In an interview with The News Hub, Steve Corino spoke about his time in the original ECW and more. Here are highlights:
On his time with OMEGA: “Well, OMEGA was like a collection of Indy guys in North Carolina and myself I had lived in Pennsylvania but I was making a lot of trips to North Carolina. Joey Mercury was in Virginia and he had just started and he would meet me on the way and Matt Hardy has this this vision of let’s do something that no one else is doing and now you gotta remember that this was 1997 where there wasn’t a Ring of Honor and ECW was finding its legs and still a little more hard-core than anything so Matt had this grass roots idea of every match has to be like a barn burning stuff like that. And he (Matt) thought that me and Joey (Mercury) and CW Anderson would be great as the guys selling the old school first. People always ask where did the old school character begin with and I had those ideas and then right from OMEGA first time.”
On his time in the original ECW: “When I came in there were always no promises. I came in as just an underneath guy. I was Nova’s friend and this was right after November to Remember 98’ and they were looking for new guys and Paul wanted to build new guys. So they had Reckless Youth that was the guy they wanted and I was the afterthought. The guy was Nova’s buddy here is pretty good and he’s got an anti-hard-core thing alright bring him to the arena and do a quick try out match. That’s how I won my job. Then little things would come up and happen. Whereas Candido would mess up and Paul would look at me like, ‘Steve you can talk let’s do this thing with Tazz’ and then Candido would be back and then he would be fine and then I’d get pushed down a little bit and then Candido would mess up again and then all of a sudden I’m back. There was a time where no one remembers where I had Rhyno and Tajiri and Candido comes back and all of a sudden I had no one and Candido had Rhyno and Tajiri then 3 weeks later he’d mess up again. And then I’m back without explanation it was just like I was the go to guy.”
On his future in Professional Wrestling: “If you would have asked me this a couple of years ago I would have said the game plan has always been for ROH to be economic television for the Sinclair broadcasting channels. I would have never thought we would have done something with New Japan and I’d never thought that the replica belts would come and that they would have taken the 17th chance at ippv because of all the problems that we had and I would have never thought that we would have done regular traditional pay per view and it wasn’t all in the business plans that they all got together and this is good and houses are up and merchandise licenses are being sold so let’s try this so for me you just gotta keep moving forward little steps just like they are doing whether the next step is a video game, whether the next step is action figures, whether the next step is four weekends a month instead of three, whether it is the test of hey Tuesday and Wednesday worked maybe we should start thinking Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday instead of Friday/Saturday.”