Brian fucking Pillman

I stopped watching wrestling for the first time some time in 1995. WCW was shit. Everything that made it cool (being the opposite of WWF in both good ways and bad) was changed into a bad impression of mid 80's WWF, and it was unwatchable. And WWF was in the middle part of the New Generation, where every wrestler had a day job that they defined themselves by, and some of the best wrestlers of all time had to continuously wrestle with these assholes. In retrospect, WWF started picking things up a little in late '95, but I didn't know this at the time, because I wasn't fucking watching.

I saw ECW very sporadically in 1995. The memories of these times almost seem like strange fever dreams. It was late at night, I always remember it being hot (hot in the summer because we had no AC, hot in the winter because our heat was awesome), and really strange images that I had never seen before would flash at me MTV style in my half groggy state (quick cuts, the camera would zoom in and out on Joey Styles for no fucking reason). Fever dream, or acid trip. It was a surreal experience that was truly an experience. It was that dream that you only sort of remember. But Brian Pillman showing up at Cyberslam and threatening to take his dick out and piss in the ring was different, and is a more vivid memory to me than things that happened yesterday.

Now my memory of it, this took place for like a half hour, when it was really only a few minutes, so it's not completely reliable either. But I like my memory better. An unhinged man threatening to whip his dick out in a wrestling ring for a half hour is what dreams are made of. No matter how long the duration of this threat, it was definitely the most bizarre thing I had ever seen on a wrestling show, and most irreverent thing, maybe even to this day. That was another thing about ECW -- Even at a young age, I had a sense of what the WWF/WCW would and could do. If a bad guy threatened to kill somebody, or something, I knew nobody was dying. This isn't 'Nam. There are rules. But ECW was a different thing. In that setting, and that time of night, Brian Pillman pissing in a ring, not only seemed possible, it seemed likely.

It's easy to overstate things in retrospect. With the nWo and Austin 3:16 right around the corner, saying this Pillman angle impacted things enough to pave the way for such angles, could be a small time romanticism. Like the type of guy that would say, "You thought the Beatles changed music, you should see these four other assholes nobody ever heard of that were doing the same things before, dude." That hipster, indy cred, the "I know how things really went down," sort of thing. And this might be that. But I also maintain that its just fucking true too.

Pillman wasn't going back to WCW. Bischoff may have thought so, but the guy threatening to whip his dick out, wasn't going to wrestle at the Mall of America a couple weeks later on Nitro. Or worse yet, at some TV taping in Disney.  Pillman's WCW fate was sealed whether he knew it or not, whether he even cared or not. Austin was already gone from WCW. We know how this turns out.  So the nWo had to happen now. And the way it would happen would be very similar to the way Pillman showed up in ECW. This was the start of the promo being king. A year before, somebody shows up "unannounced" at a wrestling show, they wrestle, or they do a run in on the top babyface (Good gawd, what's Jake Roberts doing here?!?) and even though you're suspending disbelief, you know, "well, he's in the ring with a WCW/WWF guy, they're wrestling, this has been talked about, this isn't that dangerous." But the lunatic with a live microphone, was a new thing, and much more dangerous.

You could say Austin did the same thing just a couple months before, in the same company, but that was different. Mainly being, Austin's best stuff taking place backstage. There is an unconscious knowledge of this having to be kayfabe. They're clearly choosing for this Steve Austin promo to air. The guy showing up in the ring, unannounced,"live," with a microphone, is complete anarchy. You can't cut around that. It's the birth of the attitude era. This is exactly what Scott Hall did a couple months later on his first night on Nitro. He didn't attack Sting with a folding chair. He showed up, grabbed a microphone, and let you know some shit was going down. And you fucking believed it. This is also exactly what Austin 3:16 was. Austin fought what, three of four times that night? Nobody cared. He grabbed a microphone after it was all done and had to teach poor poor Jake Roberts, that John 3:16 wasn't shit, and we're still talking about it (it's pretty amazing when you think how closely all this great epic stuff happened in relation to each other. How did our heads not explode?).

In this time where the illusion of wrestling being real was slowly rotting away -- If you're watching ECW, you're a smark, you know. If you're watching WWF, they're calling it sports entertainment now, and barely trying to keep that illusion alive anymore. WCW has Yeti's and Robocops, they're not even trying -- What happens when the "marks," aren't quite the same marks they used to be? The promo becomes king. Because while wrestling might be fake, and we all wink at each other acknowledging this fact, the words being said inbetween it, might not be. So in this fake world, the words being spoken, might be the only bit of truth. And that's fucking awesome. So what happens is, a man, in the ring, with a microphone, can become more compelling than any Flair-Steamboat match ever wrestled. Now wrestling becoming secondary to promos may not have been a good thing in the long run. But I'm not judging it positively, or negatively. That's just the way it became. And it became that, exactly after Brian fucking Pillman, and business completely exploded. So bascially, the desire to relieve ones bladder in a public setting changed wrestling forever. Try rewriting that.