Halloween goes to the extreme this year because the new ECW podcast Front Row Material with Mikey Whipwreck & Jerry Lynn dropped this morning. Hosted by Mike Freland, the first episode of Front Row Material focuses on Paul Heyman, the two stars breaking into ECW, the craziness of some of the regular fans and more. Below are a few quotes:
Mikey Whipwreck on arriving at the ECW Arena and as just a ring crew guy:
“This place [ECW Arena] is a shithole. This is nice. I guess Joey Styles saw me doing high-spots and he called Paul E. Next thing I know, Paul says to me “hey you wanna wrestle?” I’m like “uh, okay.” You gotta figure then you know, 5’9′, 180 lbs, up in the northeast, you know, I wasn’t going get a career doing anything in the business. It was the land of giants up here.”
Jerry Lynn: “I can sympathize.”
Whipwreck: “Yeah, see? So I’m like ‘ah, I’m not gonna break in or anything.’ So I had no aspirations, no delusion that I was going to be any type of wrestling superstar so ‘you wanna wrestle?’ ‘oh yeah cool, okay, I’ll just go get beat up. I’m pretty good at it.’ It just took off from there.”
Whipwreck on his “Whipwreck” name:
“I didn’t know that Paul was using other promoters names and kind of tweaking them and making them job guys. Like we had ‘Joel Hartgood.’ I just remember Chad [Austin] saying to me, ‘with that name and this gimmick, you’re never going to get over.’ I was working at K-Mart overnight in the garden shop, that was my job. I had benefits. You, it was one of those ‘I’m cool with this right now.’ But when he told me that ‘with a name like that, you’re never going to get over. I’m like the guy around here.’ I was like ‘okay f*cker.'”
Whipwreck on some of the ECW arena fans and the origins of Sign Guy Dudley:
“Eventually we had Sign Guy Dudley, who was a mock of the sign guy, the real sign guy, who was a fan. So the real wrestling guy was the fake imitation of the fan. The real gimmick, the fan, the sign guy.”
“Look at any show from the ECW Arena in 1994, 95, probably til the end, just to the left of the guy with the hat, John Bailey, was the sign guy and he f*ckin’ hated me. 25 years later I remember that this one f*cking fan does not like me!”
“The f*ckin’ hat guy – the show would not start until he put his hat on. ‘Where’s your hat’ was a f*ckin’ chant!”
Jerry Lynn on taking bodyslams:
“I always over the years hated taking the bodyslam the most because no one would let gravity to the work, it was like they wanted to try and put you through the mat.”
Whipwreck & Lynn on the craziest weapons the ECW fans brought:
Whipwreck: “A dildo wrapped in barbed wire.”
Lynn: “I remember seeing fans handing over the rail like frying pans. I think I even saw one time they handed over a microwave oven.”
“I did a ‘fans bring the weapons’ against Sabu in Michigan when his cousin ran the show, and someone had the Nintendo with a piece of tape on it that had ‘Sabu’ that they brought in. And someone actually made an actual homemade coffin to put in the ring”
Whipwreck: “Was it life-size?”
Lynn: “Yes! I think it was shaped like them old school coffins with a little angle, you know that look a little Gothic or whatever, but it was just plywood and so we had it sitting up in the corner. It was a three-way with me, Sabu and Kevin Sullivan (I’m sorry I went off on a tangent but you were talking about weird weapons). And then there was a skateboard. So first of all, when I first got there I didn’t even know what I was doing. And I asked him, I said ‘so what am I doing tonight? Is it true I’m in a fan brings the weapon match?’ He says, ‘yeah.’ I said, ‘do you know what I do?’ He goes, ‘well yeah, you know, we thought we’d bring the right way.’ I’m thinking ‘what? You mean you wanna kill me?’ But it ended up being alright. The biggest pop of the match I threw Sabu across the ring into the coffin, I mean the lid was closed, so he was leaning against it and then I think I took the skateboard and I skated from the other corner across the ring and clotheslined him and the place popped like I did something spectacular. It was crazy.”
You can subscribe to Front Row Material by going here.
Listen to the first episode below:
