Greggulator - since you're from Philly, did you get to attend a lot of ECW shows?
being from Chicago, I wasn't able to go to any events until their first PPV here.
i did briefly work for RF Video though. I have a few stories.
I'd love to hear the RF Video stories. Unless it's really creepy stories about Rob.
I went to about 20-25 ECW shows. Most were in Philly but I went to a few in Jersey and elsewhere.
I have so many absurd ECW memories/stories. That place was truly one of a kind. If ECW was around today, there's absolutely no way I would go since it was borderline disturbing.
Some of my favorite ECW in person tales:
1) The first time I attended was my second weekend my freshman year in Philly. I had no idea where anything was. And this is 1995 Philly and not 2011 Philly -- 1995 Philly, the city was pretty much a craphole as opposed to today, when it's really awesome. The ECW Arena was also literally underneath the I-95 underpass. (Those old Public Enemy/Gangstas videos were filmed there.) So I was 17-years-old walking underneath an interstate overpass trying to find this place.
I got there a few hours early. I was doing my World History reading (leaning up against the arena) when I heard a bottle break. I looked up to see a shirtless man with a swastika tattoo on his arm, a patch over his eye while pounding a 40 with another 40 held in his sweatpants holster style. That kind of explains it all.
I took a cab on the way home after hanging out w/ some friends. The campus ATM machine was locked up so the cab driver had to take me to Broad & Olney at around 2:30 AM. This is one of the sketchiest corners in Philly. I was walking over people while others were asking me for money. (I did make sure to hide my PIN number.) On my way to the cab, this cracked out guy grabbed my shoulder. "DO YOU HAVE ANY MEAT I AM HUNGER." Welcome to Philly!
2) I actually went took a girl on a date to ECW. A bunch of kids on my floor my sophomore year were big ECW fans. This girl I was hanging out with a little bit used to watch it with us and was completely mesmerized by it. We ended up convincing our RA to let us take a school-owned van to the show. The girl I was hanging out with was sitting next to this methed-out biker dude who was hitting on her and grabbing her shoulder. I was thinking of saying something but I saw he had a knife so I let it slide. She started dating a guy named Tony Phatsacks (who wore a hat made of hemp and had an entire wardrobe seemingly made of 311 t-shirts) a few weeks later. YOU MAKE THE CALL!
3) At WWF show, people go to watch the wrestlers fake fight. At ECW, people go to fight the real wrestlers! Oh dear lord, the amount of times that happened. Spike Dudley was once thrown into the crowd and some dude started punching him. The ENTIRE ECW roster came running out and into the crowd and started fighting these guys. This happened about 8 rows in front of me.
4) ECW was never so good with the logistics. They had one entrance, which brought you through into this holding pen and then finally into the arena. It didn't matter if you had a ticket already or if you were buying a ticket there or trying to sneak in. That was how you got into the arena. As soon as the door open, everyone at once converged to get in.
I went one night in the summer when it was about 125 degrees outside. The throng was bigger and more insane than usual. It was just chaos. I'm not a big guy at all (probably 115 pounds at the time) and it got European soccer nuts in there. I was literally off my feet at one point -- you just got shifted around at the mercy of the crowd and tossed into the walls and had elbows tossed into your neck. The holding pen was roughly 450012 degrees. My friend Mike (huge FOT, too) is a bigger guy and he was off his feet, too, with his face shoved into a dyed-blonde rat tail (done possibly in honor of Lance Storm's haircut). We made it through but it was REALLY frightening. (It's the second closest time to death I've ever come at a wrestling show. The first features The Murder Junkies. But that's for another day).
5) In a lifetime of executing poor ideas without thinking them through, one of the worst was when there was some Japanese wrestler (no one memorable like Great Sasuke or Tajiri) who was a good guy taking on Jason, The World's Sexiest Man. Despite being the good guy, and despite the ECW crowd supposedly being "smart", people still started a U-S-A chant. So anytime after U-S-A, I would yell "SUCKS."
Some dude stormed down from eight rows back and got in my face. "IF YOU THINK THIS COUNTRY SUCKS WHY DON'T YOU LEAVE!" I don't know how I wasn't murdered by this guy.
At the same show, my friends and I were hecking the Eliminators, since we were big Dudley Boy fans at the time. Someone else said to us, "Hey, why don't you say that to his wife's face? She's right over these selling jewelry." Sure enough, there was Mrs. Kronus selling a gold necklace in the Elims logo, selling for $275.
6) This was at Asbury Park. I had this friend Ian who was a total scumbag but could convince anyone to do anything. He was like Bodhi from Point Break, if Bodhi was really into Stereolab and had a problem with painkillers. For some reason, we followed his lead in taking off our shirts while watching ECW. We were opposite the camera so for an entire episode of ECW TV, you could see me and a few other people shirtless.
The same card, we were right by the floor when New Jack jumped off from like 30 feet or however high through a table. My brother ended up claiming some of the table, which is the ultimate in ECW merchandise.
