Many ECW fans have speculated on what would have happened had the company continued into the rest of 2001. So much has been speculated, but here is some interesting information not well-known to pro wrestling fans.
After ECW on TNN ended after roughly a year, ECW’s only television deal was its syndicated Hardcore TV show. However, clips of ECW started to appear on the “Farm Club” TV show and on the Farm Club website. Here are some of the matches which appeared:
However, Paul Heyman indicated that music industry mogul Jimmy Iovine had a small interest in the company and that there were talks that his business may have invested more into the company.
According to the WWE.com website (full article here), Paul said:
I don’t think this is any secret. Universal Music was coming in to purchase a minority share of ECW. Which is why, after we were off TNN, our videos started appearing on “Doug & Jimmy’s Farm Club” on USA Network. Doug & Jimmy were Doug Morris and Jimmy Iovine, the co-chairmen of Universal Music. The concept was: one, exploit the massive financing available from Universal Music; two, use Universal’s distribution for our DVDs and CDs; three, utilize their web development teams as we expanded into the ever-growing Internet platforms that were becoming available in 2001.
This was confirmed on the HeymanHustle.com website as well here: https://www.heymanhustle.com/what-if-ecw-never-closed/
In November 2021 Fightful.com referenced a podcast with Paul Heyman on the Metal Injection’s Square Circle Pit where he was quoted as saying:
“An investor in ECW, in our very, very last days, was Jimmy Iovine. The most powerful man in the music [industry] of the past 30-40 years. To this day, he sold Beats to Apple for, you know, $3.2 billion. At the time, Jimmy was the Co-Chairman of Universal Music Group, which was Geffen, A&M, and Interscope. Jimmy was a fan of ours because he started a rebel music label called Interscope and disrupted the entire music industry. So he understood the struggles of ECW. Our only exposure besides when we did some co-promotion with WWE, then WWF on USA Network was after we were off TNN, we would get these little snippets on Jimmy and Doug’s Farm Club, which was on USA Network, because Jimmy Iovine was trying to expose ECW again, in our very last days, not just to his audience, but also to the USA Network. Because we were negotiating with Stephen Chao, the President and at the time, the Charmain of USA, Barry Diller.” — full article, and link to the podcast channel, here: https://www.fightful.com/wrestling/paul-heyman-doesn-t-regret-moment-ecw-says-jimmy-iovine-was-investor-during-its-dying-days/
On December 31, 2020 WrestlingInc.com also posted this about Jimmy Iovine’s potential involvement with ECW – during an interview with Jamie Iovine:
Iovine also touched on Paul Heyman recently revealing that Interscope was on the list of buying ECW. He noted that he was only a teenager back then, but of course, the deal did not go through and WWE eventually bought ECW.
There’s also that whole thing where Paul Heyman revealed in an interview, of course, I’ll leave it to him to reveal because we didn’t say much, until he talked about it, that Interscope was one of the lists of people who was interested in buying ECW before it went out of business,” Iovine said. I met Paul Heyman the first time, God, I had to have been 15 – 16 years old back when ECW was starting, right after the TNN deal went through, and they were needing money.
Thanks: