During a recent episode of the Outdated Wrestling Podcast, the founder of ECW Tod Gordon made an exciting announcement regarding his upcoming book titled "Tod is God."
During the podcast, Gordon shared captivating stories from his time in ECW and discussed various influential figures such as Paul Heyman, The Sandman, Terry Funk, Joey Styles, The Public Enemy (Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge), Eddie Gilbert and more. For fans eager to delve into the behind-the-scenes world of ECW.
“I really went for all the gusto basically. There’s so much stuff that people don’t know. I mean, if I see one more tape or book or whatever saying the real story of ECW, the unauthorized biography of ECW, well, this is the actual authorized story. This is the one that is coming right from the horse’s mouth. I’m gonna tell you stuff that you weren’t told before. You’re gonna hear stories about drugs, sex, rock and roll, all that good stuff, and you’re gonna hear some bad stuff too about people who were just dishonest. What really happened to Paul and I? I mean, there’s a lot of stories in here that have never been told publicly before. If ever you were a fan of ECW, anybody, they’re going to say, ‘Wow. Wait, what’, or they will be hysterically laughing. It’s that kind of thing.”
“My co author, Sean Oliver, I met him through Kayfabe Commentaries. He had me on for a couple of DVDs and we hit it off pretty well. He started hammering me because he’s already done other books. ‘Come on. We gotta do a book.’ ‘I don’t want to do a book.’ ‘We gotta do a book.’ I don’t want to do a book.’ Long story short, it wasn’t until Paul Heyman’s DVD came out for
WWE and I watched it and I said, ‘You gotta be kidding me.’ I’ve kept quiet for so many years. 30? 25? Whatever it is, and he’s out there still lying his ass off. I said, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ So I said, ‘I got to tell the true stories.’ Nobody’s telling the true story. It had to be told finally. I would have stayed quiet for life if he hadn’t done that DVD.”
“Oddly enough, it wasn’t a story I wanted to tell’, but once he got to know me and he heard these stories, he said, ‘This is a story you need to tell. This story needs to be told.’ I said, ‘Listen, I’ve gotten along this far without telling it’ and he said, ‘No, you have to tell the stories. No one knows what really happened except you and Paul’. There’s this thing out there like it was Paul’s company and that couldn’t be further from the truth, although eventually it became that.”
Then Tod Gordon took a look back at his pro wrestling career. He said:
“Yeah, I have to say it was. I wish that I hadn’t moved as fast as I did and grow as quickly as I did because I didn’t really have a game plan, and it was not to be on national TV or Sunshine Network and MSG Network in the first year, which was charging a fortune. That’s also part of the problem was Paul had promised New York, MSG which took the deal, that had every commercial covered, because he was Mr. New York and all the clubs.”
“They all wanted to buy into the show. So I signed a contract and he never got one advertiser, but he said he got it all covered, You know, at $3,000 a week going out the window, boom, boom, boom. Same thing with the Sunshine Network. Boom, boom, boom, boom. All of a sudden, it’s like six grand a week and I went, whoa, we’re not bringing that kind of money in and it’s not part of my business plan here. We’re already there and it was just like, hard to go backwards.”
Tod Gordon's new book will be released on July 25th and as noted is co-authored by Sean Oliver. Oliver was the host of Kayfabe Commentaries shoot interviews such as "Timeline: The History of ECW" and "YouShoot", which Oliver has had Gordon on two of his releases (with Gordon hosting Timeline: History of ECW 1992/1993 and a YouShoot: Tod Gordon).
You can listen to the interview below:
