Sabu vs. Taz (Feb 1995 – Apr 1997)

Background

Sabu, trained by his uncle Ed "The Sheik" Farhat, arrived in ECW carrying a wrestling bloodline and an already established reputation for a dangerous, improvisational style built on tables and chairs, a style he had developed training alongside Rob Van Dam.[1] Taz, working early on as The Tazmaniac, was a squat, explosive amateur-style brawler who paired with Sabu as a tag team in ECW's formative years.[2]

The two men won the ECW World Tag Team Championship together on February 4, 1995 at Double Tables, beating The Public Enemy in the first match of its kind the promotion had run, with Taz setting up Johnny Rocco on a table for Sabu to finish with a leg drop.[3] They lost the belts just three weeks later to Chris Benoit and Dean Malenko at Return of the Funker.[2] It was a short-lived title reign, but a real partnership, which made what happened next land as a genuine betrayal rather than a storyline turn.[4]

Build-up

Sabu was booked in a scheduled ECW World Tag Team Championship match at Three Way Dance on April 8, 1995. He never showed up. He had taken a more lucrative date with New Japan Pro-Wrestling instead, a contract that, by one account, paid roughly five times what ECW was paying him.[1] Paul Heyman has said Sabu had repeatedly assured him the ECW date would be honored, and that he learned Sabu wasn't coming through an answering machine message rather than a direct conversation; Sabu has said he told Heyman in advance.[1] Whichever account is accurate, Heyman's response was public and real: he fired Sabu on the spot, in front of the sold-out ECW Arena, and the crowd turned on Sabu's name that night.[1]

Taz was left to answer for the empty spot on the card and the collapse of a partnership he hadn't chosen to end. Sabu returned to ECW seven months later, on November 18, 1995 at November to Remember, beating Hack Meyers in front of the same fans who had booed him out of the building that spring, this time receiving him warmly.[1] Taz's reaction was not so forgiving.

For roughly the next year and a half, Taz publicly challenged Sabu at every opportunity, and got no response.[4] Heyman revealed that he had personally asked Sabu, as a friend, to ignore the challenges rather than engage.[4] Both men have since said plainly that they didn't especially like each other during this stretch, a rare case of an ECW rivalry running almost entirely on real animosity rather than scripted heat.[4] What kept it from boiling over into a match for so long was Heyman's own booking instinct: he let the real tension sit unresolved on camera for over a year rather than rushing it to a finish.[4]

The Matches

The two men finally met one-on-one at ECW Barely Legal on April 13, 1997 at the ECW Arena, the promotion's first pay-per-view, in front of 1,170 fans.[5] The match ran 17:49 and was built as a standard singles contest rather than a hardcore gimmick match, a deliberate choice that let two years of real tension play out as a straight wrestling fight.[5]

Taz locked in his finishing hold, the Tazmission, and Sabu had no answer for it; unable to respond to the referee, he submitted.[5] Taz got the win, and with it the resolution of a real-life grudge the promotion had let simmer since the spring of 1995. Rob Van Dam attacked Taz immediately after the match ended, opening the next chapter of ECW's tag and singles programs off the same show.[5]

Aftermath

The match was significant enough to the promotion's history that WWE later included it on the 2012 "ECW Unreleased: Vol. 1" DVD and the 2013 "Top 25 Rivalries in Wrestling History" collection.[5] Both men continued as top ECW acts afterward: Taz went on to hold multiple ECW World Heavyweight Championship reigns, and Sabu continued teaming and feuding with Rob Van Dam through the rest of the decade before an eventual, contentious departure from the company around 2000.[6]

Behind the Scenes

Both wrestlers have been consistent in interviews that the heat between them during 1995 and 1996 was genuine rather than performed. Taz's grievance was specific: Sabu's decision to prioritize a higher-paying Japan booking over an ECW date read to him as disrespect to the company and the rest of the locker room that had shown up.[4] Sabu's own account, filtered through the Forever Hardcore documentary, framed the decision in plainer economic terms, describing an ongoing career in Japan that predated ECW and that he wasn't willing to walk away from for what the smaller American promotion could offer at the time.[1]

Heyman's decision to let the real animosity run unresolved for close to two years, rather than book the two men together immediately on Sabu's return, is frequently cited as a case study in ECW's house style: using a genuine backstage conflict as the raw material for a program, and trusting the natural tension to carry more weight on camera than a written script could.[4] The result was a rivalry both participants have described as legitimately personal even while they were, by the numbers, some of the best workers the company had.[4]

Legacy

Barely Legal's Sabu-Taz match is remembered as one of the defining bouts of ECW's identity heading into its national pay-per-view era, less for its spot list than for what it represented: a real-life story, allowed to breathe on television for two years, resolved in a straightforward wrestling match rather than a gimmick.[5] It remains one of the rivalries most frequently cited when historians discuss ECW's willingness to blur the line between a wrestler's real life and the character built around him.[4][5]

See Also

Sources & Further Listening

1. Sabu (wrestler) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabu_(wrestler)
2. Rob Van Dam and Sabu — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Van_Dam_and_Sabu
3. Double Tables — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Tables
4. "8 Real Life ECW Rivalries Fans Should Know About" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/real-life-ecw-rivalries-fans-should-know-taz-sabu-rvd-paul-heyman/
5. ECW Barely Legal — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECW_Barely_Legal
6. "Sabu vs. Taz" — Cagematch: The Internet Wrestling Database. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=111&nr=1262
7. "Story of Tazz vs. Sabu at Barely Legal 1997" — YouTube (WWE Vault). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_28LfVrYDdU

Further Listening

• Forever Hardcore (Sabu documentary) — Sabu's own account of the Japan booking and the ECW firing
• Taz's own podcasts and shoot interviews discussing the real animosity behind the feud
• The Rise and Fall of ECW (WWE documentary) — company-wide context on ECW's willingness to work real backstage tension into on-screen stories