared she would no longer manage the “useless” Sandman, and Dreamer wrestled without any spirit or enthusiasm, showing that the blinding had caused him great pain. A month later, Sandman came to the arena, with his eyes bandaged, for what was supposed to be a final interview. Now blinded, he was going to retire from wrestling. While Joey Styles was doing the interview, Sandman’s wife, Peaches, came to the ring and made up with her husband. Woman, armed with a Singapore cane, ran up and started beating Peaches and then threatened to do the same thing to the blinded Sandman. Dreamer ran to the ring to stop it and save Sandman, but while his back was turned, Sandman took the bandages off, grabbed the cane, and slammed it over Dreamer’s head, with blood pouring down the fallen wrestler’s face.

“It was one of the most shocking moments in early ECW and one of the loudest, because, boy, did that hook the audience,” Heyman says.

“When ECW was first starting, there were a lot more gimmicks in professional wrestling,” Dreamer recalls. “It was more geared toward children. ECW was mainly that 18-to-24 male demographic of testosterone-filled, ass-kicking wrestling with hot women. There was also a lot of blood, which was a no-no in WCW and WWE. And also there were a lot of women getting their butt kicked by men. Some wrestling fans on the Internet were offended, and some people weren’t, but there were a lot of people talking.”

The feuds, the hardcore battles with tables, ladders, and chairs, the barbed wire, the storylines—all contributed to the talk that this promotion was something wrestling fans had to see.

While Heyman had abandoned his plans to work with Jim Crockett on a new, national promotion, he had not forgotten about it. He still had visions of making such a move, and now saw Eastern Championship Wrestling as a vehicle to do that. And he felt the summer of 1994 was the right time to make that move.

“My goal was to create a new generation of a wrestling promotion, what I saw as the evolution of the industry,” Heyman explains. “My theory was—and I had not clued anyone, including Tod, in on this—was that the business was at a turning point. We are the buzz of the business. Vince is in the middle of his federal steroid trial on Long Island. WCW is now being run by Eric Bischoff, who is just raiding Vince’s talent, but doesn’t know what to do with them. And the business has not yet caught on to what it needs to do. So we are the hip, alternate wrestling promotion.

“People are flying into our shows from all over the country and from Japan. They do a whole tour from Japan, with fifty people coming over for our show. It is exploding. We moved into Florida—and we are paying for that time—and now we are up on the satellite. We are looking for other markets to go into. We get cable television throughout New Jersey. It is time to make another move.”

Heyman saw two ways to raise the level of the promotion: to change its name from its regional identity, and to break away from the old-school National Wrestling Alliance, which Eastern Championship Wrestling was still connected to. Various independent promoters were part of the NWA, which—ever since WCW broke away and went out on its own—was no longer a powerful national force in wrestling. “It didn’t have any real political clout,” Heyman says. “They hired an attorney in Charlotte who drew up the bylaws stating what you had to do to be a member in good standing in the NWA, which of course means nothing. Just because you put NWA on your poster or TV ad doesn’t mean you are going to get two hundred extra people, so it is really a waste of time. Their big claim is NWA goes back to the days of Harley Race and Ric Flair, which is true, but this isn’t really the NWA of old. This is a bunch of nobodies strung together.”

Wrestling has its share of backstabbing and double-dealing outside the ring among promoters. Heyman had some problems with a local promoter from southern New Jersey named Dennis Coraluzzo, who had been doing business with Tod Gordon. Heyman said that Coraluzzo was sabotaging Eastern Championship Wrestling shows. “Dennis was jealous of Tod’s success and tried to run shows five minutes away from the ECW Arena, right across the bridge in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Maybe he’d draw fifty people while we are selling out the arena in 1994,” Heyman says. “Dennis would call the fire department in Philly as a local citizen, claiming that the ECW Arena was overcrowded and dangerous and in violation of fire codes. So every month I am getting head counts done by the fire department at all my shows, and the fire marshal is checking the sprinkler system an hour before an event begins, and it is a real pain in the ass—cheap, dirty promoter tactics that have been around since the carnival days.”

While Heyman was contemplating a way to make a statement about establishing his new promotion nationally, Coraluzzo had petitioned the NWA board that he wanted to hold a tournament for the NWA title. He claimed they needed to crown a new NWA champion. Heyman saw this as a way to make his statement.

Heyman went to Gordon with a plan to break away on their own, and to use the NWA title tournament to do it. They sent a letter to all the members of the NWA, suggesting that Eastern Championship Wrestling host the NWA title tournament, since they had the most television exposure, in Pennsylvania, Florida, and New Jersey and on satellite TV as well. But they included in the proposal an offer to have Coraluzzo be part of the event, a black-tie affair, with Coraluzzo and Gordon sitting together and then making the championship presentation together in the ring. It was a great opportunity for a small-time promoter like Coraluzzo to get some exposure. So he agreed, and the tournament was set up for the August 27, 1994, show at the ECW Arena.

The title tournament was announced at the Philadelphia arena on August 13, 1994, during
Hardcore Heaven.
In that show, Tazz & Superfly Snuka beat The Pitbulls; Jason Knight defeated Mikey Whipwreck for the ECW TV championship; Hack Meyers beat Rockin’ Rebel; Chad Austin beat Tommy Cairo; Sandman won over Tommy Dreamer in a disqualification; Sabu defeated Too Cold Scorpio; and Terry Funk and Cactus Jack battled to a no contest, but gave the promotion a scene that would live forever in ECW lore.

At the end of their match, after Funk and Foley had beaten each other up, The Public Enemy ran into the ring and beat up both Funk and Foley. The crowd didn’t appear to know how to react—they couldn’t decide if they liked it or didn’t like it.

What was supposed to happen was that Funk and Cactus Jack (Mick Foley) were going to reverse the attack on The Public Enemy and leave them in the middle of the ring unconscious, and then challenge them at the big show for the titles. But Funk improvised. He dove out of the ring and got a chair, threw it into the ring, and nailed Johnny Grunge in the back of the head. Then he waved for the audience to throw in their chairs. The audience threw their chairs into the ring, and The Public Enemy was buried underneath the chairs. The arena erupted with chants of “ECW! ECW!”