10 Wrestlers You Won't Believe Were Once Paul Heyman Guys

4. Taz

While he is now best known as the voice of TNA€™s weekly Impact Wrestling show, Taz had a stellar in-ring career before swapping a pair of boots for a pair of headphones. While he is best remembered as the hard-nosed, singlet wearing tough guy called Taz, throwing suplexes left, right and centre, and choking people out with his katahajime submission, his time with Heyman was in a previous incarnation. Before there was the tough guy image, there was the wildman image, when he was a long haired, face painted lunatic known as The Tazmaniac. First coming to prominence in the regional ECW, he was a tag team wrestler, usually with his partner providing him with guidance and direction, even if that partner was the usually unhinged Kevin Sullivan. In 1994, Dangerously brought together The Tazmaniac and Sabu in a wild pairing of two untamed beasts. As time progressed, the animalistic tendancies faded away and the two became better known for their wild matches, with Sabu€™s trademark high flying and table breaking. However, Sabu was then legitimately fired by Heyman by snubbing an ECW booking for one in New Japan, and Tazmaniac then suffered a horrific neck injury which forced him onto the sidelines for the best part of 1995. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQc7-qIE68 When he returned to action, he was repackaged as Taz, the orange and black singlet wearing tough guy with short hair. Eventually, Sabu returned to the now national ECW, and Sabu v Taz was presented as the most anticipated match of ECW€™s first ever pay per view, Barely Legal, in 1997. The match was hyped perfectly, and in typical Heyman fashion. The build up went on for months, and significantly, neither man was able to lay a hand on each other, which just meant that the actual match itself was received with much anticipation. Heyman may have been out of the picture on-screen, but his fingerprints off-screen were very much visible.