Extreme Championship Wrestling redefined professional wrestling in the 1990s with a reckless, brutal, and often bloody style termed "hardcore." Through extensive interviews with former ECW talent and management, fans have an inside look at the company and its demise.

Chapter Two: Laying the Foundation Paul Heyman always had a lot of the mad scientist in him -- the type that was willing to experiment with different ingredients in the hope of creating something new and exciting. He had ideas about how to do this, but never had the sort of laboratory that Tod Gordon was offering him in Philadelphia. There weren't a lot of options for Gordon after his fallout with Eddie Gilbert, a talented but troubled booker. So when he turned to Heyman to salvage this small wrestling promotion, he had to live with the idea that it was not going to be business as usual. The formula Gordon had used to date in Eastern Championship Wrestling -- nondescript local talent with a washed-up name veteran to lure people in -- was history. Heyman had a plan for the promotion to create its own stars. And he started right off the bat with the first match of the first night he was in charge, creating a new tag team. It turned out he hit a home run with his first experiment -- The Public Enemy, which would turn out to be one of the most popular tag teams the business has ever seen. And it started with two small-time independent wrestlers who had bounced around the business -- the least likely candidates to be wrestling superstars. Ted Petty was a 6-foot-2, 250-pound, 39-year-old veteran of the Northeast independent circuit who had flirted with the big time, with tryouts in WCW and a handful of matches for Vince McMahon. But Petty was never able to make the leap, so he wrestled for small promotions in small towns and supplemented his income by renting out a ring that he owned. Like most wrestlers, Petty -- born in Woodbridge, New Jersey, and a graduate of Rutgers University -- had been through a variety of personas and gimmicks over his fifteen-year career, at one time wearing a mask and calling himself The Leopard Mask and later The Cheetah Kid. Petty, who died of a heart attack in 2002, often traveled with his own opponent: Mike Durham, a 6-foot-3, 260-pound kid out of Compton, California. He used the name Johnny Rotten, and while he was not a particularly good wrestler, he put on a good show as a punk rocker. Heyman had seen the two periodically on TV shows, and also once in a match in Singapore, and thought the two would make a perfect fit for an idea he had flying back from Singapore in the summer of 1993. He had been reading a Newsweek article about the cultural changes taking place in America, and about the problems for young men in places like South Central in Los Angeles and Washington Heights in New York. "I read a line in that story that said today we live in an environment that for the first time ever, there are teenagers who are more afraid of living than dying," Heyman recalls. "That line blew me away. I thought we should get these two white guys to do a hip-hop routine where they come out dressed as hoodies, with the baseball uniforms and the hot look in 1993. Their catch phase would be 'Can't scare us because we're the first generation of American children more afraid of living than dying.' Even though one guy was 39 years old, he didn't look it. I called them not Public Enemy, which was the name of the rap group, but 'The Public Enemy,' which was the name of the James Cagney movie where he shoves the grapefruit into Mae Clarke's face." Heyman saw something in both of these unknowns beyond what they did in the ring, and what he did with Ted Petty and Mike Durham was the blueprint for what he would eventually do with ECW. He made them stars in interviews. "These were two of the funniest guys you would ever want to meet," Heyman said. "But Teddy never showed you that side because, number one, he was never on television enough, and number two, he wore a mask. So I took the mask off him and gave him the name Flyboy Rocco Rock, like Snoop Doggy Dog, and Durham, instead of Johnny Rotten, I called him Johnny Grunge. They became Flyboy Rocco Rock &