New Jack, Sabu Say Hardcore Things; Hardcore Fans Pissed

(SPOILER Alert: These two men said something mean about a dead person. I know, right?)

Sunday, July 29, 2018, was a shitty day to be a wrestling fan. For a lot of reasons. Most of us woke to the news we lost WWE Hall of Famer Nikolai Volkoff, legit badass Brickhouse Brown, and the former Grandmaster Sexay and son of WWE HOFer & Announcer Jerry "The King" Lawler, Brian Christopher. In addition to styles & eras, the three deaths ran the gamut as well from natural causes to cancer to, in Christopher's case, suicide in a jail cell.

While I know Brown by name & rep, I've not seen a ton of his work, but I don't think I ever heard a bad thing about him. And Volkoff was as much a part of my childhood as Santa Claus. He & the Iron Sheik (who wrote some incredibly-touching tweets about his former tag-team partner) were two of the best heels in the history of professional wrestling. He had the best gimmick of the 80s because no matter how goofy it sounded, when he was in the ring singing the Russian Anthem, you were PISSED.

Christopher is a different deal. A WWF Attitude mainstay with Scotty 2 Hotty as Grandmaster Sexay forming the team Too Cool. It was kinda goofy, a shot at the club kids and whatnot, but he was a strong in-ring performer. Oddly, the angle got even better with the addition of Rikishi. Not gonna lie; I would give a little pop watching RAW at home when they finished a match with their dance. Christopher was also given a solid push for the new WWF Cruiserweight Division (or whatever they called it), losing in 1997 to Taka in the Cruiserweight tournament finals. I literally just watched that match last week on WWE Network & found it hysterical watching JR bust Lawler's chops about "your boy."

I had read he had been arrested for DUI July 7 & didn't think anything about it. I figured he posted bail & went home. So reading the drama from Sunday was gut-wrenching. I don't care if you didn't like Lawler as a wrestler or don't like him as an announcer, I can't imagine getting that phone call. I pray nightly to a God I'm not sure I believe in anymore that I don't get that call.

(Sabu, however, feels differently...)

Now, I say all this as a fan. Period. I've worked in media my entire life but I haven't covered wrestling on anything even resembling a regular basis. I worked as a producer for a sports-talk radio station in St. Louis and as such, pre-interviewed some wrestlers coming on our shows (as a newspaper reporter, I also did a story on Christian during his TNA run in 2006 when they did a PPV in St. Louis. He & Christy Hemme were incredibly nice). One of those wrestlers I talked to was Jerry Lawler. He was promoting RAW coming to St. Louis & our host loves sports history, so the Lawler vs. Kaufman story was told to much hilarity. My brief conversation with Lawler was pleasant. He asked if I was a fan & I said yes & he said "Good, I won't have to dumb this down for you!"

That was a single phone call. The guy could be the biggest dickhead in the world & I wouldn't know it. Now, apparently, Sabu had some pretty memorable run-ins with young Lawler back in their USWA days. It doesn't take much research to find that BC struggled with relationships with colleagues at times. But that's Sabu. No one else is going to disrespect a dead wrestler like that, right?

(...aaaaaand we have a new leader in the clubhouse.)

Sabu's rants were, for whatever reason, kept pretty low key. There wasn't a lot being said about it. When New Jack jumped online, that shit changed with a quickness. Whereas Sabu was making hit & run comments & responding to individual fans re: BC, New Jack just flat out said what he was thinking, no ambiguity at all.

Their reasoning is this: Sabu didn't like how BC treated him in the old days. New Jack said BC was an unrepentant racist. On any given day, these two saying these things wouldn't raise an eyebrow. Saying them the day BC was found hanging from a jail cell...just a touch different.

Also, using New Jack's racism rant, another Twitter follower posited the question: Why is Hogan getting a pass for definitively saying incredibly racist shit while New Jack is getting heat for pointing out that both BC and The King have said/done racist things? The obvious answer is, well, one of them is dead & can't defend themselves.

Here's the bigger theme behind this whole story, though: Why the fuck are we shocked that Sabu & New Jack, two of the most legit extreme athletes in the history of pro wrestling, said shocking things online? This pair, more than probably anyone, took ECW to the extreme more times than fucking ANYone (Google "Mass Transit ECW"...I'll wait). They were held up as wrestlers who were hardcore, both in & out of the ring, in both word & deed.

Let me say I absolutely don't agree with what they said. At all. It's incredibly disrespectful, regardless of your personal issues with them. But here's the problem, kids. Sometimes, when "extreme" people do "extreme" things, we don't always agree with them because we don't have a real gist of what REAL extreme really is. When you idolize someone for being hardcore, and then bail on them when they actually do something hardcore kinda makes you a hypocrite. Or fucking stupid.

When it comes to your heroes, be careful what you ask for. Sometimes, you get it.

How ECW Created Its Slavishly Loyal Fanbase

Like I said I would, I'm gloriously baked, I'm watching ECW on the WWE Network, and I'm writing about it. Today's viewing is Hardcore Heaven 1995. This particular bit of internet literature is my shout out to both the ECW for creating a fanbase that was an active participant in every event and to the fans themselves for understanding they were part of a bigger whole.

I'm watching Shane Douglas do the whole "will he, won't he" thing about heading to WWE and the audience is giving him the business. Shane is baiting them and they respond with "Get Ric Flair!" It's kind of effective. Flair has been a foil for Douglas since he returned from the WCW. Standard fare for a wrestling show.

Then, as Shane starts to talk again, we hear, "Shut The Fuck Up!" And it wasn't done in the sing-songy way of "Shut the fuck up!" (Clap-clap, clap-clap-clap), it was just the crowd yelling at him in unison. It's not the vulgarity, it's not the fact the crowd is all ganging up on him, and it's not his response.

It's their timing.

The audience had impeccable timing, almost always. Now, let me restate, I'm no insider by any stretch of the imagination. I'm not even an active wrestling fan anymore. Every couple years, I dig my ECW DVDs out of storage & binge watch them for a couple weeks. YouTube's OK, but there aren't many full shows out there because WWE, strangely, doesn't want all their content floating out there for free. 

My point being, I'm a pretty green mark. I don't read any of the gossip sites, haven't in a very long time, and don't keep up with the wrestlers, other than Twitter. I don't know who the audience where. I know some of them did documentaries and have been interviewed and whatnot and I know they could be pains in the ass because they thought (knew) they were a huge part of the show. I also know this because I've done event public relations before and as a rule, the audience tends to suck. I know, you pay the bills and that's an absolute fact and in general, huge crowds actually tend to be awesome, but it's the nine or ten shitheads that ruin it because they feel entitled to get free shit. "Hey, man, you give me a hat, I'll wear that hat around town, and, I mean, that's free advertising for you!"

You'd be stunned how often I've heard that as a legit excuse to get free shit.

(Hey, guys, you can't just rush in and--you know what? Fuck it. #NotMyTable)

Anyway, got off track there (Bubba Kush is what we're doing today & I have to tell you, it's fucking incredible. I can't feel my teeth). I'm sure there was a ring general of some kind, giving instructions on what to chant. There had to be. Because the chants never started slow & ragged; they always started loud. There are times, obviously, when you get the spontaneous "ECW" chants (Or "What?!" with Stone Cold, one that I love to this day & it's a promised divorce if I do it to the wife again), but the others were pretty specific and I find it hard to believe that many people were thinking the same thing at the same time. So if you have any insight on that, head over to my Twitter account @MyECWMemories. I'd love to hear about the real stories.

By the way, the Taipei Death Match is on. Holy shit, I love this. I'm not necessarily a huge fan of the blood, but I respect the hell out of the wrestlers who do it. 

Like I said before, the ECW audience was a real entity that interacted with the wrestlers. If Paul E. was ECW's brain, Joey was the voice, Tommy was the heart, and Sandman was the spirit, the audience was its conscience. That was a damned savvy crowd and it's because Paul & Joey & the wrestlers treated them like intelligent consumers instead of a bunch of 80s-era Hogan-worshiping marks (I love calling people "marks," I do it all the time even/especially if they're not wrestling fans). Paul knew the fans were on the internet. He knew they read the gossip sites and knew what was going on, so he talked to them like equals. As a result, he had a guaranteed audience of people who were going to make his shows pop like Wrestlemania every time.

(ECW! ECW! ECW!)

Man, good stuff.

Oh. I've never been to an ECW show. Ever. I've had a couple chances & either sometime came up or I just didn't feel like leaving the house. I'm weird like that. Just a huge fan. I'm literally that 45-year-old stoner mark blogging about wrestling that doesn't exist anymore. Holy God. Strangely, I think the 15-year-old me would be cool with it.

PS Just did a massive hot bong rip. I can smell colors. Tommy Dreamer just literally threw Raven and Stevey through a wall. They're beating the shit out of Luna.

"You can't super bomb a woman!"

Oh, yes you can, Joey Styles.