Paul Heyman Badly Wanted The Rock For ECW, But Vince McMahon Wouldn’t Budge
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BY DOMINIC DEANGELO/APRIL 9, 2023 4:30 AM EST
Tommy Dreamer has been a producer of professional wrestling all the way in which again to his ECW days with Paul Heyman, and the “Innovator Of Violence” has revealed that these days as soon as had the potential for being “electrifying.”
It was Dreamer and co-host Dave LaGreca steering the ship on Friday’s version of “Busted Open Radio,” and the most important matter of debate was how expertise has been utilized and generally under-utilized all through the course of the Nineties into the 2000s. Dreamer laid out a timeline of his backstage work beginning with ECW and finally into WWE, and recalled when ECW initially made the alliance with WWE again in 1996 as a channel to assist domesticate among the unsung expertise laying considerably dormant on the WWE roster. Dreamer talked about how they occurred to make the most of names like Doug Furnace, Phil Lafon, and maybe most memorably, Al Snow. However, there was one identify within the combine that Heyman instantly wished to construct, courtesy of Vince McMahon.
“Real, real cool revolutionary stuff,” Dreamer stated, referring to the ECW and WWE relationship. “I remember Paul [Heyman] being like, ‘Give me that guy.’ That guy was The Rock. They were doing nothing with him. Paul saw something with him, even back then, and Vince wouldn’t let him go. Would that have been awesome to have The Rock under the ECW Original banner? Yes, but it didn’t happen.”
Dreamer did say that Rock was an enormous ECW fan too, however at the moment, WWE did not see it in “The People’s Champion.” Thankfully for everybody concerned (besides, after all, ECW) they finally got here to their senses.