Paul Heyman: I Don't Regret A Single Day Of ECW
Paul E. is proud of his renegade promotion
ECW changed the game in the 90s by pushing as many boundaries as possible, despite financial insecurity, and the big two of WWF and WCW stealing their best talent and ideas.
However, despite ECW’s brilliant highs and ultimate inevitable end, former ECW Owner Paul Heyman has admitted he doesn’t regret a single day of his time running ECW, telling Metal Injection’s Squared Circle Pit podcast:
"It was seven and a half years of stress. I mean, it was also, you know, I can't say the best time of my life because, to me, the best time of my life is tomorrow, that's just the way I view things. I don't regret a single day of it. It was a seven-and-a-half-year struggle to survive. There's a certain adrenaline rush to that, that you just can't duplicate.”
Heyman also alluded to the fact that ECW was probably never meant to succeed, comparing the Philadelphia hardcore promotion to revolutionary peer-to-peer file sharing programme Napster:
"We disrupted the game,” continued Heyman. “I mean, we were a cause, you know, we weren't a business, we were a cause. Sometimes the collection agencies and the lawyers and the need to pay bills will catch up to you. We were juggling those chainsaws for seven and a half years. It's an interesting idea for people to say, 'Well, it's an interesting business model. You made people drink the Kool-Aid to you, you made people buy into the cause.' No, we were the cause. If anybody drank the Kool-Aid, I probably drank the Kool-Aid more than anybody or certainly as much as anybody. We were a cause and I can't recommend it as a business model for most other people. I think Bubba Ray Dudley says it best; we were Napster. We weren't meant to last. We were meant to completely change the game. We were meant to disrupt the industry and we were meant to go away and live on as martyrs. That's the story of Napster and whether fortunately, or unfortunately, that's the story of ECW.”
H/T: Fightful
