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FU to you all! ECW Legend ”The Franchise” Shane Douglas once again
dons his Dean mortarboard and breaks out the trusty ”Board of
Education” to beat some wrestling sense into you... verbally
speaking... every Tuesday, Shane Douglas will take a deep dive into
a different subject, event or performer with his trademark
intelligence, expert insight and take-no-prisoners,
spin-no-bullsh*t attitude. Without Shane Douglas, there would have
been no ECW World Heavyweight Championship. It was Douglas who, on
Aug. 27, 1994, won a tournament to become the new NWA Heavyweight
Champion, and then threw the title down and proclaimed the death of
the National Wrestling Alliance and the birth of the ECW World
Heavyweight Championship. No other competitor on the ECW roster
could have pulled off such a flagrant act of defiance with the
poise of the man who declared himself ”The Franchise.” Indeed, it
was Douglas’ unflappable confidence, poison tongue and hair-trigger
temper that made him both a captivating personality and a
sports-entertainment outlier better suited for the uncensored world
of Extreme Championship Wrestling. The Franchise did not start out
this way, however. Trained alongside Mick Foley by Dominic DeNucci,
Douglas skateboarded into WCW as one-half of the fun-loving Dynamic
Dudes alongside John ”Johnny Ace” Laurinaitis in 1989. Looking like
Zack Morris with his bleached blond mullet and neon high-tops, the
upstart popped over to WWE in the early ’90s and then back to WCW
where he developed rapidly during a championship partnership with
Ricky ”The Dragon” Steamboat. Douglas’ breakout as a singles star
came in 1993 when he abandoned his white bread good guy act as
ECW’s newest villain. Dispatching his hardcore opponents with a
rough, technical style — Douglas always favored belly-to-belly
suplexes over barbwire bats — the Pittsburgh native became the
first champion of the rebranded Extreme Championship Wrestling, and
the leader of The Triple Threat. An obvious challenge to his
nemesis Ric Flair and his Four Horsemen, the group’s rotating cast
of characters included Bam Bam Bigelow, Chris Candido and
“Primetime” Brian Lee at different times. A brief trip to WWE in
1995 became the career lowlight for Douglas as the Dean Douglas
persona (based on the fact that he was formerly a school teacher)
forced upon him failed to catch on with WWE fans who saw it as a
retread of The Genius. When he returned to ECW, he had an even
bigger chip on his shoulder. Now with his “head cheerleader”
Francine by his side, The Franchise captured both the ECW
Television and ECW World Heavyweight Titles while besting Chris
Jericho, Bam Bam Bigelow, Sabu and many more. After losing the ECW
World Heavyweight Title to Tazz at the Guilty as Charged
pay-per-view in 1999, Douglas returned to WCW for a strong two-year
run as The Franchise. He won both the United States Title and the
WCW Tag Team Titles (alongside Buff Bagwell) and captained
competitors like Dean Malenko and Perry Saturn in an impressive
faction known as Revolution. With extra stops in TNA as a manager
and wrestler, Extreme Revolution and a mainstay of the independent
scene to this day, Shane Douglas has been involved with pro
wrestling at every level for 40 years.
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