7 Behind The Scenes ECW Stories That’ll Shock You

6. Billy Corgan Almost Became An Investor

Long before he was laying down dollars for the NWA or Impact Wrestling/TNA, Billy Corgan was a rockstar frontman for The Smashing Pumpkins who loved him some live wrestling. By late-2000, he'd befriended a lot of the wrestlers in ECW and was seen hanging around shows. That was never going to escape the attention of one Paul Heyman.

Seizing his chance, the boss took Billy out for dinner and asked if he’d like to invest a million dollars in exchange for 10% of the entire company. Seeing through this bold pitch, Corgan pointed out that ECW wasn’t worth $10m. In other words, 10% ownership of the promotion wasn't worth anything close to a million bucks.

Rather blatantly, even if he'd never admit it, Paul E was trying to pull the wool over a non-wrestling person's eyes and dazzle him with power in a biz obsessed with it. Billy, who was already business savvy by that stage in his life, was having none of it. He adored ECW, but he wasn't going to put down a million dollars of his own capital in what was rather blatantly a failing brand that was struggling to stay afloat.

Stories like this make it clear that Heyman was doing everything he could think of to keep the place ticking along. They were keeping wolves from the door daily, and it was a stressful ongoing battle that was akin to standing in the ocean with a bucket and trying to drain it dry. In other words, it was million impossible, and Billy Corgan knew it.

He said no, by the way. That probs left Paul a little Mellon Collie and gave him Infinite Sadness.