Raven on ECW: “They came so close to picking up the No. 2 spot when WCW was going out of business”

In an interview with Heated Conversations with Booker T (via Wrestling Inc), Raven said that if ECW had come along a little later, it likely could have taken WCW’s place as the #2 wrestling promotion in the world. Here are highlights:

On ECW’s rise: “It was crazy because they were just on the cusp of getting big, so I got there right in time just riding the wave. I was there for the two years when they were the most influential. They revolutionized the business in a sense because the business had gotten really stale where you’d have the old-timers would sit in a hold for like 20 minutes, they wouldn’t even work a hold. Paul Heyman had said that we were changing that. They changed the music. They changed the sound. You know what I mean? He borrowed from a lot of places so it wasn’t like he created the whole thing, but he was smart enough to coalesce all these elements where whether it was the cruiserweights he got from Mexico and then he got the music and stuff from Memphis. He got stuff from FMW [Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling], the violence from Japan in FMW and then he just put it all together into a soup. He picked all the right ingredients and knew how to stir the pot.”

On if ECW had come along later: “I definitely think it would have spread further. They came so close to picking up the No. 2 spot when WCW was going out of business. Then they were put on Spike TV before it was Spike. The network just didn’t get behind it. There is so many what-ifs, but I try not to dwell on the past. I look back fondly, but I hate to play the what-if game because there were so many things that could have happened – so many things that could have gone right and so many things that could have gone wrong too. But it’s a moment in time and I guess that is what makes it so special too because it is a moment in time and it just happened and it won’t happen again.”