Sorry for the delay, Jose. I have been really looking forward to this debate for a couple of weeks and I hope that the reason I have given you is enough to explain my lack of punctuality. Good luck and let’s have a great debate.
No worries. Real life takes precedence over pleasures like these.
I, for one, would be very surprised if Paul Heyman was not rubbing his hands together as he got into a tussle with WCW over Mike Awesome. ECW came out of the matter with more people talking about them than ever before.
Make no mistake; Eric Bischoff was probably doing the same thing!
It's no doubt that either man (and don't forget Russo!) was excited to somehow spin this to their advantage. However, Heyman still held the legal high ground, and could have taken any number of precautions to ensure that the ECW Title didn't appear on WCW television, even in name alone. He chose to make it a business deal with WCW; Paul was always keen on getting promotion on someone else's dime. The provisions of this deal included that WCW announcers would hype the upcoming April 13th ECW show from Indianapolis, where Awesome was already booked to lose the title.
No mention of the April 13th show. No extended promo as was agreed upon with Heyman. WCW merely took Awesome and threw him out at Nash, and just as quickly shifted to Hogan. WCW had no interest in fulfilling their end of the deal, and Awesome's willingness to go along with it voided the deal brokered with Heyman and allowed ECW to take legal action against WCW. Was that within Awesome's or WCW's right? Clearly not, as a price was eventually paid to ECW to prevent matters from ending up in bigger courts.
Not only had WCW managed to bring one of the biggest names in ECW to WCW, he had managed to do it with the ECW Heavyweight Championship around his waist. WCW had been known to have done this one more than one occasion and the trend suggests that WCW didn’t exactly care about the way these situations were handled. The incident involving Alundra Blayze is evidence enough of this as the then WWF Women’s Champion defected to WCW and dumped the Championship into a trash can.
In one of the few miracles of latter day WCW, somebody higher up seemingly learned their lesson from the Alundra Blayze fiasco. WCW refrained from having Awesome carry the belt on his Nitro debut. It was one of the few terms of the initial agreement with Heyman that they did fulfill even as they willingly broke the others. Had they allowed Awesome on TV with the physical title, Heyman and ECW would have had even more ammunition against WCW and Awesome in court.
At the end of the day, what WCW were always trying to do at this stage, was to try and get people watching and talking about their shows. Defections were all the rage and people were jumping ship frequently. They were big talking points in the wrestling business and still are to this day. WCW brining in a Heavyweight Champion from another promotion is a talking point, no way around it. WCW had achieved their goal and Mike Awesome was a part of that.
But what did it get them compared to the trouble it caused them? Through their actions, which broke the terms of the deal that allowed them to rightfully mention the ECW title, allowed Heyman to take legal action to void his prior obligations to Awesome and extract a large sum of money from WCW. WCW got an unproven talent who flopped quite hard and never matched the main event level status that he had achieved in ECW.
Not only was [Mike Awesome] out of a company that owed him a lot of money, he left with a middle finger to Paul Heyman. He took the Championship that was the top prize in ECW and took it to another promotion. For the rest of Mike Awesome’s career, he would forever have that attached to his name. He would forever be the man who gave a lasting middle finger to ECW and Paul Heyman. He would forever go into the same category as people like Lex Luger, Hulk Hogan, Bret Hart and (more recently) Ric Flair to join another company as one of the original companies top stars.
Awesome would not have been able to leave with the title of champion without Heyman's blessing as part of an arrangement; an arrangement Awesome and WCW broke and paid the price for. I can't argue that these events didn't place Awesome into the discussion of such high profile defections, but Awesome is far and away the least important of the list of men you have given. With the exception of Bret Hart, each of those men went on to do good business after their moves.
More importantly, it gave Mike Awesome some exposure as a both a Champion of ECW and a competitor in WCW. It gave him an easy springboard into competition in World Championship Wrestling and was competing with the likes of Hulk Hogan and Kevin Nash in his breakout feuds. Not many people can say that they had that effect but Mike Awesome is one of the few.
Awesome got steady employment for another year or two, but was never made to be a true main event star. After some initial work with Hogan (which isn't too surprising when you realize that Hogan's nephew Michael (Horace Hogan) is a cousin of Awesome's) and a go-nowhere feud with Nash, Awesome went on to work with mid card guys like Kanyon, Lance Storm, and Vampiro for the remainder of his WCW career. WCW even saw fit to reboot his gimmick twice in the span of one year. No big feature or hype was made of him being the ECW Champion past his initial Nitro debut because they had screwed the pooch on the deal with Heyman. He could have debuted and started feuding with the injured Nash and doing run ins for Kidman without the need for the title of ECW Champion; again, WCW was clearly more interested in the shock value of having Awesome debut than they were in utilizing any talents Awesome had. He shows up, lays out Nash, and BOOM! We're back to Hogan and Bischoff/Kidman to close the show.
Let us make no mistake, at the time of the Mike Awesome invasion to WCW, ECW was the third pro-wrestling promotion in the United States. It came behind World Championship Wrestling and the World Wrestling Federation. Now, this may seem like a digression but it is actually a very pertinent point in my debate.
WCW was a hell of a lot bigger than Extreme Championship Wrestling. They had more recognisable talent and a better overall product. They had way more fans and a greater amount of weekly viewers. Ask any small business owner and they will tell you that the best thing for small businesses that want to get on and make some waves is an advertisement. If we reduce this to the most basic of factors, Mike Awesome was a huge advertisement for ECW. People were talking about ECW then and we are still talking about the incident now.
There's no doubt Paul Heyman and ECW needed all the promotion they could get, as TNN acted as if they didn't exist. What Heyman didn't need however was to lose a top star. On top of that, he was forced to damage the image of the ECW Championship by having Awesome practically lay down and lose the title in a matter of minutes. In fact, in an attempt to get any kind of promotion out of the situation, he used Tazz, a WWF performer, to try and max out the exposure and excitement level of the event.
You can hear in Styles' voice that he's trying to make this sound important. He's trying to make it sound exciting. It's too bad that Awesome barely showed up. No sell, no sell, no sell, Dreamer run-in, submission. All that attention, all that free promotion (which WCW never gave anyway), all so viewers could tune in to watch men from two other promotions put on a mockery of a title match. As WCW also found out during this era, damage like that to your flagship title can be difficult to recover from. On top of this, during the 10 days in which WWF found itself in possession of the ECW Championship, ECW found itself even more free promotion; millions of viewers tuned in to watch Tazz come up short to the WWF Champion. The title Dreamer won off of Tazz later was irreparably damaged goods.
At the end of the day, the decision to bring the title of ECW Champion to WCW was wrong: wrong because their (Mike Awesome and WCW) actions broke the agreement with Heyman, and wrong because it benefitted no one but McMahon in the end.
