When it comes to tag teams in Extreme Championship Wrestling, there are icons like The Dudley Boyz and Sabu and Rob Van Dam as well as well-remembered teams like Mikey Whipwreck and Tajiri. But it’s easy to forget one of ECW’s most popular tag teams, the duo of Flyboy Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge, collectively known as The Public Enemy.
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Because they’re ultimately overshadowed by legends like the above — particularly The Dudleys — Public Enemy aren’t as well known these days. Let’s take a look at the collective career of Rock and Grunge, which includes several stints in WCW and an infamous WWE run.
10 Started As Rivals On The Indies
Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge didn’t grow up together, train together, or even start out as a tag team. Instead, they were both singles competitors, with Rocco Rock working as the masked Cheetah Kid and Johnny Grunge wrestling as Johnny Rotten.
The two had a couple of matches together, including a WWE tryout match and a run of matches on a tour of Austria and Germany. ECW boss Paul Heyman noticed that the two did great work together, so he decided to pair them up as a tag team.
9 Debuted In ECW
Inspired by a Newsweek article about youth in America that contained a quote about how they’re “more afraid of living than dying,” Paul Heyman devised the gimmick of what would be known as The Public Enemy: white guys who love hip hop culture.
Coming out to the reggae-infused hip hop track Here Comes The Hotstepper by Ini Kamoze, The Public Enemy were basically an ECW-flavored version of the dancing WWE babyface, except capable of brawling in hardcore matches. As a result, Rock and Grunge were ridiculously popular with ECW fans.
8 Rivals With The Gangstas
Mid-1995 brought the arrival of The Gangstas — Mustafa Saed and New Jack — who had a grittier gimmick playing off of west coast gangsta rap, and thus proved solid foils for Public Enemy. From there, they spent nearly two years brawling with one another.
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On their way out of ECW, The Public Enemy took on The Gangstas one last time — in a main event tag team street fight at House Party in January 1996. It was a wild match, with Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge coming out on top.
7 Four-Time ECW World Tag Team Champions
Flyboy Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge weren’t just a defining tag team in ECW — they were also a successful tag team as well. During their time with the promotion, The Public Enemy held the ECW World Tag Team Championship four times, their first run being a 174-day run that began in spring of 1994.
Notable opponents during their various tag team runs included not just The Gangstas, but also Cactus Jack and Mikey Whipwreck and Raven and Stevie Richards.
6 Involved In The Infamous ECW Chair Incident
There are a couple of iconic moments that happened during ECW’s existence that tend to always show up in respective videos, and The Public Enemy was involved in two of them.
The first was the infamous chair incident where Terry Funk asked the crowd for a chair, and myriad fans in the crowd threw their chairs in the ring, burying Rock and Grunge under them. On another occasion, the duo invited fans to join them in the ring to dance, and so many people entered that the ring collapsed.
5 Spent The Late 1990s In WCW
The year 1996 marked a major milestone in the career of Flyboy Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge, as The Public Enemy signed with a major promotion in WCW. The duo changed nothing about their gimmick, though they’d ultimately be overshadowed by major developments in the promotion, like the formation of the New World Order.
That said, The Public Enemy were still able to capture some gold in the company when they defeated Harlem Heat for the World Tag Team Championship in September 1996 for a brief eight-day reign.
4 Were In WWE For Two Months
In 1995, The Public Enemy wrestled a dark match against The Smoking Gunns for WWE, but ultimately turned down the company’s offer to sign with WCW instead. However, after leaving WCW they signed with WWE in 1999, and only stuck around in the promotion for about two months.
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Public Enemy’s brief WWE stint is one of the stranger ones, with reported backstage politics — as well as Rock and Grunge’s own reported unprofessional behavior — resulting in a weak run for the duo.
3 Beaten Down By The Acolytes
After an unsuccessful feud with The Brood, The Public Enemy experienced one of the more infamous moments of their career when they wrestled against The Acolytes — Farooq and Bradshaw, later known as JBL — on an episode of Sunday Night Heat.
Rumor has it that The Acolytes were tasked with punishing Rock and Grunge, so the result is a surprisingly stiff, one-sided beating of The Public Enemy at the hands of Farooq and Bradshaw. Public Enemy were gone shortly after this bout.
2 Returned To WCW In 1999
After the blink-and-you’ll-miss it WWE run came to an end, The Public Enemy found themselves back in WCW, just as the promotion was establishing a Hardcore division.
The duo made their first appearances as individual entrants in the Junkyard Invitational match at Bash at the Beach ‘99, which was won by Fit Finlay. From there, Rock and Grunge only made a few appearances in August 1999, including losses to the Insane Clown Posse and then Sid Vicious in a two-on-one handicap match.
1 Continued To Wrestle On The Indies
After all their major opportunities dried up, Flyboy Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge took their act to the independent scene, notably wrestling a handful of matches for ECW’s west coast rival, the controversial Xtreme Pro Wrestling.
Their other major stints included a run with the newly created X Wrestling Federation — founded by Jimmy Hart — and the short-lived Australian promotion, i-Generation Wrestling. Then, in 2002, Rocco Rock died of a heart attack, with Grunge following as a result of sleep apnea in 2006.
