When it was revealed that the WWE would revive ECW, many fans of the promotion were ecstatic, especially since originals such as Sabu, Rob Van, Dam, and Tommy Dreamer made their return to the revived promotion. However, once Paul Heyman was fired in late 2006, the show noticeably took a downhill spiral and became a shell of its former shelf.
Sabu was only there from the beginning until 2007; however, the former ECW World Champion saw the problems with the newly revived ECW and often points to his time in WWE as a low point in his career. On a special TMPT Feature Episode #12, the ECW legend believes that the company “lied” to him about the way the new ECW would be pushed (transcript courtesy of
fightful.com):
“Well, they lied to me. They said they were going to keep Sabu the way he was and push it the way ECW was and keep it in the small venues and all that stuff which I agreed with because I didn't want to do the big venues. I like the more intimate venues where the people think they are special and part of the assembly line but anyways I wasn't happy there. First couple of months was okay but they slowly wanted to completely change what they said and they went from liking Sabu to not liking Sabu and I could feel it."
"It just looked like WWE with different lettering, the ECW lettering. It was the same show and no different. There was no extreme to it, no hardcore to it and we couldn't even have the ECW Extreme Rules match every night. We had them every other night. Some nights we'd go to house shows and not one extreme match."
"I was afraid people were thinking we were lazy or something but we were being told that we couldn't break a table and could not do this and could not do that. Before I could say, could I do it? Before it they would say well you can do that tomorrow so instead of me doing stuff and saying I couldn't do it anymore they'd stop me before I could even do it."
While the newly revamped ECW didn’t turn out the way that Sabu hoped it would, the wrestling veteran doesn’t believe that the revival was purposely set up to fail:
"I don't think they tried to kill ECW, they were just trying to show that WWE style is stronger I guess. I don't know, I don't think they were trying to kill it because why would Vince spend the money on it to try and kill something? He could've killed it by not using it again."
Check out the
full episode where Sabu goes into detail about his new book, “Scars, Silence, & Superglue”.
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