Sabu vs. Taz (Feb 1995 – Apr 1997)

Background

Sabu came to ECW as the nephew and protégé of Ed "The Sheik" Farhat, working a dangerous, improvised style built on tables, chairs, and dives, a style he had developed training alongside Rob Van Dam.[1] He had debuted in 1985 and wrestled in Japan's FMW alongside his uncle, including a May 1992 fire match in which the Sheik was badly burned when wind blew the flames around the ring inward.[2] Sabu arrived in the Philadelphia promotion in October 1993 with that reputation already in place, and took the ECW Championship from Shane Douglas in only his second appearance.[2]

His opponent in his very first ECW match was The Tazmaniac. The two met in singles matches four times between October 1993 and March 1994, with Sabu beating him at NWA Bloodfest on October 1, 1993.[3][4] The Tazmaniac had debuted at that same Bloodfest show and spent his first year in the tag ranks, first with Joe Chetti as The Tazmaniacs and then with Kevin Sullivan, with whom he won the ECW World Tag Team Championship twice.[13] In August 1994 he reached the quarter-finals of the one-night tournament for the vacant NWA World Heavyweight Championship before losing to Douglas.[13]

By the summer of 1994 Paul Heyman, then working on camera as Paul E. Dangerously, had paired them as a team. They lost a title match to The Public Enemy on a January 1995 television taping in Orlando that Dave Meltzer rated four and a quarter stars.[3][5] Less than three weeks later, on February 4, 1995, they got the rematch at the ECW Arena in the promotion's first ever Double Tables match, and won the ECW World Tag Team Championship in 12:48.[6][7]

The reign lasted three weeks. Chris Benoit and Dean Malenko took the belts from them at Return of the Funker on February 25.[8] It was a short run, but a real partnership, which is why what happened next landed as a betrayal rather than a storyline turn.

Build-up

ECW built its April 8, 1995 card, Three Way Dance, around a three-way tag team main event: Sabu and The Tazmaniac against The Public Enemy and Benoit and Malenko.[2][9] Sabu, though, was also booked by New Japan Pro-Wrestling for a show at Korakuen Hall the same weekend.[2] New Japan was paying him around $3,000 a week at the time, against a few hundred dollars a date in ECW.[2]

The Pro Wrestling Torch laid out the timeline at the time. Heyman went to New Japan, which told him it was Sabu's problem, not theirs.

On April 1 he asked Sabu to tell him now if he wasn't coming, so the television could reflect it, and in Heyman's words Sabu "swore he'd be there." Heyman asked for a call before any flight to Japan; instead, on Thursday morning, Sabu's answering machine said, "I'm on my way to Japan. Leave a message."[2]

Sabu's version was that he had told Heyman on the Tuesday that he was going. He later said he had told Heyman what he wanted to hear to get him off the phone.[2]

Heyman did not quietly rework the card. He walked to the ring with The Tazmaniac and 911, told the fans Sabu was gone, offered refunds, and said, "While he might have been the best guy we have, he's not here any more."[9] Rick Steiner filled the spot on two days' notice, Chris Benoit cut a promo that turned the building further against the absent star, and the ECW Arena spent the night chanting obscenities about Sabu.[2][9]

The Tazmaniac was left standing in street clothes next to the man who had just fired his partner.[9] "He made the decision to go [to Japan] and yeah, that definitely ticked me off and created some heat," Taz said years later.[10]

Then his own year went sideways. On July 20, 1995, a spike piledriver from 2 Cold Scorpio and Dean Malenko landed him on his forehead and injured his neck badly enough that he was out of the ring for months.[13] Heyman kept paying him through the injury, a loyalty Taz never forgot.[13] Sabu, meanwhile, won the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship in May and was stripped of it within a month, then worked a two-match stint in WCW.[2]

At November to Remember on November 18, 1995, Heyman came to the ring, the arena lights went out, and when they came back on Sabu was standing in the ring.[11] The crowd that had cursed him in April gave him a roar of approval.[2] He beat Hack Meyers later that night.[11]

Taz was on the same card, and he turned heel that night. Working as special referee for Bill Alfonso's match with ECW commissioner Tod Gordon, he attacked Gordon, counted the pin for Alfonso, and cut a promo claiming nobody in ECW had looked after him while he was hurt.[11][13] He was also angry that Sabu had been brought back.[13]

Heyman kept them apart for the next year.[2] Taz returned to the ring at Holiday Hell in December 1995 with a new look, a suplex-heavy style, and the Tazmission as his finisher, and spent much of 1996 feuding with Tommy Dreamer.[13]

At November to Remember on November 16, 1996, Taz opened the show by announcing a "big show" in the first quarter of the new year, which fans took as ECW's first pay-per-view, and said Sabu would finally face him there.[14][15] Later that night he came back out, fought off a ring full of undercard wrestlers, and demanded Sabu come out. The lights went out, came back up on Taz and Sabu face to face, and went out again before anything was settled.[15]

Into 1997, Taz went after Sabu's tag partner Rob Van Dam instead, choking him out and costing the team matches, and beat Van Dam by submission on the house show circuit in the weeks before the pay-per-view.[13][16]

The Matches

Barely Legal ran on April 13, 1997 from the ECW Arena, the company's first pay-per-view, in front of 1,170 fans paying $66,000.[16] The show had two featured matches: Taz against Sabu, and the Terry Funk story that closed the night with Funk winning a three-way dance and then beating Raven for the ECW World Heavyweight Championship.[18] Sabu and Taz went on right before the two Funk matches.[18]

They started face to face, trading slaps and punches before Taz clotheslined Sabu out of the ring.[18] Taz went for the Tazmission early and Sabu blocked it, then ate a series of forearm crossfaces that bloodied his nose.[18] Sabu came back by attacking Taz's knee with a dropkick and a slingshot kick off the second rope, and the fight spilled out of the ring and into the crowd.[18]

Sabu got his spots in, a plancha to the floor, a rana for two, and a top-rope legdrop.[19] Taz won the match with suplexes: a string of Tazplexes, then the Tazmission, and Sabu could not answer the referee.[18][19] The finish came at 17:49, and the hold went on as Taz's usual katahajime, a judo choke.[17][19] Dave Meltzer gave the match three and a quarter stars in the Wrestling Observer.[17]

What happened next was the angle. Taz offered his hand, Sabu took it, and while the two men embraced, Rob Van Dam hit the ring and attacked Taz.[18] Van Dam had spent the winter getting choked out by Taz in Sabu's place, so the attack had a story reason behind it.[13][16] After Van Dam and Sabu finished the beating, Taz's own manager, Bill Alfonso, pulled off his Taz shirt to show a Sabu shirt underneath and joined them.[18]

The turn flipped the whole program. Taz, the heel who had spent two years hunting his old partner, walked out as the wronged party, and Sabu and Van Dam left with Alfonso as the new villains.[19]

The rematch came at Wrestlepalooza on June 7, 1997. Sabu reversed his weight while caught in the Tazmission and rolled Taz up for the pin in 8:14, Taz's first loss since 1995.[20][21][13] Taz refused to let go of the hold after the bell and went after the referees, until several of them hit the ring to pull the two apart.[29] Later the same night, Taz beat Shane Douglas in under three minutes for the ECW World Television Championship.[20]

Aftermath

The rivalry did not end at Barely Legal. Taz, now the TV champion, and Sabu wrestled to 30-minute time-limit draws over the belt on October 31, 1997 in Stamford, Connecticut and again on December 27 in Blackwood, New Jersey, with Alfonso still in Sabu's corner.[3][22][23] In between they met in tag and multi-man matches, with Taz teaming with Chris Candido and later Tommy Dreamer against Sabu and Van Dam.[3][13]

Sabu had his own run at the top that summer. He took the ECW World Heavyweight Championship from Terry Funk in a no-ropes barbed wire match in which he tore open his bicep and had Alfonso tape it shut so he could keep going, then lost the belt a week later to Shane Douglas at Hardcore Heaven.[2] In June 1998 he and Van Dam won the ECW World Tag Team Championship, while Taz and Sabu kept crossing paths in three-ways and six-man tags through the year.[2][3]

In 1998 Taz carried an orange belt he called the FTW Heavyweight Championship, an unsanctioned title he defended while ECW champion Shane Douglas was injured.[13] Late that year, shortly before winning the real ECW World Heavyweight Championship, Taz "gave" the FTW belt to his long-time foe, pulling Sabu on top of him for the pin.[13]

That set up the last chapter. At Living Dangerously on March 21, 1999, in front of about 3,900 fans in Asbury Park, New Jersey, ECW World Heavyweight Champion Taz beat FTW Champion Sabu in 18:28 in a Falls Count Anywhere match that unified the two titles.[24] Dave Meltzer rated it three and a half stars, a quarter star higher than their Barely Legal match.[17][24]

Their final singles meeting in ECW came on a taped episode of ECW on TNN in October 1999, and Sabu won it.[3][25] By then Taz had signed with the World Wrestling Federation and had already lost the ECW title that September.[13]

Sabu's own ECW run ended in February 2000. He had been offered a WCW deal worth about $400,000 a year, the biggest of his career, but Heyman threatened to sue WCW, saying Sabu was still under contract, and the deal was pulled.[2] Within a year both WCW and ECW were out of business.[2]

Behind the Scenes

Both men were clear, in later years, that the heat between them in 1995 and 1996 was real. Taz framed his side of it plainly. "If anyone was jealous of anyone, I was jealous of him, he wasn't jealous of me," he said on Busted Open Radio in 2025. "He was getting a better push than me, he was making a lot more money than me."[10]

He described arguments rather than fights: "some arguments here and there, but nothing crazy, no fistfights."[10]

Bubba Ray Dudley, a young wrestler in the company at the time, has described the tension in the building. "I remember the night that Taz was standing in the middle of the ring, the lights went off in the ECW Arena, the lights came back on, and there was Sabu standing there, finger in the air," he said. "Taz wanted to rip Sabu's head off of his shoulders and spit down his neck. For a 100% straight up shoot. To the point that Paul asked guys like me to be out there just in case."[12]

He tied that memory to Sabu's return from the firing. The records of the November 1995 show, though, have Heyman in the ring when the lights went out, and the lights-out face-off between Taz and Sabu came a year later, at November to Remember 1996.[11][15]

The no-show itself remains disputed in its details. Heyman's account, reported in the Torch at the time, has Sabu promising to appear right up until the answering machine message.[2] Sabu's is that he told Heyman on the Tuesday and that his earlier promises were meant to end the conversation.[2] New Japan was reportedly already unhappy with his attitude about losing to Chris Benoit, and it stripped him of its junior heavyweight title within a month of him winning it.[2]

Taz's neck injury changed his side of the story. He has credited the months out of action, and the depression that came with them, with creating the Taz character, after Heyman told him to turn his real frustration into an on-screen persona.[13] Heyman had kept paying him while he was hurt, which is why the on-camera claim that nobody had looked after him was pure storyline.[13]

Taz was also eager to headline the first pay-per-view. His November 1996 promo pitched Taz against Sabu as the main event.[15] The show instead closed on Terry Funk's title win.

Not everyone thought Taz and Sabu delivered. One reviewer scored it two and a quarter stars and called it "incredibly disappointing given the Sting/Hogan-like buildup," noting that the match "had no heat, either, oddly enough."[19] Meltzer rated it three and a quarter.[17]

Their relationship outlasted all of it. Taz said the last time he saw Sabu was at AEW's Double or Nothing weekend in 2023, where Sabu posed for a photo of former FTW champions. "At the time, I thought he hated being the FTW Champion in the 90s, when Paul put it on him," Taz said. "But he actually thought it was cool."[10]

Legacy

Barely Legal drew about 60,000 buys at $19.95 while available in only 12 to 14 million homes, with the long-awaited Sabu and Taz match billed as one of its main draws.[2] WWE later put the match on its 2012 ECW Unreleased: Vol. 1 collection and its 2013 Top 25 Rivalries in Wrestling History set.[18]

Sabu was already a fan favorite when the team formed: Wrestling Observer readers voted him their favorite wrestler of 1994.[26]

Across six years, from October 1993 to October 1999, the two wrestled each other in 22 matches in singles, tags, and multi-man bouts.[3] Two of their tag matches from early 1995 drew four and a quarter stars from Meltzer.[3]

Sabu died on May 11, 2025, at 60, weeks after wrestling his retirement match against Joey Janela at GCW Spring Break 9 on April 18.[26][27] His real name was Terry Brunk.[26]

Taz, by then a broadcaster for AEW, paid tribute to him on Dynamite three days later. "When I wrestled him, every time he brought the best out of me," he said. "Sabu was aura before aura was aura, before aura was cool, that's who he was. Behind the curtain, I promise you, he was loved by his peers worldwide. I'm gonna miss you brother."[28]

The FTW belt outlived both of their ECW runs. It came back in AEW, and when Taz posed with Sabu at Double or Nothing weekend in 2023, the photo was of FTW champions: Taz, Sabu, Brian Cage, and Hook.[10]

Recalling the moment the lights came back on for Sabu's return, Taz said his first thought was relief that the crowd accepted the angle at all, and his third was about his old partner: "I knew homeboy was over, but man, now he's over over, more than ever now."[10]

See Also

Sources & Further Listening

1. Sabu (wrestler) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabu_(wrestler)
2. John Pollock, "The Story of Sabu" — POST Wrestling, May 14, 2025 (quotes Pro Wrestling Torch's April 1995 newsletter timeline of the no-show). https://www.postwrestling.com/2025/05/14/the-story-of-sabu/
3. "Sabu vs. Taz: all matches" — Cagematch: The Internet Wrestling Database (22 matches, 1993–1999, with Wrestling Observer ratings). https://www.cagematch.net/?id=111&nr=1262&page=2
4. "NWA Bloodfest 1993, Night 1" (Oct 1, 1993) results — Cagematch. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=1115
5. "ECW Hardcore TV #93" (taped Jan 16, 1995) results — Cagematch. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=47266
6. "ECW Double Tables" (Feb 4, 1995) results — Cagematch. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=354
7. Double Tables — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Tables
8. "ECW Return of the Funker" (Feb 25, 1995) results — Cagematch. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=356
9. "The Story Of Sabu No Showing ECW Three Way Dance" — Wrestling 20 Years Ago. https://www.wrestling20yrs.com/blog/the-story-of-sabu-no-showing-ecw-three-way-dance
10. "Taz Recalls Sabu Leaving ECW For NJPW, Crowd Reaction To His Return" — 411Mania, May 13, 2025 (Taz interview on Busted Open Radio). https://411mania.com/wrestling/tax-sabu-leaving-ecw-njpw-crowd-reaction-return/
11. November to Remember (1995) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_to_Remember_(1995)
12. "Bully Ray Recalls Sabu and Taz's Real-Life Heat During ECW Days" — 411Mania, June 21, 2023 (Bully Ray interview on Busted Open Radio). https://411mania.com/wrestling/bully-ray-recalls-sabu-taz-real-life-heat-ecw/
13. Taz (wrestler) — Wikipedia (ECW career; neck injury account from WWE's The Rise and Fall of ECW documentary). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taz_(wrestler)
14. November to Remember (1996) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_to_Remember_(1996)
15. "ECW November to Remember 1996 Review" — Wrestling 20 Years Ago, December 4, 2016. http://www.wrestling20yrs.com/blog/ecw-november-to-remember-1996-review
16. "ECW results, April–June 1997" (Barely Legal attendance and gate; spring house shows) — Pro Wrestling History. http://prowrestlinghistory.com/ecw/results/1997b.html
17. "ECW Barely Legal" (Apr 13, 1997) card and Wrestling Observer ratings — Cagematch. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=381
18. ECW Barely Legal — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECW_Barely_Legal
19. Scott Keith, "The SmarK Rant for ECW Barely Legal" — Scott's Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/rant/the-smark-rant-for-ecw-barely-legal/
20. "ECW Wrestlepalooza 1997" (Jun 7, 1997) results — Cagematch. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=382
21. Derrick Hubbard, "Then, Now, Forever – Memories of ECW" — Pro Wrestling Torch, June 23, 2026. https://www.pwtorch.com/site/2026/06/23/then-now-forever-memories-of-ecw-the-influence-and-impact-of-sabu-taz-the-franchise-shane-douglas-the-dudleys-jerry-lynn-rvd-and-the-ecw-brand-itself/
22. "ECW Fright Fight" (Oct 31, 1997) results — Cagematch. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=28884
23. ECW house show, Blackwood, NJ (Dec 27, 1997) results — Cagematch. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=30543
24. "ECW Living Dangerously 1999" (Mar 21, 1999) results — Cagematch. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=396
25. "ECW on TNN #10" (taped Oct 22, 1999) results — Cagematch. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=410
26. "Sabu passes away at 60 years old" — Wrestling Observer / F4W, May 2025. https://www.f4wonline.com/news/other-wrestling/sabu-passes-away-at-60-years-old/
27. "Wrestling World Pays Tribute To ECW Legend Sabu After He Dies, Aged 60" — Sports Illustrated, May 11, 2025. https://www.si.com/fannation/wrestling/wwe/wrestling-world-pays-tribute-to-ecw-legend-sabu-after-he-dies-aged-60
28. Max Everett, "Emotional Taz Pays Tribute To Sabu On AEW Dynamite" — Wrestling Inc., May 14, 2025. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/1860366/emotional-taz-pays-tribute-sabu-aew-dynamite-im-gonna-miss-brother/
29. Wrestlepalooza (1997) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrestlepalooza_(1997)

Further Listening

• Busted Open Radio (May 2025) — Taz on the no-show, the heat, and Sabu's return
• Wrestling Observer Radio — "The passing of Sabu" (May 2025)
• The Rise and Fall of ECW (WWE documentary, 2004) — Taz on his 1995 neck injury and ECW's use of real backstage tension
• Forever Hardcore (2005 documentary) — ECW alumni on the promotion's history