Paul Heyman, the advocate for current Undisputed WWE Universal champion Roman Reigns, is being inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame this week in Philadelphia. His induction shouldn’t be a surprise; through his work as a manager, promoter, and wise man to the superstars, Heyman has touched nearly every part of the professional wrestling world over the past 40 years. Heyman’s fingerprints have been all over many significant changes within the industry, making him one of the most consistent creative figures of the modern era.
Many legends are remembered for one big idea, and their legacy is therefore judged on the impact of that idea. Heyman completely shifted the paradigm of pro wrestling three separate times, and the ripple effects of those changes make him an undisputable Hall of Famer, even if we divorce his creative output from his iconic work entirely as an on-camera performer.
Heyman started his time in wrestling at the age of 13 as a photographer, publishing photos in wrestling magazines, and he began his career at the legendary Studio 54 in New York City at 19, producing Wrestle Party ’85, which featured big stars of the NWA (and Bam Bam Bigelow’s pro wrestling debut). With Bigelow’s encouragement, Heyman began managing wrestlers in the Northeast independent wrestling circuit under the name Paul E. Dangerously (a name he got from the 1984 comedy Johnny Dangerously). As Heyman tells The Ringer, his plan was never to perform. “I always wanted to be writer, director, producer. I wanted to be behind the scenes, but no one was going to ever take instructions from an outsider.” Heyman felt that if he could get his foot in the door as a premiere act in an organization, he would then be able to exert his influence behind the scenes, giving him the tools to reach for what he’d always dreamed of.
Heyman was in his 20s when his managing career took off, working alongside Austin Idol and Tommy Rich in their wars against Jerry Lawler in Memphis wrestling. He took the original Midnight Express to the AWA World Tag Team Championship and then to the NWA to feud with Jim Cornette’s Midnight Express. Dangerously became the cohost of the NWA’s flagship television show World Championship Wrestling at age 24, ultimately becoming the mouthpiece of the lead heel stable in WCW, the Dangerous Alliance. However, when Bill Watts took over WCW, he clashed with Heyman, who was eventually fired (his last appearance was his match against Madusa at the November 1992 Clash of the Champions).
Getting fired from WCW led to Heyman’s first reinvention of professional wrestling. Heyman joined Philadelphia-based Eastern Championship Wrestling to help his friend Eddie Gilbert, who was booking the promotion. After Gilbert got fired by ECW owner Tod Gordon, Heyman took over the role of booker. In August 1994, ECW hosted the NWA World Title Tournament, and Heyman booked “the Franchise” Shane Douglas to win the title … and then toss the title to the ground and cut a scathing promo on the NWA before crowning himself the champion of the newly rebranded Extreme Championship Wrestling.
At this point in the ’90s, children were a huge target for pro wrestling promoters in America: Hulk Hogan and his friends were taking over WCW, feuding with the cartoonish heel stable Dungeon of Doom; meanwhile, the WWF had King Mabel win the King of the Ring before feuding with Diesel. Heyman’s ECW was a shock to the wrestling system. The promotion ramped up the violence, embracing a “hard-core” ethos that introduced everything from barbed wire to thumbtacks to broken glass to fire in regular matches, relatively unheard of among American audiences. They also produced more mature angles, pushing boundaries in a way that would sometimes hurt the promotion, including at High Incident in October 1996, where a controversial main event led Kurt Angle to reportedly walk out of his first pro wrestling event in disgust. ECW also helped push a more athletic, high-flying wrestling style, showcasing Eddie Guerrero, Dean Malenko, and 2 Cold Scorpio. Heyman would also bring in talent from Mexico, such as Rey Mysterio Jr., Psicosis, Juventud Guerrera, and La Parka, who blew the minds of the fans in attendance with moves no one had seen in the U.S. before.
“I never considered hard-core wrestling to be the pursuit of blood,” Heyman reflects. “I considered extreme and hard-core to be a testament to the work ethic that was involved. We did an excessive amount of blood in ECW because the others couldn’t offer it.” Heyman also champions the broad range of talent that ECW put on display: “We popularized Mysterio versus Psicosis. We popularized Malenko versus Guerrero. We innovated the tap-out instead of ‘I Quit’ in professional wrestling and sports entertainment with the character of Taz.” And it wasn’t just the action in the ring that made ECW stand out from its competition; its gritty, in-your-face production values (and soundtrack plucked straight from your favorite radio station) also attracted attention. “The stunts and the visuals and the music [were] a counterculture presentation,” Heyman says.
ECW ended up having much greater influence than it did success as a business, especially as the WWF and WCW raided ECW talent and ideas. WCW built nearly its entire cruiserweight division with talent seen first on ECW and brought in ECW headliners like the Sandman, Raven, and Public Enemy to fill out its undercard. The WWF’s Attitude Era took the violence, raunchiness, and sophom*oric humor nearly wholesale from ECW; WWF also signed ECW standouts Steve Austin and Mick Foley and pushed them to the moon around this time. Unsurprisingly, as big-time cable wrestling did ECW’s schtick with a higher production budget, ECW couldn’t survive, and the promotion fell into debt, declared bankruptcy, and sold its assets to the WWF.
“ECW was meant to disrupt,” Heyman affirms. “The disruptors very rarely in life get the direct benefit of their disruption. … Bubba Ray Dudley says it best to this day: ECW was Napster. It completely changed the way this industry is presented, thought about, and absorbed by the audience.”
Heyman also isn’t just looking at the influence ECW had on WWF and WCW in the ’90s; he sees how federations of today were influenced by ECW as well. “AEW is in and of itself RVD, because anyone who watches AEW can quickly conclude the AEW style is based on Rob Van Dam versus Jerry Lynn from 1998, 1999. And then you throw in all the different things that were obviously influenced by Taz, Sabu, the Sandman’s entrance, playing music while the action still goes on—let alone the fact that they continue to use the ‘lights out, lights on’ gimmick, which we debuted at the November to Remember 1995 when I brought back Sabu. The first financially viable opposition to WWE in many years employs styles that we either innovated or popularized during our run.”
When ECW went out of business in 2001, Heyman went to WWE and, after a stint as an announcer, became the SmackDown booker in 2002, marking the second time Heyman shifted the pro wrestling paradigm. Heyman built the show around what was dubbed the “SmackDown Six.” They were smaller and more athletic than WWE’s traditional main event stars, and their work rate–focused style soon became the template for 21st-century pro wrestling.
“What we did on SmackDown was not all that complicated,” Heyman explains. “We presented a clear alternative to Monday Night Raw. Raw was a television show about a sports entertainment television show, much like The Larry Sanders Show with Garry Shandling.” All Heyman had to do was not that. He says that he was creating “a sports-oriented show built around young, hungry, emerging stars looking to stake their claim in either the charts of notoriety or the pursuit of a championship.” That approach paid off. Heyman says, “The exhilaration of the audience witnessing the emergence of new stars that they themselves can herald and champion entices that very audience to go to their family, their friends, their associates and say, ‘I say, you must watch this along with me. There’s something very special going on over here.’” Post-Heyman, SmackDown continued to focus on the in-ring aspects of WWE over dramatics, building enough steam that Fox paid $1.025 billion over five years for the show in a deal that ends this fall. And from Chad Gable’s quest for the Intercontinental Championship to Cody Rhodes’s journey to defeat Reigns, the WWE universe is all about following young stars on their paths to greatness.
Eighteen years and numerous positions within WWE later, Heyman aligned himself with greatness on a different level in Roman Reigns, becoming the orchestrator of the third major shift in pro wrestling: the “Succession Era,” with a long, layered story line that more closely resembles prestige TV than traditional pro wrestling. Heyman has had a long relationship with the Anoaʻi wrestling family, going back to the start of his career as a photographer, when he used to ride to WWF shows with the Wild Samoans, and the late ’80s, when he managed the Samoan SWAT Team (which included Fatu, a.k.a. Rikishi, the father of the Usos).
The past several years of WWE have focused on the Bloodline, a familial drama built around psychological abuse, family trauma, resentment, megalomania, and betrayal. For each twist and turn in the story, Heyman has been in the background as the wise man, the consigliere to the Anoaʻi family, both venerating and manipulating Reigns. That story line has led to a boom in WWE viewership, one that should only continue with the long-awaited addition of the Rock to the familial stew. And as Heyman has said in the past, the story is far from finished.
“I’m a huge proponent of writing the last page of the script first. It’s always to the advantage of long-term storytelling,” Heyman says. “I don’t think it was ever done better, ever, than the Brian De Palma–directed movie Carlito’s Way, because the very first frame of the movie tells you the ending. The first scene in that movie is the end of the movie. Then you’re taken on a ride with these characters that are so layered. The audience is truly emotionally invested in them to such a degree that when you know the movie is coming to the conclusion, you have forgotten what the ending is, and you’re rooting for Carlito, even though you were just told less than two hours ago he’s going to die on that train platform at the hands of this person in front of his soon-to-be bride. The magnificence of that storytelling is, to this day, so dramatically underappreciated. I’ve always been of the belief that the launch of the story is the first push toward the conclusion. The finish is everything.
“All that being said,” Heyman continues, “I think I would suggest the ending of this story has already been rewritten multiple times because the world has changed since the inception of the Bloodline story. And therefore, what was a clear vision of how this should play out almost four years ago changed along the way based on not only the audience’s investment in the characters and the stories, but the world itself—society itself, pop culture itself, sports culture itself has all changed. And now we can see the trajectory that we’ve been on takes us so much further than we ever initially imagined.”
It is very rare to have one great idea; it’s even rarer for that one idea to make a ripple. Heyman is in the midst of his third pond-disrupting splash in pro wrestling. He reinvented wrestling in the 1990s with ECW, embedding ideas in the DNA of pro wrestling that continue to be seen today. He reinvented wrestling again in the 2000s by pushing a more hard-hitting athletic style and reasserting the importance of wrestling on pro wrestling TV programming. And now, as the wise man to Reigns and the Bloodline, Heyman is helping craft one of the most unprecedented story lines in sports entertainment history. The beauty of Paul Heyman is that he will continue to be as disruptive as he was when he forced wrestling to become extreme.
Phil Schneider is a cofounder of the Death Valley Driver Video Review, a writer on the Segunda Caida blog, host of The Way of the Blade podcast, and the author of Way of the Blade: 100 of the Greatest Bloody Matches in Wrestling History, which is available on Amazon. He is on Twitter at @philaschneider.
