When you talk about Extreme, and you talk about Hardcore, you start with Terry Funk and Mick Foley. The two men have pushed the limits of their bodies for as long as fans can remember, but this incident at a live event in 1995 might have been too much even for them. At the time, Cactus Jack was a cowardly heel trying to convince Tommy Dreamer not to follow the ECW dream, and to go to WCW where he could make money and retire comfortably. Terry Funk was in Dreamer's corner, Raven would eventually show up to even the odds, and naturally it all broke down. Foley and Funk wanted to replicate a spot they had done in Japan, where they wrap a kerosene soaked rag around a steel chair and use it as a weapon, and that's where everything went wrong.
Well, when Funk swung the chair, the towel broke loose, and the fire was bigger than they thought. It burned the rope that tied the towel to the chair. The towel came off the chair and flew onto Funk's back. Funk rolled out of the ring. His shirt was on fire. A fan reached over and tried to put him out. Funk burned his arm pretty good, but the fan really burned his fingers. - Paul Heyman (The Rise and Fall of ECW)
The fan would later sue the company unsuccessfully, and Paul Heyman would go on to apologise for the incident, promising to never use fire in ECW, a promise that would not last that long. Mike Johnson of PWInsider, who was there that night, even said "A lot of people were freaked out by that incident and I don't blame them as I remember being furious that evening. If you were in the building that night, you would have thought it was the end of ECW ... It was easily the worst moment in the history of the company."
