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On this episode of Chewin’ The Fat with Chubby Dudley, Bay Ragni welcomes one of the true missing voices from the earliest days of Eastern Championship Wrestling: original ECW TV play-by-play announcer Jay “Six Pack” Sulli. After being largely out of the wrestling spotlight for decades, Jay sits down to talk about where he has been, how he ended up behind the ECW microphone, what he remembers from the early Cabrini College and ECW Arena days, and what it was like being a lifelong wrestling fan suddenly dropped into the middle of the Philly wrestling scene.
This is a tremendous conversation because Jay was not just an announcer who wandered into ECW. He was a real wrestling fan first. He grew up watching WWWF, going to Spectrum shows, taking trips to Madison Square Garden, following Mid-Atlantic while attending Virginia Tech, seeing wrestling at Cobo Hall, and later becoming part of the hardcore Philly fan scene around Joel Goodhart’s Tri-State Wrestling Alliance. That fan background shaped everything about how he saw ECW.
One of the best parts of this episode is hearing Jay explain how accidental his ECW announcing career really was. He was not hired through some formal process, and he was not trained for the role. He was a lifelong fan who happened to be there when the promotion needed someone, and because Steve Truitt (Stevie Wonderful) vouched for his voice and his wrestling knowledge, Jay suddenly found himself calling early ECW television.
The conversation also clears up a lot of long-standing mystery around Jay’s disappearance from the commentary desk. He explains that there was never some dramatic meeting where he was fired. Things just shifted. Paul Heyman came in, Joey Styles became the direction, and Jay simply moved from being the announcer to being one of the people with full access who still watched almost everything unfold from the best seat in the house.
Bay and Jay also spend a lot of time on the importance of the Philly wrestling scene before Extreme. Jay makes it clear that he loved the local guys and felt they deserved more credit. The discussion of Joel Goodhart, Johnny Hotbody, Tony Stetson, Larry Winters, DC Drake, Don E. Allen, Tommy Cairo, and the early ECW/Tri-State crew fits perfectly with the mission of Chewin’ The Fat: preserving the stories of the people who were there before the mythology took over.
The episode is also full of great fan history material. Jay was one of the people who went to shows, read the Observer, traveled to see wrestling, knew the regulars, and understood the culture from the fan side before he ever had a microphone in front of him. That makes his perspective unique. He was part announcer, part insider, part fan, and part eyewitness to one of the most important wrestling scenes of the 1990s.
For fans of early ECW, Tri-State Wrestling Alliance, Joel Goodhart’s Philly wrestling scene, and the forgotten voices and faces who helped build the atmosphere before ECW became a phenomenon, this is an important episode. Jay “Six Pack” Sulli finally tells his side, and it is funny, honest, surprising, and full of the kind of stories ECW fans have been waiting decades to hear.
