The story of Shane Douglas reads like a twisted fairy tale. A very talented, good-looking wrestler (who was trained, alongside a young Mick Foley) with charisma and presence to spare, Douglas was always going to be a big star. ...Had he been born in any other era of wrestling, it would have happened a damn sight sooner, too. In many ways, Shane Douglas feels like a man out of time, even today. The wrestling industry of the 1980s was probably even more cut throat than it is today and Douglas was merely another victim, another talented could be, whom many an established star sought to render as a never was instead. Originally debuting as a skateboarder in WCW (alongside a young John Laurinaitis, if you can believe that). The Dynamic Dudes skateboarding team went nowhere fast (probably because neither man could actually ride a skateboard) and Douglas went over to the WWF. The company pushed him fairly strongly as a singles star, but he left because he wanted to care for his dying father. By this time, Douglas was an 11-year veteran of the wrestling business, with almost nothing to show for it. He seemed to be one more example of squandered potential. Then, suddenly, it all changed for Shane Douglas. In 1994, ECW had done a deal with a diminished version of the old NWA (National Wrestling Alliance). The dying embers of the once proud company that had been partly founded by Lou Thesz were still attempting to make a go of it, mainly because their title belt still carried some weight as the original Worlds Heavyweight Championship. On August 27, 1994, Douglas was crowned the new NWA Champion. ...Roughly five minutes later, he discarded the historic belt and declared the ECW Championship to be the only real Worlds Title. It wasnt a work or a carefully scripted storyline aimed at upping Pay Per View buy-rates, either. This sh!t was 100% real. ECW, the punk rock renegades of wrestling, had pulled a fast one on the historic NWA. From that moment on, the ECW Championship would forever be recognized as a World Heavyweight Championship belt, just as the WWE belt is today. All recognized World Championships have to be descended from the NWA belt and, by doing what he did; the man they called The Franchise had put ECW on the map in a HUGE way. With one impossibly ballsy move, he had set them, inexorably, on the road to revolution. And, to quote Elaine Benes the heat, my God the heat! For some time afterwards, Shane Douglas became the hottest heel in the business, taking a back seat to absolutely no one. The embittered, arrogant and merciless Franchise character stemmed from the real-life frustrations built up over ten long years of aborted attempts at stardom, backstabbing locker-room politics and working his ass off for very little gain. In Forever Hardcore, Douglas explained his rationale behind making such a risky move. My Dad was an old WW2 veteran, he always taught me that you can always be like everybody else. Its easy to be mediocre, its easy to be middle of the road, its easy to be non-controversial, but all the successful people in the world and he went through, my Dad used to talk to me about the scientists and the warriors and all the different people throughout history that made it were always people that took chances. His explosive run as ECWs superstar heel champ meant that Douglas was (finally) offered another opportunity with the WWF. However, in an act that amounted to wanton career sabotage, the firebrand Franchise, one of the most controversial and legitimate characters that had been seen in decades, was re-packaged as The Dean of wrestling. Basically, it sucked. Just about a year later, Douglas returned to the ECW arena and The Franchise lived again, to thunderous applause (and eventually seething fan hatred, but to a heel, it amounts to the same thing). A stint in WCW, which was infinitely better conceptually than his WWF run, saw Douglas attempt to start a rivalry with a disinterested Ric Flair, who took umbrage to the many unflattering things that Douglas had said about him in various promos and shoot (legitimate) interviews. Flair (probably) used his backstage influence to ensure that Douglas was never fully utilized in WCW, something that The Nature Boy has a long history of doing... When all is said and done in pro wrestling, and the annals of the sport are written down and catalogued, Shane Douglas will surely be recorded as one of wrestlings true rebels. He helped make ECW into something more than just one more struggling indie promotion. Shane Douglas, as much as anybody, helped forge the company into a tough, non-conformist ideal. It is this idea of what ECW was that has survived the companys implosion and taken up root in the hearts and minds of so many wrestlers, promoters and fans today. That, more than anything else, is the legacy of Shane Douglas. Because of ECW, he was at last able to live up to his true potential, becoming a 5-time World Champ (4x ECW and 1x NWA) and a wrestling legend in the process and, because of Shane Douglas; ECW became first a cult and then a culture. I can think of no higher praise for the man than that.
I am a professional author and lifelong comic books/pro wrestling fan. I also work as a journalist as well as writing comic books (I also draw), screenplays, stage plays, songs and prose fiction.
I don't generally read or reply to comments here on What Culture (too many trolls!), but if you follow my Twitter (@heyquicksilver), I'll talk to you all day long!
If you are interested in reading more of my stuff, you can find it on http://quicksilverstories.weebly.com/ (my personal site, which has other wrestling/comics/pop culture stuff on it).
I also write for FLiCK http://www.flickonline.co.uk/flicktion, which is the best place to read my fiction work.
Oh yeah - I'm about to become a Dad for the first time, so if my stuff seems more sentimental than usual - blame it on that!
Finally, I sincerely appreciate every single read I get. So if you're reading this, thank you, you've made me feel like Shakespeare for a day! (see what I mean?)
Latcho Drom,
- CQ
