Buckle in, crappers.
This week’s WrestleCrap induction might say “Triple H vs. Tazz”, but that’s really just Act Two in a three-act comedy of errors.
This just might be the first induction to span the entire Big Three (WWF, WCW, and ECW).
Act 1:
The extraordinarily convoluted story begins (and ends) in April 2000.
Mike Awesome, then the ECW champion, started no-showing ECW events. This, despite (according to Joey Styles’s ECW One Night Stand rant) making good money
Or at least being owed good money. See, according to Mike Awesome himself, Paul Heyman was always late with his paychecks, while the bank was frustratingly consistent in demanding their mortgage payments. And title belts alone didn’t pay the bills.
Had Awesome had the financial acumen of Paul Heyman, he could have done any number of workarounds, such as:
- Having Bubba Ray front the money while giving him a phony FedEx tracking number for his “reimbursement check”
- Maxing out Chris & Tammy’s credit cards to make the payments, then never paying them back
- Buying time by getting Kimona Wanalaya to dance atop the house, then marketing the footage for the next four years
Instead, he secretly signed with WCW, showing up on Nitro to attack Kevin Nash. If jumping ship to WCW weren’t bad enough, Awesome had broken wrestling’s time-honored tradition of losing the title on the way out…
…even as Paul Heyman upheld wrestling’s other time-honored tradition (stiffing his workers).
Legal wrangling ensued involving an allegedly forged ECW contract, a fifty-grand settlement, and the return of Mike Awesome to ECW for one last match.
But who in ECW was worthy of getting the rub by beating the now-despised champion?
No, not Tommy Dreamer. The answer was nobody—Paul got a WWF guy to do it.
Cutting a deal with Vince McMahon, Heyman would borrow back his former champ Taz(z) to win the ECW title and later lose it to a full-time ECW talent.
And so at the earliest date, a Thursday night in Indianapolis, Mike Awesome showed up for the main event, immediately lost to surprise opponent Tazz…
…then got up and walked right out of the building.
No one in attendance was expecting something so cool to happen at a random house show. And if Taz were in ECW to stay, it would have been one of the greatest moments in company history.
But of course, he was still under contract to the WWF and would, along with the ECW title, keep appearing on WWF TV—for better or worse.
Act 2:
The next Monday, Tazz showed up on WWF Raw with the ECW title around his waist, which is how most wrestling fans found out about the shock title change. But his new title didn’t spare him from the same cookie-sheet matches he’d been wrestling ever since Vince discovered he was 5’6”.
The next night’s WWF Smackdown taping was the second and final time Vince McMahon would be able to use the ECW champion (and title belt) on his show. And they just so happened to be in Philadelphia. Yes, that Philadelphia.
Quiz time! In ECW’s home base, would Vince McMahon:
A) Have Tazz beat the WWF champion and make ECW look great, or
B) Do the exact opposite of all that?
If you guessed B, you probably should have been running ECW instead of the one guy who apparently guessed A.
That night, Triple H was wrapping up a ten-minute promo recapping that Monday’s Jericho-Hebner shenanigans…
…when who should interrupt (about nine minutes late) but the new ECW champion, Tazz!
Michael Cole noted that Tazz had won the title in less than three minutes on his day off (in fact, it was 1:13). Now, when JR said the same thing on Raw, he was putting over how much Tazz kicked ass. But the way Cole said it, you’d think this was something any WWF Superstar could do when they were bored or whatever.
Speaking from the stage so as not to expose the two men’s size difference…
…Tazz issued a challenge from champ to champ.
The cocky Triple H was naturally unimpressed with Tazz’s ECW belt.
“What does that stand for, ECW or something?” asked Triple H. Yeah, something like that.
But the two agreed nonetheless to a match, with no titles on the line, for later that night. For Tazz, it was about proving to Philly and the world who the real champ was. For Triple H, it was about proving something else.
“I am gonna prove… that ECW sucks!”
And so, on less than an hour’s notice, the champion of the World Wrestling Federation went one-on-one for the first time ever against the champion of ECW (or ECW, for short).
For the first five minutes or so, the two champions went back and forth without ECW being buried too badly (except by Jerry Lawler, who ragged on it incessantly).
Tazz even put Triple H in the Tazzmission…
…but it was all downhill from there.
The WWF champ broke free with a mule kick to the groin, then Pedigreed Tazz. It appeared the WWF champ would beat the ECW champ unceremoniously, but at least Tazz was a WWF guy now, so they wouldn’t make him look like a total doofus.
That’s what Tommy Dreamer was for. Defending ECW, Tazz’s Cyberslam challenger came out of nowhere and tried to rush the ring…
…but got knocked off the apron by Triple H.
The Innovator of Violence then grabbed a chair, swung at The Game’s head, and somehow managed to hit Tazz instead. That’s hard to do on purpose, let alone by accident!
To top it off, Triple H gave Dreamer a Pedigree, which ECW’s number one contender sold for the Philly crowd by twitching face-down on the mat.
While Dreamer humped the canvas, Triple H pinned Tazz to prove, as he’d set out to do, that ECW sucked.
Cameras immediately cut to Vince McMahon’s daughter celebrating, eyes closed and nose in the air.
Triple H and Stephanie stood triumphantly with their WWF titles over the fallen ECW guys.
Lest you mistake this for cross-promotion with ECW, the announcers didn’t even mention that the two men lying motionless in the ring would wrestle at ECW’s Cyberslam that Sunday….
…which was probably for the best.
Act 3:
At that Sunday’s non-televised event, Taz(z) dropped the title to Dreamer in WWF-approved fashion, taking no back bumps, dishing out 80% of the offense, and losing via a fluke pin in five minutes.
You remember how ECW would have those big chains of like ten near-falls, where the two guys would keep reversing each other’s roll-ups, and you knew neither man would actually win that way?
Well, it was like that, except Taz didn’t bother kicking out.
Even Taz’s win over Mike Awesome felt less like a formality than this.
Tommy Dreamer celebrated for longer than the match itself, then accepted Justin Credible’s surprise challenge.
He lost.
So in a ten-day span (and about 13 minutes of ring time), Mike Awesome lost the title to Tazz who lost the title to Tommy Dreamer who lost the title to Justin Credible.
To Paul Heyman’s credit, this was slightly less damaging to the ECW title than if Mike Awesome had thrown it in the trash on Nitro.