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RAW Magazine - Home To Roost - February 2001
By Keith Elliot Greenburg
RAW Magazine
Home To Roost
Raven Returns to the Federation a New Man
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"The road less travelled by ..." Raven begins, before staring at some far-off spot and recalling the odyssey that led him to the World Wrestling Federation for the second time in his career, "I think I was the only traveller on it."
He started out in Philadelphia, the son of a newspaperman, and wound his way around wrestling's old territory system - stopping once in Stamford, Connecticut, and adopting the name Johnny Polo - before continuing his journey. As Raven - the name he made famous in Extreme Championship Wrestling [ECW] - he returned to the place of his birth at September's Unforgiven pay-per-view. He had always planned to return to the World Wrestling Federation, but demons stood in his path. Now, finally sober - and, by his estimation, mentally sound - the man born as Scott Levy feels equipped to give back to the business that made him into a cult figure.
"The Raven character is very cathartic to me," he says, "All the childhood angst, all the anger I've carried can be released in the ring and on television. It's really very healthy, much healthier than beating some guy up in a bar."
More than ever before, he seems in touch with himself, and the role Raven and his other personas have played in his life: "Art imitates life. All the names I've used in my career - Johnny Polo, Scotty The Body, Scotty Flamingo - came about because I craved attention, attention I never received as a child. I had to be loud, obnoxious, and flamboyant in order to get people to look at me."
His earliest memories of emptiness and longing are routed in West Palm Beach, Florida, where the Levy family moved after Philadelphia. His father worked for the National Enquirer, but according to Raven, appeared more interested in examining the lives of his interview subjects than those of his family members.
"He was not an affectionate man," Raven claims. "I think the first time he told me he loved me I was 23 or 24, and that was right after I wrote him a letter decrying my emotionless childhood. If we went out to dinner, he talked more to the people at the next table than he did to us. He was a reporter and wanted to know about the man on the street and what he thought about the world. But he drove me nuts, because he didn't seem to care about what I thought. You know, 'What about me? What about Raven?'"
Like so many teens lookin for an outlet for their frustrations, Levy lost himself in the world of sports-enteratinment. While studying criminal justice at the University of Delaware, he became smitten with the Universal Wrestling Federation [UWF]. The broadcasts originated in Oklahoma, and featured Cowboy Bill Watts as the law-and-order promoter, Jim Ross at the announcer's table and the fabulous Freebirds - featuring current Federation official Michael "P.S." Hayes - as the preeminent tag team.
"He was the coolest," Raven says. "I wanted to be Michael 'P.S.' Hayes. He was a heel, but one with character and depth. I certainly didn't want to be a standard white-meat babyface. There's no flavor to that. Michael Hayes and the Freebirds were three-dimensional. They were more than wrestlers. They were an act."
It was during this period that Levy returned to Florida to visit his family and decided to attend a Miami Dolphins football game with his friends. The group made a gigantic sign on a sheet, planted themselves at a conspicuous spot in the stadium and waited for the television cameras to zoom in on them. "I'm thinking to myself, 'Why am I trying this hard to be on TV?'" Raven says, "Obviously, I'm missing something in my mental stability for me to need that kind of adulation, to feel that people I've never even met care for me.' And so I realized that if I was so adamant about being on TV for just one second, I should probably explore being on television as a career."
A short time later, he began training at former World Wrestling Federation journeyman Larry Sharpe's New Jersey training school, the Monster Factory.
When he finished there in the late 1980's, wrestling's time-worn regional system - consistin of a gentlemen's agreement between promoters to divide North America into territories - was in it's final hour, with the World Wrestling Federation and rival World Championship Wrestling [WCW] enveloping the continent. Raven calls himself the last World Wrestling Federation newcomer to come out of the territories, a fresh face who still remembers bouncing from promotion to promotion, and acquiring different skills in each one.
In Memphis, he began calling himself Scotty the Body: "I was a big mark for Jesse 'The Body' Ventura, and it rhymed. And the joke was on everybody else. I was decently built, but not spectacularly built. I thought that as a heel, [my build] would attract heat. The funny thing was that the boys would say, 'You're not that big.' Duh! That's the gimmick. Then years later, they're like, 'Man, do you remember when you were really built when you were Scotty The Body.' It's amazing how time has colored history."
In Portland, Oregon, Scotty the Body worked for Don Owen, an ancient man alleged to have been in the business since Lewis & Clark wandered into the Pacific Northwest. "He was this insane crackpot," Levy says, "But I worked with some great guys like Steve Doll and Art Barr. And the booker was Len Denton, who went by the ring name, 'The Grappler.' He had a brilliant mind and taught me so much. I was going 12 to 18 minutes, bell-to-bell, every night and really learned how to work."
"I also learned how to listen to the crowd. Some guys just go out there and do what they want to do, whether the crowd cares or not. I learned to read what the crowd wanted. If you don't, you're doing them and yourself a disservice - especially when they act indifferent toward you."
When Levy switched to the Atlanta-based Global promotion, he became Scott Anthony, a cocky character similar to Scotty the Body. During his first stint in WCW, he called himself Scotty Flamingo, a name partly inspired by the film The Flamingo Kid, about a charming rogue working at a pool club.
In 1993, spoiled child of leisure Johnny Polo debuted as a manager in the World Wrestling Federation, and led the Quebecers to the tag team title. Fans were largely indifferent to Polo's character, but the organization was impressed enough by Scott Levy's creative mind to give him a second job as a television producer. The World Wrestling Federation had yet to cultivate its rebel "Attitude."
"I had an office on the executive floor," Raven says. "I'd be in my leather and jeans, and have to put on my shirt and tie when I got to work. But as soon as the workday was over, I'd go back to the leather and jeans. So the character I am today is not a work. This character is a shoot."
Tired of office life, Levy moved on. "I've always wanted to return to the World Wrestling Federation," he says. "But I know that I had leave if I ever wanted to come back. I thought about who I really was and the character of Raven rose from Johnny Polo's ashes."
Raven was introduced to the wrestling public in ECW, which at the time was revolutionizing the business with outrageous stunts that most of sports-entertainment had yet to try. Raven began his address to ECW fans by laundry-listing the names of his prior characters - breaking the long-held prohibition of mentioning performers' past identities. "I felt I couldn't just be a new character when the fans knew about all the other roles I played," Raven recounts, "I didn't want to insult their intelligence the way other wrestling promotions had before. I told them, 'You know me by these other names, but this is who I really am.' Then I never brouht up the subject again."
While ECW - which recorded most of it's programming at a Philadelphia bingo parlor - didn't command attention like the World Wrestling Federation did, the organization had a devoted following. The more unusual Raven behaved, the more he was appreciated by ECW's crowd. He soon found himself sharing a dressing room with Tazz, whose violent style of combat was consistent with what ECW's audience demanded.
"We actually hated each other in ECW," Raven says. "Tazz thought he carried the promotion, when everyone knows that I did."
But as celebrated as Raven's ECW tenure was, it was simply a long stop on his return to the World Wrestling Federation. He bounced back to WCW , heading a collection of outcasts known as Raven's Flock, followed by another run in ECW. Then - after a public feud with ECW owner Paul Heyman - Raven decided to remedy a condition that could have easily turned him into another tragic statistic.
"I was an alcoholic and a pill addict," he concedes. "And I cracked up. Everything that oocurred in my childhood finally caught up with me. I kept pushing it away and finally it overwhelmed me. I ended up in rehab. I wasn't ready to do it before. But I'd changed - I wanted to be sober. I cleared my head and now I never want to go back. That's why I know this is permanent."
Raven was finally ready for the World Wrestling Federation. But the Federation wasn't sure if it was ready for him.
"I was a recovering addict," he says. "The quality of my work was never in question. But I'd had problems with Paul [Heyman] and Eric [former WCW boss Eric Bischoff]. So had a lot of guys, but not the same problems I did. So the Federation asked around. They went to my friends like Chris Benoit and Chris Jericho and questioned them. From what I understand, they said, 'If he's clean, you have to hire him. If he isn't, don't - because we don't want to see him as a mess.' Frankly, I would have taken nothing. I'm just grateful to have a chance to really prove what I can do when I'm clean and sober"
Last year, Raven made his comeback. The choice of venue was deliberate: the First Union Center in Philadelphia - the city of his birth, and the place he'd received his greatest acclaim in ECW. Taz was tangling with Jerry 'The King' Lawler in a strap match at Unforgiven when Raven interfered, aiding his former ECW cohort by delivering a DDT to the royal Tennessean.
The crowd went wild, and Raven and Tazz became tag team partners for a while. But, just as fans were beginning to think of them as a unit, the two tuned on each other. Today, Raven is at the top of his game, working for the organization of his choosing, and taking turns slamming his old friend on the ringside steps and through tables.
"I like wrestling Tazz," he confesses, "and, even when I'm not wrestling him, I enjoy watching him work. He's a funny guy - for such a miserable bastard."
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