by Bob Holly
I thought ECW would be a perfect fit for me. I was excited, thinking I’d get to be one of the top guys, get a lot of TV time doing matches and promos, and be involved in a mixture of things. I was half-right — I definitely was in a prominent role as one of the main players on the show. But when it came down to the important matches, they used me to get other people over again. I picked up some wins along the way but I was still pretty much a glorified enhancement guy. It all goes back to what they want to do with someone — it doesn’t matter how good you are, it only matters what they want to use you for. Still, I did what I was supposed to do: worked hard, pitched ideas to the writers, and hoped that maybe something would happen. It never did.
The big plan was to base the group around Rob Van Dam. He was still very popular (even though Hunter had been burying him for years), so they had him win the WWE Championship and then declare himself the ECW Champion too. It was going well until he screwed it up for himself. Rob is Rob and he’s going to do what he wants no matter what. He just wanted to wrestle and smoke his weed. He didn’t care about anything else. They had just built a pay-per-view around him winning the company’s top title and were building a new brand around him, and then he got busted by the police for smoking pot. He got suspended and they had him lose both the WWE and ECW Championships over the next week. When he came back from suspension, his momentum had slowed, so they wanted to get him back on track. As usual, they turned to me.
It didn’t bother me that I was asked to put Rob over. That was my job. I always liked Rob. He’s one of the best guys you’d ever meet. I loved working with him. A lot of the guys complained about him when he first joined WWE in 2001 because his kicks were too stiff, but I never had any problems with him. I took everything he gave me and didn’t try to shy away or put my hands in front of my face to block his kicks because I wanted it to look believable. Sure, a few of those kicks connected pretty hard and rang my bell, almost knocked me out a couple of times, but he didn’t do any real damage. I work like that so who am I to complain? When he does that Rolling Thunder move though, that fucker lands on you full force and he is heavy.
We worked together a bunch on the road and had a lot of great matches, but the one that really stands out, the one people still talk about, aired on live TV in September 2006. It ended up being probably the best match I ever had.
The instructions were pretty simple — go out there and get Rob over, help him look good, and have a good match. Just another day on the job. This was all about Rob. We were told to make it about 12 to 15 minutes and that a two-minute commercial break would be in there. We would have to plan something pretty spectacular so we could down-sell for that amount of time. Since we’d worked together so much on house shows, the match was easy to put together. I focused on making sure it all made sense and that, by the end, Rob would get over the way they wanted. When we got out there, everything was going great; the crowd was into it and the timing was just right. About seven minutes in, the referee told us that we had 30 seconds before we went to commercial. We had a big spot planned with a folding table that we’d set up beside the ring earlier, so we got into position for that. The ref gave us the 10-second warning; we were in perfect position. I was on the ring apron, outside the ropes, and Rob was in the ring. We faked the suplex one way. I went up for it but came back down on my feet on the apron. Then I lifted Rob up for the suplex to the outside and we both came crashing down through the table. The crowd erupted — all I could hear was them going nuts.
In the middle of all that noise, laying there on the floor in the wreckage of the table, I was thinking, “That stung awful damn bad.” It felt like I had a sunburn and somebody had slapped me hard on my back. It wasn’t anything like some of my dirtbike accidents, it just stung, like I’d been badly scratched.
When the referee came over and told us we had a minute before we came back from commercial, we started moving. I rolled over onto all fours and suddenly saw a puddle of blood. I recall thinking, “Holy shit, where did that come from?” I had no idea if it was Rob’s blood or mine. It looked like somebody had been shot. Rob wasn’t bleeding. I glanced under my arm and saw all of this blood running down my side. I thought, “What the fuck have I done now?!”
I got up onto the apron. The guys with the handheld cameras could see the blood, which meant everyone in the arena could see it on the big screen. The crowd let out a big gasp. Everyone in the back apparently went scrambling to get the doctor and the trainer. I just wanted to get on with it. The referee was wearing an earpiece, and he was told from backstage that I should wait on the apron because Dr. Rios was going to look at me before we went back on air. The ref said that Vince might want to stop the match. Oh, hell no! Nobody was going to stop that match as far as I was concerned! I had no idea how bad it was and I didn’t care. The ref told me it was pretty bad but I was moving around a bit and thinking, “How bad can it be?” Turns out it was pretty damn bad! Dr. Rios and Larry — the trainer — came running down and checked it out. Larry said to me, “I’m going to tell them to stop it.” No way, I thought. It was too good of a match. I said, “Motherfucker, you tell ’em to stop it and I swear to God, I will punch you in the mouth right now.” He looked at me dumbfounded and said, “Bob, come here and let me look at it one more time.” I told him to get the fuck away from me and rolled back in the ring. I didn’t give them a chance to stop the match. I was feeling pretty stubborn that night. I didn’t realize how bad the injury actually was until I was in the ring and happened to look up at the big video screen — they had a shot of me from behind, and I could see a huge gash about halfway up my back. It was at least a foot long and pretty deep. Blood was dripping out of it — it looked fucking brutal.
As nasty as it looked, it didn’t actually hurt that much. I thought it added to the match, made it that much more interesting for the fans. The rest of the match felt good and the people were into it. I wrestled another eight minutes with that injury and, as I said earlier, I think it was probably the best match I ever had. I earned a lot of respect that night. You’re never going to make everyone happy all of the time, and there are always those fans who just don’t like you for whatever reason. That night, I earned a lot of respect even from those guys. The audience gave me a standing ovation when I left the ring. That was nice — I was a heel at the time, so for them to respect me and what I’d done in the ring that night was appreciated. When I got backstage, Vince shook my hand, gave me a hug, and said, “You’re one tough motherfucker — thank you for a great match.” I just went out there and did what I’m paid to do the best I could, and I gave the fans what they wanted. I’d never quit a match because I was bleeding!
They led me to the trainer’s room and put 25 stitches in my back. I felt fine. I was just happy that the match was good. Over the next few days, once the adrenaline had worn off, it was a little more painful but still not that bad. It hurt to be touched and I couldn’t lie on my back but other than that, it just felt like a regular cut. The most annoying thing about it was that it was in a spot that was literally a pain in the backside. Everything I did, I felt it right there. It affected the way I sat down, the way I worked out. I had to take two weeks off from training to let it heal. It was more of an irritation than anything else.
Rob was very grateful after the match, like he always was. He’s grateful whenever you work with him. That can be a rarity in this business. We had become really good friends because we’d been working together so much, so I’d wanted to do the best I could for him in that, give him 100 percent and really help get him over as best I could. I felt bad for him when he blew his big shot earlier that year, but that’s on him. I hated that WWE decided to change directions and didn’t push him back up to the top when he got off suspension. He went out every night and did what he was supposed to do. The fans liked him, they bought tickets to see him, they bought his merchandise, and he delivered good matches. It pissed me off that they saw him as a liability and wou
ldn’t roll the dice on him while they protected a guy like Randy Orton who, back then, was way worse than Rob ever thought about being. That just goes to show that if you make the company a ton of money, they’ll change the rules for you. If you’re not making them money — and often it’s because they’ve not put you in a position where you can make them money — they will treat you as expendable and get rid of you at the first sign of trouble. It’s a big double standard.
After that match with Rob, I was probably the most over I’d been in five years. It was a great chance for them to capitalize on that and put me in a position where I could make money for them. I was a veteran, I knew what I was doing in the ring, I could cut a decent promo, I had credibility with the fans, and I’d proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was loyal to the company. They were lacking in good heels at that point so it made sense to me that they would use me as a no-nonsense heel in ECW. The Big Show was the top heel but he was always complaining because he was in such bad shape. When he had to take some time off, there were no other heels left.
It seemed to me that I might finally get a break and what did they do? Because the fans cheered me at the end of my match with Rob, the office decided to turn me babyface. I thought that was dumb. They assumed the audience would want to cheer me just because that one crowd gave me respect for working through a sliced-open back. There’s a difference between one audience showing respect for a wrestler who has gutted out an injury and the fans being ready to take to me as a permanent good guy. Turning me babyface was a mistake, which they realized a few weeks later. They turned me back heel, and you can’t do that — if you turn a guy too much or too quickly, the audience stops caring. All that momentum I had after the match with Rob vanished. They really blew that opportunity.
The big plan for ECW after Rob got busted was to bring Bobby Lashley over from Smackdown and make him the top guy for the brand. If Lashley was going to be a good draw as top babyface, he was going to need a good heel to work with, somebody who knew how to work with his limitations — and there were a lot of them because he was so green — somebody who could get some heat on him and make it look believable. I looked around that locker room and knew nobody was a better fit for that position than me. Problem was that I’d lost so much momentum after that asinine face-turn that they didn’t feel I would work in that role. That was their own damn fault for turning me babyface!
Instead of using me as the top heel, they went with Test. He had a good look and his promos were okay but could stand to get better. I’ll say this — he was vicious. People talk about me being stiff in the ring; I was nothing compared to Test. He was rough. I didn’t have a problem with him but I thought I deserved that spot.
Still, they thought enough of me to use me in one of their main events, even though I wasn’t originally advertised for it. We were going into the first official — and what ended up being the only — ECW pay-per-view, December to Dismember, which turned out to be a horrible night. Most of the guys in ECW at that point were undercard guys who had been losing on RAW and Smackdown but were pushed as top guys in ECW — and none of the fans bought it. For the main event, they used this thing called the Elimination Chamber. A huge enclosed cage surrounded the ring: inside were four pods, with a wrestler locked in each pod. Six wrestlers in total were in the match: two starting in the ring, with a pod opening every five minutes to let a new guy into the match. You could get eliminated at any time. Since it was meant to be hardcore wrestling, they called it the Extreme Elimination Chamber and put a weapon in each pod. One guy had a crowbar, one had a barbed-wire baseball bat, and so on. I turned up at the arena that day and they took me aside right away to tell me that Sabu failed a drug test. They were taking him out of the match and I was going to replace him. That was just fine by me.
I was one of the two starting guys and was working with Rob. Even though it was a new environment for us, we were so comfortable with each other that we just called things on the fly. We knew what to do. I enjoyed that match but it was probably the most painful thing I’ve ever done in my career because that chamber was solid steel. It had no give whatsoever. Rob and I did a few moves using the chamber and I took a couple of bumps on the steel floor. They tickled, to say the least . . .
I stayed in the match quite a while, which was a surprise, given I hadn’t been advertised. I enjoyed working the match, and I thought it turned out pretty well. I made the best out of the situation and got some good screen time in. They paid me $1,000 — for a match on pay-per-view, that’s terrible. The other guys probably got more because they were advertised for it and I was put in at the last minute, but even so, it’s still terrible. Still, I didn’t complain. Big Show was complaining enough for everybody at that point. He was backstage that night, whining about having to do the match. He was miserable because he was so out of shape but he only had himself to blame. He liked his cheeseburgers and cigarettes. It’s difficult sometimes, but you can still eat clean on the road — it’s what you make of it and all Big Show was making was a bunch of excuses. He dropped the ECW title to Lashley in that chamber match and then took a year off to get healthy. When he came back, he was lean and looked great, but gradually he put a lot of it back on again. It’s a shame to see.
The thing about Paul — Big Show — is that he’s a really great guy and I’ve always thought he’s a good worker for a big man. He’s easy to work with. WWE didn’t use him the way they should have. When he first came in, they had him lose to Steve Austin in the first month, but Steve was already over so it made no difference to him. They should have been establishing Show with the WWE audience so he could make money further down the line. Then they started flip-flopping him from heel to face all the time, making him lose credibility. They just couldn’t figure out how to use him properly so I can’t blame him for being pissed off. He was always good to me though. We rode together sometimes and he was easy-going. He didn’t want to work out but that wasn’t a problem for me; I just took the car and did my thing. Like Sid, he never let me pay for anything — he would insist on paying for the car, the gas . . . if he wanted to stay at a particular hotel and I’d say, “That’s out of my price range,” he was quick to say, “Don’t worry about it — I’ll pay.” He’s just a really gracious guy, which makes it all the more unfortunate that Hunter made fun of him behind his back all the time. It was ridiculous and sad, because Paul liked Hunter and looked up to him.
I got to work with C.M. Punk in the Elimination Chamber and afterwards in ECW. I thought he was a good worker and he was always polite to me. He always said he was happy for me whenever management started to use me. I always liked him. During his undefeated streak, they had me be the first guy in WWE to beat him in a singles match. But the office didn’t make it mean anything, so they didn’t do anything with him or me as a result. He bounced around a bit after that but has since become one of the top guys in the business. He was the hottest thing going over the summer in 2011 but then Hunter got his hands on him and that was that. They had a match and Hunter went over. Hunter didn’t need that win. Punk got to kick out of Hunter’s finish but he still lost, so what does that do for Punk? Not a lot.
A few years after I left WWE, Punk brought my name up in a promo on RAW, saying that he was in an arena where I’d hit him so hard that I’d given him a permanent blind spot in his eye. I have no idea why he brought me up in that promo but I doubt he meant it as a negative thing or a complaint. I can’t even remember the match he was talking about because I worked with him so many times. You get all these little injuries, you get hit here and there, and they all blend together. It wasn’t a one-sided thing either — Punk kicked me in the face a bunch and just about cracked my skull with his finisher a few times, but that’s just part of wrestling. You don’t whine about getting hurt or about somebody hitting you too hard. If you do, you’re in the wrong business. Punk never complained that I was working too stiff with him and I don’t remember him going for medical aid after
any of our matches, so it couldn’t have been that bad. If he was really that pissed about it, he would have tried to bury me in that promo by saying something more negative about me. I was glad to hear he brought up our match — we had some good ones. Maybe he misses me, misses the physical abuse . . .
After I finished working with Punk, management told me I was going to work with Lashley, who was now the champion. They’d tried using Test against him and that didn’t work out too well. Their matches were terrible, so they decided to give me a shot after all and told me that I’d win the ECW belt. I was happy to hear that and thought we could have some good, hard-hitting matches. I liked Bobby and enjoyed working with him — he was green, sure, but he listened well and learned quickly. The road agents always told me how much they thought he improved when he worked with me. I thought hell, if you’re that impressed, use me properly in a decent program!
I was working through some pain at this point because my elbow was all busted up again. There were so many pieces of bone floating around that I’d pinched a nerve, which was affecting my hand so badly it was starting to atrophy. I had scheduled a surgery to take care of it but cancelled when Vince McMahon came and said he had big plans for me.