When I say the letters ‘ECW’ and the word ‘December’, I know what likely comes to mind first. And no, we’re not covering that here. Beyond the agonizing December to Dismember put on by WWE’s version, ECW had a few of their own memorable events in this month, and I wanted to highlight a few of them this December.
They never really did a Christmas show, and so this isn’t exactly a Christmas video either. It’s a deeper look into one of the bigger shows of ECW’s early years, the not quite extreme yet years. It’s a closer look at the first Eastern Championship Wrestling presented Holiday Hell.
In this video, we’ll look at Holiday Hell 1993, also known as the Body Count. We’ll look at some of the more notable matches on the card, the wrestlers who were involved, and all of the stories that surround this event, including two very bizarre stipulations on the card.
1993
The first Holiday Hell took place in the ECW arena, just six months after the first ever wrestling card at the now famous venue. This event is also just over two months into Paul Heyman's time as booker of ECW, after he took over from Eddie Gilbert in mid-September.
By the time of December 1993, ECW was starting to get more coverage in the newsletters, which Tod Gordon was aiming for, as it gave the company more exposure outside of ECW’s local area. The Pro Wrestling Torch was reporting ECW updates in their ‘regional’ section among other promotions of a similar size like Smokey Mountain Wrestling, while the Observer would print what Dave Meltzer calls in the January 3rd 1994 edition, “sketchy reports” from attendees of the shows. As time went on Tod would grow to despise Dave and the Observer specifically, because Tod perceived him as burying the company at every opportunity. I haven’t read enough Observers to know how true that is, but Dave and Wade Keller are both fairly critical in the later years, especially of the pay per views. Not long after Holiday Hell, it seems that Tod would get a measure of what he wanted, as the January 8th issue of the Torch would lead with an interview with Tod Gordon on the front page, where he talks in detail about Holiday Hell ‘93, and ECW more generally. The interview would actually go out in several parts, and no doubt gained ECW some of the attention that Tod wanted. I’ll keep referring back to this interview, as Tod has some interesting things to add along the way. Of Holiday Hell 93, Wade Keller writes that the show was ECW’s biggest to date, with the Observer clarifying that it drew twelve hundred fans, their second biggest crowd yet, with the highest being the first November to Remember a month earlier. As Dave points out though, many of those fans didn’t leave happy at all, largely due to the ‘Body Count’ match near the end of the card. Before we get to that though, what ECW would later become was being formed early in the card.
Debuting stars
The first match of the night, which would also be the first to air on TV, featured two relative newcomers. The rather generic looking and named Chad Austin would score a quick pinfall over The Pitbull. Yes the Pitbull, as in only one Pitbull. When this aired on TV, Matty in the House, the show's host of sorts would call this a debut, but that's not quite accurate. Gary Wolfe, later known as Pitbull number one, had appeared in ECW very early in the company’s history, in April and May of ‘92. His most notable match was a battle royal on April 25th to determine who would compete to become the first ECW heavyweight champion, won by Jimmy Snuka that same night. As best I can tell though, this may have been Wolfe’s television debut for the company, as his early appearances pre-date Hardcore TV.
In Tod Gordon’s Torch Talk interview in January, when asked about what fan reactions surprised him, Tod comments on something that happened after this match. When Chad Austin gets the surprise pin, the Pitbull goes right back to attacking him, leading the Sandman to come out and make the save. According to Tod, the fans didn’t quite react how he expected them to. “He made the save and the entire audience started yelling "Sandman sucks." This is one of our babyfaces here who's been around forever. He's got a female valet who they all love. He came out and they wanted to see this guy keep beating the jobber up.” Tod’s explanation for this at the time appears to be that it’s the Philly crowd, and they’re different from all the others. ”Sometimes, I say to myself, wow, even I didn't think they were that vicious. It's a different kind of town. You can't book Philadelphia the way you book the rest of the country. It just can't be done.” While he says this in the interview, it seems as though Tod recognised that something needed to change with the Sandman. At Tod’s suggestion, this would eventually lead to him vastly changing his character in 1994, really kicking off in February while feuding with Tommy Cairo, and separating on camera from his real life spouse Peaches.
Going from a TV debut to an actual debut, the next match would include a future ECW World champion, who had spent some time in WCW, but had also spent a lot of his young career in Japan. He was most known in Japanese promotion FMW as The Gladiator, but was making his name in ECW as Mike Awesome, or as the PW Torch’s reviewer calls him “Awesome Mike”, so he clearly made an impression then. To be fair though, the ring announcer refers to him after the match as “Awesome Mike Awesome,” so that might be where the reviewer got it from. Early in his career, Mike had used that name in USWA in Memphis, and even for a few matches with WCW, apart from one match in 1989, where he is weirdly billed just as ‘The Pro’.
On this night, Mike would have a ten minute match with Randy Starr, which wouldn’t air on television in full, but a music video set to Dive by Nirvana would show highlights of Awesome destroying Randy Starr. Mike would stay in ECW for a few more matches before heading back to FMW, including a Television title match in March. After a handful more appearances, Awesome Mike wouldn’t return to the US until a WWF tryout in December 1996, where he would face another future ECW heavyweight champion in Justin Credible, kind of. He would have another handful of matches in ECW in early ‘97, but he wouldn’t become a full time part of the roster until around Summer 1998.
ECW Heavyweight Championship
Jumping ahead on the card to third from the end, we would have the Heavyweight title match, where Terry Funk would become the eighth ECW champion. Airing on December 28th, Funk would defeat Sabu for the title, in a match that was lauded as the best of the night. For reasons we’ll get into soon, that’s a lower bar than it sounds like. First let’s briefly go through the events that led to Sabu defending against Funk.
Sabu would wrestle his first match in ECW on October 1st 1993 against the also debuting Tazmaniac. He would be shot straight to the top of the card, becoming the Heavyweight champion the very next night, beating Shane Douglas thanks to a distraction by Paul E. Dangerously. When this aired on Hardcore TV, Heyman vowed to dominate ECW, but Tod Gordon would start throwing spanners in the works straight away. He announced that at November to Remember, their next major event, Terry Funk’s Television title and Sabu’s Heavyweight title would be on the line in a dream partners tag team match, with someone losing their gold. On the night Sabu would team with Road Warrior Hawk, and Funk with King Kong Bundy, who would turn on Funk giving Sabu and Paul, both of ECW’s singles titles. This would lead to a one on one rematch with no disqualifications being set for Holiday Hell between Terry Funk and Sabu.
You might also be interested to know that apart from their tag team match, Funk and Sabu had met in the ring two previous times not that much earlier. In August ‘93 Sabu and Funk had what may have been their first meeting for FMW in Japan. In a Stretcher tag team death match, Funk would team up with Tarzan Goto to defeat Sabu and his Uncle, The Sheik. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that this match is, frankly, insane. For a start, before the opening bell rings the Sheik walks to the ring with a torch that’s already alight, and is waving it around pretty indiscriminately. Despite this, Funk brings the fight to him, while Sabu and Goto fight, quickly making it out to ringside too. Weirdly, the safest place in the whole building is the ring. Eventually some order is restored, and there is a big cheer when Funk gets tagged in to face Sabu, which brings the Sheik in with a fork. Sheik throws one of his famous fireballs at Terry, but it seems to hurt Sabu too who was standing behind holding Funk in place. The match ends after only a few minutes, when Funk hits Sabu with two DDT’s and a piledriver onto a chair, and the referee decides that he can’t continue. Nothing is resolved however, as all four men take the fight into the crowd, the terrified looking crowd.
The next time Sabu and Funk would share the ring would be a bit more reserved, just a bit, mainly because the Sheik isn’t there. On November 6th, the two had a one on one match in the main event for American Commonwealth Wrestling in Steelton Pennsylvania. The short lived ACW was as the Observer notes, an NWA territory, which ran in Philadelphia and even booked ECW talent, with Shane Douglas also working for them. It's worth noting that at this point ECW was also an NWA territory, as the breakup would happen later in 1994. In Tod's Torch interview, he talks about a recent dispute between he and President of the NWA Dennis Coraluzzo, where he claims that Dennis broke “a gentleman’s agreement that I would stay out of Jersey and he would stay out of Philly when we first got started.” To be clear, Tod doesn't say that this is ACW, only mentioning “a card in Philadelphia here and he’s using someone else as a front for him.” ACW is noted in the newsletters as NWA affiliated, and so it could well be the same. To make things more interesting, the first time singles meeting of Funk and Sabu would actually be a front page story in the November 13th Torch, a fact that Tod was also not going to like. “So of course I got angry. There was some heat there and then Dennis apologized and we sort of worked things out. Now I think he’s doing a lot of out–of–state work, such as in Minneapolis and other places.” Tod does note though that if any other promoter had started running near him he wouldn’t have had as much of an issue, it was more because he and Dennis had an agreement that he felt had been broken. As noted, this would take place several months before ECW would officially break away from the NWA, and Shane Douglas’ would throw down the NWA World title belt in the ring that August, but if this is part of the story of ECW breaking ties with the NWA, it's a less talked about part today.
On the night of December 26th, Paul E Dangerously would bring both of Sabu’s titles to the ring, while the champion himself is wheeled out on a trolley, unchained and allowed into the ring. Unlike at November to Remember, Terry Funk comes to the ring with backup that he can trust. Over the weeks prior he had formed an alliance with Axl and Ian Rotten, who he calls his ‘few good men’, who were there to provide him some support if things got out of hand. The match begins and is chaotic from the opening bell, with Sabu chasing Funk, and going on the attack very early on, though Funk quickly outfights him. We aren’t shown the full match, only highlights mostly of Sabu looking dangerous. Things start to go out of control when Sabu throws the referee into a table and attacks Terry’s few good men, even doing a moonsault on them to the outside. With the referee still down, Shane Douglas comes in to get some revenge on Sabu, allowing Terry Funk to win the match and the championship. This would also begin the set up for February’s big main event, but we’ll get to that at the end of this video.
Terry wouldn’t be the ECW champion for long, losing it to Shane Douglas in a War Games match in March, but in the process he would bring prominence to a new type of match, and would help towards making credible main eventers out of Shane and Sabu. Terry Funk was perhaps more valuable to the ECW locker room than he was in their ring, as Tod Gordon explains in the Torch. “One thing about Paul. He is smart enough to know that he doesn't know everything. And he won't hesitate to announce before every show when he gets the boys together, "Hey, Terry Funk's in the dressing room, Kevin Sullivan's in the dressing room. Jimmy Snuka's in the dressing room. If you have a question about anything about any of your matches, go ask them, learn from the masters." And you know what, those three guys will spend an hour talking to anybody, whether they know them or not. They'll go over the psychology of a match.”
Body Count
And now we get to perhaps the most infamous bout of the night, the Body Count match between Pat Tanaka and Rocco Rock. This match was part of the ongoing feud between the Public Enemy and Bad Company, with a bit of a weird twist. The match would come about after the rivalry had become so intense that the law was involved.
The November 16th episode of Hardcore TV ends with Paul Diamond and Pat Tanaka being viciously attacked backstage by the Public Enemy. Paul Diamond is strangled by Grunge with a coat hanger, while Rocco Rock injures Pat Tanaka with a crowbar, in a way that makes it deliberately hard for us to see what's going on clearly. On the next week’s episode, we’re shown the Public Enemy getting arrested and taken away. While Johnny Grunge is being loaded into the police car, he can be heard requesting the cell next to Vince, who was in the midst of the steroid trial at the time. Next we see a statement given by a police officer who claims that Tanaka suffered three broken ribs and a fractured tibia. Incidentally, the police officer is standing in front of a world map that looks very similar to the US map that Tod Gordon would sit in front of at ECW headquarters. Instead of looking like a police statement, the segment made him look like he was a guest act on Weekend Update.
Later in the same episode, Matty in the House announces that fans who call the ECW Hotline would get a chance to vote for the main event of Holiday Hell. He specifies that it can be any two wrestlers except the Public Enemy because quote, “as of right now, we do not know their legal status.” This would be a strange thing to promote anyway as it’s near impossible to put together, but it’s especially odd given that the main event would end up being a battle royal anyway. A week later Joey Styles on special assignment delivers what is quite frankly a pretty well done promo. He states that the attack on Bad Company went beyond what is reasonable to expect in professional wrestling. He says that ECW simply does not know how to handle the situation, hinting that something unconventional will be coming. The aim of what Joey is saying is simple, the situation has already gotten dangerous, and that whatever is coming next, you won’t want to miss.
On December 7th, ECW airs a warning that the following graphic footage was shot in Pennsylvania state prison, and that parental discretion is advised. What follows is a grittier version of the Public Enemy than fans more familiar with their later career would be used to. In the video, Rocco Rock promised that the two will be free before Christmas, and lays out the challenge for the Body Count match, noting that it is the name for a showdown between two prisoners. To quote the TNA legend Scott Hudson, the rules are really quite simple. As Rocco Rock is the one who injured Tanaka, the match itself would be between those two, while the tag team partner of each man, Paul Diamond and Johnny Grunge, would be locked in cages that were set to blow up after fifteen minutes. Whoever won the match before that time would earn the key to unlock their partner's cage, which was the only way to save them, and doom the opponent's partner. From here on, the Body Count match was advertised a great deal on Hardcore TV in the weeks leading up to the event. Strangely though, there wouldn’t be a lot of mentions of the match after the event, or any at all frankly. I wonder why?
On May 3rd 1993, Terry Funk and Atsushi Onita took part in a very famous exploding barbed wire death match in Japan, one that would cause many a US promoter, as I’ve talked a bit about on this channel before, to want to recreate it in America. The Body Count match may be one of the earliest attempts of doing this, and quite frankly, it didn’t go well. As stated on the website Lost Media Wiki, a site which records the existence of media that we know exists but isn’t publicly available, “Because of the universally negative reception among fans in attendance and ECW personnel, the match and aftermath were never aired on ECW television, despite being planned to air, and was never mentioned again. If footage still exists, it most likely is located somewhere within WWE's vaults, as WWE purchased ECW's assets and tape library in January 2003.” That probably means that we can expect to see it on the WWE Vault channel someday. According to those sketchy reports in the Observer, while the fans were expecting some sort of FMW-like explosion, what they got was very different, described as “flares set off like in every major AAA ring entrance, and a tape played over the p.a. of an explosion.” Dave also notes that many fans were angry, and apparently wanted refunds. They essentially got flash paper, the kind wrestlers have used, and occasionally botched to create fireballs. The Torch doesn’t say much about the match, other than calling it a slow paced brawl. Of the post match, Chris Forbes’ live report just says “The cage explosion was a joke.”
Tod Gordon gives a quite detailed explanation of what went wrong to the Torch, blaming it on a police officer ruining the special effects. He says that he thought it would add to the drama if a real police officer placed Johnny Grunge in his cage, but in doing so, the officer “stepped on the bowl of gunpowder and shot it completely across the floor. He destroyed what could have been a very nice explosion and turned it into nothing more than a pretty large flame.” Tod goes further in explaining what it felt like for the stunt to go wrong, and to be at ringside while it happened. He was even the one who led the countdown. “I realize you can’t bat a thousand, but the fans were undoubtedly and rightfully upset. I had no comeback.” Perhaps benefitting from having a few weeks to reflect on what went wrong, Tod at least had a good attitude going forward. He displays confidence in his product that the fans they disappointed would come back next time. “Unfortunately, everybody walked away remembering that. Then again, if they’re watching TV, they’re reminded of the good from the show. They’re realizing, even if I did mess up, we’ll make it up. We’ll keep giving them consistently a good product.” We’ll see whether they did or not, but first it’s time for the main event of the show.
Lights Out
The Body Count match wasn’t the only bout on the night with an interesting stipulation, and by interesting I mean ill advised and never done again. The show would close with a Light’s Out battle Royal, where the winner would win a very seasonal prize for right after Christmas, a Turkey stuffed with hundred dollar bills. If you ever wondered where Tony Khan got the idea for all those prize money matches from, it could well be right here. According to Tod in his Torch interview, this match has a very interesting back story inspired by a mishap at November to Remember, and the quick thinking of Paul Heyman in a crisis. During the show, the ECW arena would suffer a power failure, and “Just like that, that quickly, Paul with his creativity started sending out wrestler after wrestler while the lights are out. Next thing you know, we have 30 people in the ring with chairs killing each other and when the lights came back on, the place went crazy.”
All of this would play out on the December 14th episode of Hardcore TV with the show going to static. When we came back, Joey Styles in the eagles nest was panicking because even his lights had gone out. I assume his segments were taped some time after the show somewhere not in the ECW arena, and if you think that then this comes across as quite funny. We were supposed to see a match between Chad Austin and Mr. Hughes, but the next time we see the ring again a multi man brawl has erupted. The whole scene is prolonged mayhem, and the show goes off the air with no resolution to it. There are however, plenty of interactions between wrestlers that were set to face off at Holiday Hell, most notably Mr. Hughes and the Sandman, as well as Tommy Dreamer and Shane Douglas.
Unlike the modern use of the term “lights out”, another way of saying “unsanctioned”, the lights in the ECW arena were literally turned off for the match, while a spotlight gave hints at the chaos going on. Generally speaking, this doesn’t make for great TV, which is likely why this never aired. It did make me wonder if in the building it was anything like if you ever went to a WWE arena and saw the likes of Undertaker or Bray Wyatt make their entrance, where due to the nature of arenas and safety rules, it isn’t quite as dark as what comes across on television. If this is the case, maybe the fans in the building maybe had more of a clue what was going on than we would watching on TV. This does, admittedly, feel like a bit of an anticlimactic ending to Holiday Hell 1993, but thankfully, the future was brighter for ECW in 1994. Do you see what I did there? Brighter? Sorry.
Aftermath
As I mentioned earlier, a lot of fans left the ECW arena that night not happy, mostly due to the failed promise that was the Body Count match. I was interested to know whether or not this had an effect on attendance for the next show, a television taping set for January 7th, which promised a big main event of Shane Douglas challenging Terry Funk for the ECW title, but it turns out we’ll never know. In the week following this event, the Torch describes terrible weather conditions on the night, so bad that the show ended up taking place a day later. It was no doubt harder to inform fans that the show had been delayed than it would be today, and while ECW tried to do this mainly through their hotline, the Torch says that “several hundred fans showed up.” I assume that Wade is referring to fans who were there on the wrong day, because this conflicts with the Observer saying that the turnout for the following night's taping was a lot lower than this. “ECW had to move its TV taping from 1/7 to 1/8 because of bad weather, and the result was taping before 150 fans, reportedly less than 100 paid.” To look at the episodes that were taped on this night, the ECW arena looks emptier than it ever has since.
Fortunately for Tod Gordon and the company, their string of bad luck would end with their next event at the ECW arena on February 5th. Attendance shot back up from the disaster in January, with thirteen hundred fans reported, which if true tops Holiday Hell and is similar to the record holding November to Remember. The show is also significant as it would become known as ‘The Night the Line was crossed,’ with a main event of Terry Funk versus Shane Douglas versus Sabu, the first ever three way dance, a match ECW would become famous for.
On February 14th, Tod received more of the attention he had wanted from the newsletters, as ECW would for the first time be Dave Meltzer's cover story of the week’s Observer. Initially it may seem like this was not of their own merit, with Dave opening by pointing out that that week WWF was on tour in Europe with all of their television pre-taped, and WCW had no major events to speak of, leaving ECW arguably number one by default. Dave does note though, that the promotion’s February 5th show had really made a good impression, calling it “the best house show from any promotion in years in Philadelphia , and what seems to have been the most highly regarded house show in North America so far this year”. If you’re curious like I was about the house shows in Philadelphia part, that claim covers thirty two WWF events and twenty by WCW in just the 90’s up to that point. Meltzer then downplays this by saying it’s fainter praise than it sounds, and I’m starting to see Tod’s point of view about the Observer a bit more. Dave then moves on to write about the other major American promotions and their house show business, but makes a point of how highly praised the Funk, Sabu and Douglas Three Way Dance was first.
These were definitely important times for the still young ECW. While ‘93 had been a mixed bag of an ending, they were only going to grow bigger in 1994. The new year was looking up, and the February 5th show, The Night the Line was Crossed, turned out to be just the start.
Sources:
1993
PWT Dec 25th 93 results https://members.pwtorch.com/artman/publish/1993digitalpdfnewsletters/article_77313.shtml
WON Jan 3rd 94 sketchy report https://members.f4wonline.com/wrestling-observer-newsletter/jan-3-1994-observer-newsletter-flair-beats-vader-starrcade-93-huge/
PWT Jan 1 94 Live report, Chris Forbes https://www.pwtorch.com/artman2/members/uploads/8/260TorchNewsletterPDF.pdf
PWT Nov 13th Sabu vs Funk https://members.pwtorch.com/artman/publish/1993digitalpdfnewsletters/article_76311.shtml
PWT Jan 8th 94 Tod Gordon interview https://www.pwtorch.com/artman2/members/uploads/8/261TorchNewsletterPDF.pdf
PWT Jan 15th interview P2 https://members.pwtorch.com/artman/publish/1994pwtorchnewsletters/article_78274.shtml
WON Feb 14th Cover story https://members.f4wonline.com/wrestling-observer-newsletter/feb-14-1994-observer-newsletter-first-ever-ecw-cover-story-new-wcw/
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