10 Things You Didn't Know About Shane Helms
4. He Was Very Unhappy With His Time On WWE's ECW Brand
Wrestling is a cyclical business. Sometimes you're up and sometimes you're down. One moment you're the longest-reigning Cruiserweight Champion in history, the next you're stuck on the neglected C-show, wrestling up-and-comers to ever-increasing disinterest.
This is the fate that befell Gregory Helms. After his epic Cruiserweight Title reign was over, he needed to undergo major neck surgery, which would sideline him for over a year-and-a-half. When he returned, he did so in a non-wrestling role, as a backstage interviewer for Smackdown.
Soon after, though, he was drafted to ECW, a move he really wasn't happy about. After performing on Raw and Smackdown since 2001, he naturally felt as though this was a demotion. Helms opened up about his ECW experience in a 2012 interview with Wrestling Inc:
I wasn't a fan of it. I thought it was something that had ran its course. Like I said earlier, if you watch a show and none of the guys that you like are on the show anymore, it's not really the same show. It was ECW only in name. It wasn't the spirit of ECW. There was nothing extreme about it at all.
All of us were handcuffed because it was filmed before Smackdown. They don't want us to go out there and steal the show because you had another hour and a half television to record after this. You can't go out there and just tear the house down on ECW every time because you still got to record Smackdown. We were all really handcuffed.
The talent there wasn't as high as it should have been. It was kind of like just above an FCW or OVW. They were just bringing new guys all the time. Some of them looked like they still just belonged on the indies. Some of the guys I really liked as people but out there performing it was like, 'This isn't good TV'.
Helms did say, however, that he enjoyed his mini programme with the long-forgotten Paul Burchill, which included a rare Mask Vs. Career Match. On a somewhat related note, Helms had a 'tryout' of sorts with the original ECW back in the late 90s and wrestled with Simon 'Nova' Dean and Steve Corino before a show.