10 Wrestlers Who Hated Working For ECW

1. Paul Heyman (2006)

The owner and creative genius of ECW learnt to truly loathe those three initials (that were the core of his life in the ‘90s) in 2006 when Vince McMahon brought it back as a weekly television program and placed Paul in charge as the booker.

Paul was the lead booker, sure, but Vince McMahon was his editor, painstakingly supervising and overseeing every storyline, promo and direction Paul tried to write. Paul had to strenuously fight and argue for his ideas like debuting CM Punk and have him be the face of the ECW brand going forward. The program quickly became a severely watered down WWE unlike the hardcore asylum it once gloriously was the decade prior, with Vince quickly injecting it with WWE centred talent like Test, Hardcore Holly and Daivari. This caused serious friction between Paul and Vince that erupted in a huge argument at the (atrocious) ‘December to Dismember’ pay per view, with Paul being removed from his position/the entire company less than 24 hours after the event finished. Paul in the end was actually thankful for being put out of his misery with Vince’s mandate and not having to deal with the daily argumentative wars with The Chairman over the direction of ECW.

Paul Heyman has said of his time in ECW in 2006: “To resurrect the brand in 2006 was an impossibility because if you gave it a WWE-sanitized spin, the audience would reject it. But you couldn’t go back to what we were doing in the 1990s because the culture had changed and the style was not applicable anymore.”