In an exclusive for WrestlingNews.co, Steve Fall interviewed ECW founder Tod Gordon to help promote his book “Tod Is God.” The book is available now on Amazon and wherever books are sold.
Tod Gordon says Paul Heyman fabricated the WCW mole story:
“You have to understand it was always us against the big guys. We were the Little Engine That Could, us against WWE, us against WCW. We were shooting at them and we’re trying to equate ourselves with them. So what happened was things got bad at a certain point around ’96, ’97 in the locker room. What used to be this great family loving atmosphere in his locker room had become a splinter group. There was a crew over here. Here was the Philly crew over here. Here’s a guy with his own he made up for himself, his own championship over here. The whole thing was really getting bad. Everybody’s coming to me saying, ‘Look, you helped Public Enemy. Can you help us? Can you get us a job somewhere? I can’t live like this any more worrying about whether or not I’m gonna get a check that clears and I can eat my dinner. I don’t want to buy anything as I’m definitely afraid.’ I said, ‘Paul. You’re losing these guys. I’m going to make the phone call.’ He goes, ‘Wait a minute. I’ve got a brilliant idea. You’re leaving anyway, right?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘How about there’s a mole in the company and I can get the locker back together again, all of us, against whomever and now we tighten the ranks again.’ I wanted the company to succeed. I wanted it to go on forever. I still get my money out of it and it wasn’t just the financial out of it. My best friends were there. They’re still my best friends, Sandman, Fonzie, Sabu, Scorpio. I mean these are people I talk to like religiously. Were that close as a group. So basically be went with that, and of course, you have to understand the way Paul operates like, ‘You will come back in a year as the greatest heel in the history of professional wrestling. You have no idea how big we can make this.'”
Tod Gordon on why he started ECW:
“To me, it was fun. It was a hobby once a month. You know getting 100 people in the audience, there’s nothing to get excited about. Then we did the pilot. Someone came up to our videographer and said, ‘I really need TV. We’re starting a new channel called Sports Channel Philadelphia. It has Flyers, the Sixers, the Phillies, but no programming.’ It was just starting. He said, ‘Can you get me any programming? Can you get a pilot?’ I went, ‘Sure we got a pilot.’ So naturally, we did. We got a pilot. We got the gig. Every Tuesday at six o’clock, Philadelphia.”
“Well now I got to put the TV together. What do I want to do? My whole philosophy since day one has been I want to produce shows that I would want to see. Couldn’t stand what I was watching on TV because it was a cartoon. Everybody was a cartoon character. It ruined what I’d grown up loving, like living and it was so depressing. So I got Eddie Gilbert to become my booker. He was going to try to bring up the hardcore Memphis style. The Moondogs every week we’re on TV smashing people with trash cans. That’s where I wanted to start. That’s my beginning point. I just wanted something a little more hardcore. There was nothing hardcore at all, anywhere. I mean, when I say hardcore, I mean, believable. Where I grew up, I watched Bruno and Killer Kowalski and Gorilla Monsoon and it was believable. It’s like, ‘Oh, my God. I wonder what happened last Saturday night at the arena’, but I had to wait until the next show to find out whether Bruno won or not or lost the title because it was believable. I wanted to do the same thing and more so as time went on beginning with Eddie. I wanted it to be violent. I wanted it to be hardcore, I wanted it to be blood and guts and if there was a big audience for it. I didn’t know how big. Believe me I didn’t know how big. That astounded me. But, you know, that was my goal originally just to have a more Memphis style product.”
Tod Gordon on Sandman finding coke under a hotel rug:
“There’s a hotel we used to stay at called the Travelodge, which we called the Loserlodge. One night we were sitting in the hotel room, cocktails, drinking, relaxing, smoking a dube, whatever. It’s Fonzie, Sandman, myself, and Scorpio, and out of nowhere, Sandman goes, ‘Is this room 705?’ We all looked at him and went, ‘Yea.’ ‘Oh my God.’ He went to the corner of the hotel room. He starts ripping up the carpet. ‘Dude, what are you doing? I gotta pay for this shit. Are you crazy?’ He pulls out an 8-ball of cocaine. Understand something. We’ve stayed in this hotel now six months in a row since he put it there. He just forgot. He was taking the plane back to Utah. He had a temporary job in Utah and he didn’t want to carry it on a plane. Now again, we’ve been in six different rooms since then. He forgot completely. 705 went ding ding ding. Now we are hysterical laughing our asses. He goes, ‘Scorp , come with me.’ He walks down the hallway with his snot rag in his pocket, bare feet, no shirt on, his blood dripping down his forehead. He goes to the elevator. ‘Scorp, give me a hand. Scorp lifts him up, and he goes, ‘Another 8-ball.’ We are now literally throwing up from laughing so hard. He hid it in the hotel and forgot about it six times in a row when he stayed there.”
Tod Gordon said Vince McMahon brought back ECW in 2006 to kill it:
“I started to watch the first episode. I saw this zombie come out. I said, ‘That’s it. I’m done. We’re back to cartoons, the first freaking match. Are you kidding me? That’s exactly what is anti-ECW.’ I genuinely believe that Vince brought that back whether you want to say he worked everybody else, maybe he did. I believe he did. He hated, I know that for a fact he loathed the fact that people would yell, ‘ECW ECW’, during his live shows that came across on TV over and over again. So he put the belt on himself, called himself the ECW champion, and tried to get as many people as possible to turn off the product and hate it and stop it. And yet, what is it, a month ago, Paul is on Raw, in Philly no less, and the whole building, 20,000 in 2023 mind you, going, ‘ECW, ECW ECW’, and he’s trying to sell it, ‘Yeah, those letters are dead’, but the fact they were legitimately saying that 30 years later, do you know how humbling and amazing that is? It’s incredible. It’s overwhelming.”
This interview is exclusive to WrestlingNews.co. If you use these quotes, please include a link back to this page.
