The Secret History Of ECW | Wrestling Timelines

September 19, 1995 - Cane Dewey

In one of the best promos ever cut, Cactus Jack, a ranting, devastated, spiralling man, urges Tommy Dreamer to stop destroying his body to appease the fans at the ECW Arena. Jack does this because, deep into another bloody war in his legendary series with Terry Funk, he spotted a sign in the crowd. The sign reads ‘Cane Dewey’.

Albeit a stab at edgy humour, this is a plea for the Sandman, Jack’s nemesis, to wield his signature Singapore cane against Mick Foley’s three year-old son.

This cruel serendipity allows Foley to do the easiest work of his career. ECW’s innovation is almost endless, and it extends to the relationship between performer and audience. In a familiar refrain, things get meta in ECW before the majors blur the lines.

Cactus Jack, legitimately appalled by the ECW fans, starts to deliberately bore them. With style, and not fiction, at the forefront of this character arc, Jack drops the hardcore from his act and wrestles in a basic way with interminable headlocks. While it’s not a total breach of suspension of disbelief, in that Jack is still trying to win by doing less, he’s trying to hurt the fans more than he’s trying to hurt his opponents. Foley knows his audience, and what they despise; in a believable development of this character arc, Foley begins to profess his love for the WWF and WCW, to which he publicly begs to return. ECW had always galvanised its audience against the majors, but here, Foley perfects the use of tribalism as a narrative device.

Folding tribalism into the fiction is something else that Tony Khan adopted with his wrestling versus sports entertainment feud of 2022, in which the Blackpool Combat Club raged against the WWE-leaning Jericho Appreciation Society.