Mysteries of Wrestling Solved by Adam Kleinberg; Adam Nudelman

Author:Adam Kleinberg; Adam Nudelman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-01-27T08:08:43+00:00

Mysteries_Chapter6_m3 9/19/06 12:56 PM Page 125

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to know and love. One veteran wrestler who had gained power as booker of wcw saw what was happening in ecw and was licking his chops at the thought of recreating that feeling for Ted Turner.

Ever?

Kevin Sullivan: ECW was Florida Championship Wrestling taken to another level. If you look at it, Paul E. was a great student. He was around a lot of guys at the right time in their career. And if you look at the Florida Championship era in the ‘80s it wasn’t much different.

Promotion

Tod Gordon: Kevin Sullivan went to WCW and in a short period of time pretty much took a third of our talent. He took Benoit, Malenko, Guerrero; he took the Mexicans; he took Konnan and Rey Mysterio.

Wrestling

Basically, he just raided us.

Best

Even Terry Funk noticed the changes at wcw as ecw talents were being raided.

the

Terry Funk (From an 8/96 GIR Radio Interview): Look at Turner. He ECW

said, “I don’t want violence on TV.” But what has been the turn of WCW? It’s been towards violence in the last six months. Believe me, Was

the other companies watch ECW like hawks.

PHANTOM

It’s almost like that time when Sonny Ono tried to buy us out of our exclusive contract with WGBB. He wanted to make us a Japanese wrestling show, but we held our ground.

SIR ADAM

What are you talking about? You were begging him to buy us out, you even started taking Japanese at Nassau Community College.

PHANTOM

Oh yeah. I guess I would have sold out too. Konichiwa.

Mysteries_Chapter6_m3 9/19/06 12:56 PM Page 126

To the wrestling fan it looked like things couldn’t have been going better for ecw. After Barely Legal in April 1997, they were producing bi-monthly Pay-per-view events. But many people we spoke to point to this as the time when ecw started to sink —

under the pressures of having a leader that couldn’t say “No” to his wrestlers, and under massive debts.

Jerry Lynn: One night I had a two out of three falls match with Justin Credible at the ECW arena. I told Justin that night, “We’re not gonna ask permission to do anything. We’re just gonna go out there and do what we do.” So we went out and we tore the house down.

And we went in the back and you could tell there were certain guys who weren’t happy.

Rob Van Dam (From a 10/03 GIR Radio Interview): In ECW, we didn’t have those stiff perimeters. You could go out, if you were the first or second match on the card, and you could try to steal the show: don’t worry about keeping it down, saving it for the rest of the card. You could go out and do everything in the book. I’d be walking through the curtain for a Pay-per-view, and Paul Heyman would say to me:

“Go out there and steal the show.” He didn’t care if I’d go out there for five minutes, twenty minutes, it was up to me. If I was going to fight in the crowd, bring a chair in, if I was going to set a table up, it was all up to me.

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