Thanks to the PWTorch Newsletter for the following:
— Awesome, who is now 42 and has been with his wife over 20 years, has expressed little interest in getting back into pro wrestling full-time. The big WCW contract he took (which you could hear Joey Styles yelling about on the commentary at the ECW PPV) has set him up with a degree of financial security that most wrestlers never achieve. This caused him to get a ton of negative heat from both the fans and the ECW wrestlers at the PPV, for walking out on ECW without losing the ECW title first. He got a four year, one million dollar contract from WCW, in part because he agreed to enter the company without losing the title first.
Mike Awesome suffered a deep gash on one of his knees at the ECW PPV from when he dove over the top rope onto Masato Tanaka at ringside. It required several stitches to fix up, however there is no serious damage done to his knee.
“There is no way Awesome did anything in that match that WWE would want,” says one WWE wrestler. “He’ll get a call to come back for the next ECW PPV, if there is one, but that’s it.” Says another WWE wrestler: “The Awesome match was way too much for the sake of being too much. But it’s hard to fault the guys. They knew they had one night and they wanted to show what they could do and they absolutely worked their asses off.”
