Shane Douglas on ECW’s Legacy, Throwing Down the NWA Title and Teaching School

Fred: I have a true wrestling legend on the line. He’s wrestled everywhere, WWE, WCW, UWF and the NWA, but he truly made his name in Extreme Championship Wrestling. He is “The Franchise,” Shane Douglas. Shane, thanks so much for joining us. How are you, sir?

Shane Douglas: I’m doing great, Fred. How are you doing today?

Fred: I’m doing all right, although I’m longing for some logic in pro wrestling. Before we get to the current state of the business, what’s on a lot of fans’ minds is what “The Franchise” is up to these days.

Shane Douglas: Several things. Most importantly, I’m playing dad to my two sons and helping coach my youngest son’s wrestling team. I’m also in the process of marketing the movie “Pro Wrestlers vs. Zombies,” which stars Roddy Piper, Kurt Angle, X-Pac, Jim Duggan, myself, Matt Hardy, Reby Sky and a litany of other wrestlers. That keeps me pretty busy.

Fred: The WWE Network comes out in a couple of weeks, and one of its major selling points is access to every ECW pay-per-view in the promotion’s history. Is it ironic that after all these years of people dismissing ECW’s impact, it’s now a major selling point for WWE’s new business venture?

Shane Douglas: It’s not surprising at all to me. The biggest surprise I ever had with ECW, Fred, was at the end of our run, right around the time the company started its downward slide and I left. All of us in the company knew we had a very loyal fan base, but we thought it was a finite one, small but very loyal. Then the Acclaim video game came out and sold what it did the first week, and we started seeing the demand and the surge on the internet, and we all realized we were bigger than even we thought. In the years since, I’ve come to realize what ECW meant to the fans, and I consider myself blessed to have been part of it. The fact that they’re using it as a major selling point isn’t a surprise, because they’re going to tap into that loyal fan base. If I were them, I’d be doing the exact same thing. I wouldn’t be trying to sell my current product. I’d be trying to sell the legacy of ECW.

Fred: Can nostalgia alone carry the WWE Network, or will people eventually say, “I already lived through ECW and the Attitude Era. We want something fresh”?

Shane Douglas: Absolutely. Nostalgia will only take you so far. It’s great for an occasional look back, but you have to have something that reignites that fire in the fan’s stomach. ECW did that, and the Attitude Era did it very well. They’ll get some great ratings and make some money off that nostalgia blast, but if they don’t rearrange their product to look more like what wrestling used to look like, I doubt they’re going to see much success. Vince McMahon and I have always had our differences and never really got along, but I certainly respect what he’s done as a businessman, and his organization doesn’t usually fail for long. It seems they’ve been turning their attention away from what the fans want for quite a while now, but when they get back on track, it’ll be because they see the loyalty of the ECW fans, the Attitude Era fans, the old NWA fans and the WWF fans, and realize they’ve got to get the product back to wrestling.

Fred: A lot of people may not know you didn’t get your start in the NWA or WCW. You started in Mid-South with “Cowboy” Bill Watts, and I once heard you call it the ECW before ECW. It looks like an awesome time in professional wrestling.

Shane Douglas: It really was. I was young and dumb at the time, and I was a huge fan of the UWF, which aired in Pittsburgh on Thursday nights. From the first time I saw it, I was hooked, because it reminded me of what wrestling looked like to me as a small kid. Right around the time it started airing in Pittsburgh, they did that infamous angle with Bill Watts, and the heat was amazing. You could feel the heat coming off the TV. That was one of Bill Watts’ selling points. He always believed the heels had to have heat to draw money, which is the opposite of what McMahon believed. McMahon believed the babyfaces have to be over, and that’s true to an extent, but if your heels have no heat, in my experience, it’s very difficult to draw. The heels in the old UWF and Mid-South under Bill Watts were melting the television, and as a young white-meat babyface going in there, I had the opportunity to work with a lot of those guys and learn night after night from Bill Watts, Eddie Gilbert and an incredible crew.

Fred: Steve Austin said on his podcast with Joey Styles that he doesn’t think Shane Douglas gets enough credit for his contributions to the business, especially his promo work in ECW. Would you agree?

Shane Douglas: It’s hard to say what your legacy is when you’re sitting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I don’t even think in those terms. I’ve always enjoyed performing, and I’ve sustained myself in the business for this long, so obviously I’ve done some things right and some things wrong, and that’s how we grow. I think sometimes people overlook ECW because it wasn’t the huge company it should have become. Dixie Carter mentioned to me once, when we were discussing it, “Why would I want to copy ECW? After all, ECW failed.” Well, define failure. She’s correct that we failed on a business level, but I’d put the legacy of the company up there with any company out there, and in some ways our fan base is much more loyal. Some fans didn’t get a chance to see it, because it wasn’t in their area, but in the long term, I think history will be kind to my contributions to the business. I had a ton of fun in ECW, and I miss those days, because I’d never seen that kind of magic before or since.

Fred: Austin also said he thought you were a better babyface than a heel. Had you gotten the opportunity later in your career to be a babyface, could you have knocked it out of the park like you did as a heel?

Shane Douglas: I had fun as a babyface, but that was because I was working with guys like Arn Anderson, Eddie Gilbert and a ton of great talent. As a heel is where I felt I was at my best, but that’s for other people to decide. My feeling when I went from babyface to heel was that I’d achieved pretty much everything I wanted to as a babyface, and I always wanted to learn as much about every aspect of the business as I could before I got out. Jim Ross told me years ago that timing is everything, and I believe he’s right. When ECW started, the timing for Shane Douglas was to be a heel. That’s what ECW needed, and thank God it worked.

Fred: We took some fan questions. Stephen Miller wants to know whether you have any regrets, to this day, about throwing down the NWA World title.

Shane Douglas: No. I try to think things through as much as I can, and when I commit to a decision, I commit to it for better or worse. I’m not going to Monday-morning quarterback it. The only concern I had at the time, and still do, was that I didn’t want guys I respected, like Harley Race, Ricky Steamboat, the Briscos and the Funk brothers, to think I was being disrespectful to them. I’ve spoken to most of them, and those guys are seasoned enough to understand the business and why we did it. I think it was the seminal moment for ECW to become what it became. We had an incredible crew of talent, with Paul Heyman as a booker and great talent in the ring, so it was easy to be the captain steering that ship.

Fred: George asks: You were in TNA for quite a few years, and they obviously squandered their opportunity to truly compete with Vince McMahon. Is there any way they could turn it around?

Shane Douglas: It’s hard to say. Any time a company has the resources Panda Energy has, it can turn things around, but I’ve been amazed at the longevity of their obstinance in not doing the right thing. For years and years, they’ve consistently stuck with the wrong formula. You’re never going to out-Vince McMahon Vince McMahon. If you want to open a hamburger stand, you don’t look for a spot right next to McDonald’s. Vince is damn good at what he does. I’m not a fan of his product right now, but he’s amazing at production, lighting, sound, pyrotechnics and camera shots, so why compete on that level? Not everybody wants to drink Coke. Some people want Pepsi, and some people want something else. Give them that alternative product. If they started doing that, with the resources Panda has, they could clearly turn it around, assuming they have the wherewithal to financially hang in there after the millions and millions of dollars they’ve already put into it. It’s not over until the fat lady sings, but clearly they’re on the path to absolute failure.

Fred: Besides TNA, is there one promotion post-WCW that really squandered an opportunity to compete with WWE?

Shane Douglas: ECW did, unfortunately. We had a great run, and as amazing a booker as Paul was, his problem was that he was trying to do too much on his own. From working with young companies, I know it takes a quantum amount of work to get a company up and running, with all the different facets and revenue streams, and Paul was trying to do that all himself. Paul’s a micromanager, and an endeavor as large as starting a wrestling company requires a hell of a lot of time and a hell of a lot of talent in a lot of areas to succeed. Unfortunately, ECW didn’t succeed because of that.

Fred: Do you mind taking a few questions about random rumors and telling us whether they’re true or false? Dustin asks: Is it true you were kicked out of Raw in 2012 for starting ECW chants?

Shane Douglas: No. I walked out of the building. If ECW was anything, it was opportunistic. At the time, we were preparing for the Extreme Reunion show, and WWE had a show in Philadelphia, which we thought was perfect for us to garner some attention. We bought tickets at ringside and were in the building lawfully. We didn’t sneak in. Within minutes of me walking out, somebody in Vince’s organization put out that I’d been kicked out of the building, and that was not true. One security guy followed me up the stairs into the hallway and asked for my ticket. I showed it to him, turned around and walked away.

Fred: Eugene asks: Is it true, as Ric Flair wrote in his book, that you told him your beef with him was a work?

Shane Douglas: No. I explained the heat I had with him, and I told him that at some point it became just part of the storyline. Not many people know this, but there was a point when Ric Flair was having problems with Bischoff, and through Arn Anderson, he started negotiating the possibility of coming into ECW. It came close but fell through, and once it was obvious he wasn’t coming, I thought it was almost silly for me to keep talking about him. I kept pleading with Paul to give me something more to talk about, but he was slow to do that, because he was wrapped up in getting Tommy Dreamer established, getting Taz going as the Tazmaniac and getting Raven established as a heel. Later, when I worked with others like Sabu and Terry Funk, I was able to start moving on. But I never told him it was a work.

Fred: Is it true you taught school early in your career?

Shane Douglas: Yes. Around late 1990, when I was in the WWF, my father came down with late-stage emphysema and obviously couldn’t live alone, so I left the road. I had a long discussion with Vince, who told me family always comes first and that the door was always open for me to go back. In January 1991, I started teaching school, and I taught from 1991 to 1995. The first two years were special education, and the last two were U.S. Constitution, U.S. history, world history and economics.

Fred: I have a question for you, because I was researching your career. Did you realize somebody on YouTube has so much free time that he uses a robot voice to reenact some of your most famous promos? There’s one where the robot says, “This is the Franchise, Shane Douglas. Cut the music,” and then rants that “The Notebook” is the worst movie of all time.

Shane Douglas: God bless him that he has that much free time and that much interest. When I was a kid growing up, I was a huge Muhammad Ali fan, and I still am. When you study him as a case study, without the juggernaut of a WWE or an NWA behind him, he was able to make the entire world love him or hate him. Everybody had an opinion. Nobody was indifferent about Muhammad Ali, and that’s the guy who can draw money. People come to me and say, “Did you see what so-and-so or Flair said about you?” It would be hypocritical of me at this stage of my career to say I’m mad about something, because I’ve always said, “Talk good about me, talk bad about me, but hopefully talk about me.” So whoever is doing robot versions of “The Franchise’s” promos, God bless him.

Fred: Before we let you go, where can fans find you online, and what’s next on “The Franchise’s” schedule?

Shane Douglas: “Pro Wrestlers vs. Zombies” will be released WrestleMania week, and we’re negotiating with theaters around New Orleans and other areas of the country for a theatrical release. The best place for information is the movie’s Facebook page. Next on Shane Douglas’ stage is finally finishing my autobiography and looking to bring the sport of wrestling back. I think there’s a huge chunk of the audience looking for that, and since other companies don’t seem interested in doing it, I’ll always have my finger in the wind, trying to find the right avenue to do it.

Fred: Awesome. Thank you so much for your time, Shane.

Shane Douglas: Hey, I appreciate it.