Justin Henry's Thoughts on...Paul Heyman's Orlando State of Mind

(JG Note: We're pleased to welcome Justin Henry to WorldWrestlingInsanity.com as our newest guest columnist. I think you'll enjoy Justin's thoughts on the entire wrestling industry right here on the site. Justin is not related to Mark Henry...although we didn't ask him, so who knows.)

Ever since TNA jam packed their January 4 episode of Impact with a cornucopia of misfit toys, in the form of unemployed wrestlers, the internet rumor mills have been flanked with stories about who’ll be next to, as TNA likes to say, “Cross the Line”.

Indeed, there have been some comings-and-goings as concerns TNA that have been for the better, such as Ken Anderson, Rob Van Dam, and Jeff Hardy. Others, like The Nasty Boys, Sean Morley, and Bubba the Love Sponge, have been head scratchers, if not outright annoyances.

Lately, with word making rounds that Vince Russo is looking to step away from TV writing, the Wrestling Observer has reported that Paul Heyman could possibly be in talks to bring his unique and highly trusted wrestling mind to Universal Studios.

If you affix that last paragraph inside the eyelids of every internet wrestling geek on the planet, the collective ‘smarkgasm’ could probably power earthquake-ravaged Haiti for a couple years.

Why wouldn’t wrestling fans be happy? Anyone who’s familiar with Paul Heyman’s work knows what he brings to the table.

To anyone who thinks of “Paul E.”, they immediately dredge up three letters out of the recesses of their minds.

E-C-W

Ahhh, ECW. This, of course, is before Vince McMahon unleashed his version of ECW, which was a glorified development territory for younger talents while established veterans retooled themselves (not unlike the original ECW, actually).

If you were to go on Family Feud, and the category was “Name something you fondly remember about the original ECW”, what would you say?

I think the top five answers would go like this:

Blood………………..37

Tables……………….29

Slutty Women…..15

Foul Language…..13

The ECW Arena…..6

And it’s no surprise, since that’s how the original ECW seemed to enjoy marketing itself: as the ultra-violent unwanted child of the wrestling family, next to its brothers, the acceptably cool WWF and the out-of-touch redneck WCW.

To watch ECW is to appreciate the unique vision that Paul Heyman had. As he’d stated on WWE’s DVD release “The Rise and Fall of ECW’, he equated ECW’s phoenix-like rise to be from the ashes of a bombed-out territory system, and he compared it to ‘hair bands’ like Motley Crue and Def Leppard giving way to the grunge movement of the early nineties, fronted by Nirvana.

The comparison is very astute, since what’s ‘cool’ tends to be time sensitive. ECW was a breath of fresh air for fans who had never seen wrestling presented in this manner. A promotion with no rules? Pulp Fiction-style vignettes with rapid-fire promos in one reel? Fans chanting vulgarities in unison?

What is this? It’s ECW, duh.

And this is what Paul Heyman would bring to TNA.

Actually, let me recant that JUST a bit, so that my thought isn’t ambiguous.

Paul Heyman, should he agree to work for TNA, if he’s in charge of overseeing and contributing to the writing of each show, will not turn it into ECW.

Let me make sure that sinks in.

Paul Heyman will not turn TNA into ECW.

There seems to be this crazy notion that just because Paul Heyman walks into the building, a man with a clipboard and pen will run up to him and ask how many tables he needs, how many chairs he needs, how much barbed wire he requires, and what kind of tawdry looking women he wants at his show.

To say that Paul Heyman is all about sex and violence is to miss the point completely. To say that is to also say that Vince McMahon is about muscled up wrestlers, or to say that Cary Silkin and Gabe Sapolsky were all about mat wrestling.

In 1993, when Paul Heyman joined ECW and took over booking duties from Eddie Gilbert, his goal was one similar to Eric Bischoff’s when Eric was tasked with making Monday Nitro a success in 1995.

Heyman knew that he could either be better than, worse than, or different than the other promotions.

He couldn’t be as good as WWF and WCW, because he had nowhere near the budget or the market connections that Vince McMahon and Ted Turner possessed. He didn’t WANT to be worse than either company, since that would be admitting defeat, and relegating his company to a C-level status. Faced with these two realities, he knew he had one option remaining.

He could be different than WWF and WCW.

The landscape of WWF in 1993-94 was that of a kid-friendly promotion, much like now, except that because of the steroid trials and decline of wrestling as a popular entity, the WWF seemed like a hokey children’s show as opposed to the spectacular production that it’s become.

WCW, on the other hand, has hokey as well, except that it was run out of Universal Studios in Orlando, much like TNA. It was seen as WWF-lite, much like TNA as well. It was a safe product that was red-taped by Turner Broadcasting, so that nothing offensive could take place, and thus tarnish the image of the man who gave us CNN and Turner Classic Movies.

So let’s see: WWF has to be family friendly to help improve an image that was ravaged by steroid and sexual assault allegations. WCW is kid friendly to kowtow to Ted Turner, who kindly bought the promotion in 1988.

If the two big wheels are family friendly, and ECW has to be different to thrive, then what’s the opposite?

Sex! Violence! Vulgarity! Throwing a man through four flaming tables!

If WWF and WCW were both violent, adult-themed promotions in 1994, and neither of them were all that successful at it, then Paul Heyman, out of necessity, would have made ECW family friendly. With his budget, there’s no way he beats McMahon and Turner in their own game, so he has to be different, right?

ECW thrived because it was an alternative to the status quo, plain and simple. But it didn’t just thrive because it was violent and gory. It thrived because the characters were also relatable and easy for the adult crowd to understand.

In the cartoon world of WWF, you had an undead mortician, a mute sumo wrestler, an exaggerated patriotic hero, a Scarface wannabe, an evil Finnish wrestler, a silly clown, a tax agent, and a fat slob named Bastion Booger on the roster.

How would a 24 year old, forty-hour-a-week lunch bucket worker sympathize with any of them?

Oh, but look at ECW: you have Tommy Dreamer, who is a pretty boy that was ridiculed for not being all that tough by the fans, who goes on to try and win their hearts subjecting himself to hellacious beatings in order to prove his manliness. You have The Sandman, an individual who becomes dissatisfied with his wife Lori, and thus violently turns on her because of his own drunken insecurities. There’s Raven, who’s a tragic figure that feels compelled to lead misfits around because of his Machiavellian desire to rule in a world in which he’s been forgotten. You have Shane Douglas, who was passed over by the bigger companies, and set out to prove he’s every bit as good as their top stars through sheer willpower.

Along came Eddie Guerrero, who dedicated his career to his deceased friend Art Barr, and performed his finisher, the frog splash, as a tribute. Taz started out as a raging wildman from Oceania, but soon dropped the bad act, and replaced it with something more plausible: a shoot fighter from Brooklyn with a Napoleon complex, who had to prove to everyone larger than him that he could break their necks in mere seconds.

That’s not enough? How about Mikey Whipwreck, the perennial undersized underdog, who scratched and clawed his way to upset victories just because he was tired of being a loser. Cactus Jack railed against the blood-thirsty fans like some remorseful being who was sorry that he ever swung a chair himself. New Jack brought real life edge to his role, thanks to his past as both a street thug and a bounty hunter, making him one of the scariest wrestlers in history.

When you look back on these men that I’ve mentioned, you notice that I was able to define them not by two or three words, but with sentences with many adjectives.

In the WWF in the mid nineties, the wrestlers were colorful outfits, but that’s because they weren’t colorful performers (for the most part). In ECW, their personas were the selling point, because chances are that you could sympathize with one or two men on the roster.

Who DOESN’T get Tommy Dreamer, who fights hard for acceptance from an unforgiving mass? I understand him more than Duke Droese, the wrestler/garbage man. Haven’t you ever been Shane Douglas in your life, thrown aside because you didn’t play politics, thinking that your talent would get you through? That was more logical that Douglas’ 1995 WWF run as a monotone school teacher.

But in essence, what I’m trying to say is that what Paul Heyman brings to the table for TNA is not him opening some fictional floodgate for chairs and swearing and blood to spill out of. TNA already has its share of ultraviolence, and it hasn’t swung the ratings at all.

No, what Heyman brings to TNA is reality.

Living in New York his whole life, the former Paul E. Dangerously has his finger on the pulse of society. To read the man’s thoughts on his Heyman Hustle website is to see an astute observer who is equal part sympathizer to the nine-to-fiver, and translator of pop culture trends.

What can Heyman do for TNA?

He can give voices. Guys like Abyss, Samoa Joe, AJ Styles, Alex Shelley, Homicide, James Storm, Eric Young, and others who have the talent, but not always the forum, to play significant roles, will be retooled so that they have as much chance to win over the audience and find a fanbase that they never knew existed.

What about guys who are proven to be big stars? There’s no doubt that Heyman would see men like Kurt Angle, Ken Anderson, Rob Van Dam, Jeff Hardy, and D’Angelo Dinero as boons to his show. All of these men are either proven champions or, in the case of Anderson and Dinero, capable of being in a major role without looking out of place. Heyman, as he proved during his Smackdown writing in 2002, is capable of giving fresh, realistic voices to his stars.

Honestly, TNA would be missing out on a man with Paul Heyman’s knack. If Vince Russo walks away from the promotion to make room for Heyman, that’s the equivalent of the Cavaliers having umpteen losing seasons in a row before drafting LeBron James in 2003.

Russo returned to TNA in 2006 after a 2 year hiatus, and I can honestly say that there haven’t been ten characters in the last three and a half years within TNA that I’ve wanted to get invested in seeing.

In WWE right now, the main eventers are given plenty of talk time, and that’s where they display their biggest strength over TNA: a believable main event scene. We accept Triple H, John Cena, Randy Orton, Edge, Batista, Chris Jericho, and Undertaker as main eventers, because they have defined characters and understandable tendencies that a fan can get behind. TNA doesn’t have that.

TNA has long been a company that hasn’t “gotten it”. If the TNA roster was a complete tool set with everything you need to assemble or fix anything, then TNA writing and management has been a blind man with no arms. You can’t make the most of these tools if you have no clue or no ability to use them.

Paul Heyman can see. He has two perfectly good hands. Give the man a chance to assemble these characters and build the scenarios for them to interact.

Shawn Michaels said, in character, to Vince McMahon that good things would come from Bret Hart returning to WWE.

So I say to Dixie Carter, should somebody tweet this column to her, that only good things can come from giving Paul Heyman a crack at making TNA better.

Only good things.