After ECW closed its doors in 2001, a number of the company’s top stars would eventually wind up in WWE. Rob Van Dam, Tommy Dreamer, and of course, the mastermind behind the entire operation, Paul Heyman, all ended up in WWE as Heyman would become the lead writer of “WWE SmackDown” in 2002, and it was here where he was able to do a few favors for some old friends.
One of those old friends was Nunzio, who wrestled in ECW as Little Guido and eventually became the WWE Cruiserweight Champion. He was a recent guest on the “Developmentally Speaking” podcast where he revealed that without Heyman, he probably wouldn’t have gotten a job in WWE.
“Paul put a good word in for me and was pushing to bring me in, and they were going to start doing the cruiserweight thing too,” Nunzio said. “So when I first started going there, I did dark matches for a couple of months just under Little Guido. Like I was just going out there and they weren’t putting me on TV. I was at all the matches and they were using me a lot in New York and stuff because I did the ECW thing. So I had, you know, I had the ECW [chants] that pops 20,000 but you know I still–even though I wasn’t on TV, but they were using me on all the house shows you know? Just to use me, keep me working…I don’t know if they had an idea, but you know, all of a sudden they came to me with the FBI thing.”
Nunzio revealed that through the WWE’s version of the FBI stable that originated in ECW, he was able to mix it up with the likes of The Undertaker, Kurt Angle, and Brock Lesnar, and was very grateful when the company decided to give him the WWE Cruiserweight Championship in 2005.
Please credit “Developmentally Speaking” when using quotes from this article, and give a H/T to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.
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