The death of ECW in 2001 was simultaneously slow and sudden. Slow in that the company was clearly on borrowed time for months and Heyman had stopped attending the live shows. Sudden because they just stopped running any shows without warning, though the crew knew nothing was scheduled and held a beer bash in the ring to close the last actual ECW event. It wasn't long before Heyman started on WWE television as an announcer, and a month after that, ECW's parent company filed for bankruptcy, as did Heyman personally. Worse, the company died right before WCW did, quickly eliminating dozens upon dozens of jobs in the wrestling business. Recently, Heyman went into extensive detail about the final days on The Steve Austin Show, detailing the end of the company and what he had planned for the future, like a style change where ECW essentially would have become Ring of Honor. More than anything else, he hammered home the point that they could have easily kept going if the pay-per-view companies, namely InDemand, paid ECW sooner. He even singled out a InDemand executive, Dan York, who he claimed told him that it made more sense for InDemand to wait for ECW to go bankrupt than send out the money when they were supposed to. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-nmFnN2p2w Heyman's claim was that InDemand owed ECW $2.8 million at the end when ECW's debt totaled $7 million. The idea he tried to get across was that since about $4 million of that debt was Heyman's parents' investment that wasn't being recouped, the InDemand money would've effectively brought them down to a much more manageable $200,000 debt and ECW would have been able to keep going. The bankruptcy was covered by many wrestling websites at the time. According to the bankruptcy filing, InDemand actually owed ECW $800,000, while ECW owed them $150,000, so InDemand effectively owed them $650,000. ECW listed $8,881,435 of debt, which doesn't include "unknown" amounts listed for some wrestlers and allotted for outstanding lawsuits. At least he was pretty much accurate in saying how much his parents invested (listed as $3.8 million).
