Wrestling — An Adult Fan’s Perspective
There comes a time in every boy’s life when they are an utter devotee of wrestling. For me and my year group, it hit us when 10 years old. The World Wrestling Federation (WWF) was aired through Sky, then a brand new offering compared to the four-channel TV we had known all our lives. (Channel 4 started in 1982, when I was 3). Only parents with disposable income had Sky, which ruled out most of us. So, naturally, the boys with access to Sky were hugely envied and their VHS tapes of the WWF events became instant goldust.
This was long before Sky Sports News and Transfer Window Countdowns and football oligarchs, when teams of British players (paid a good wage for a working man) played before unglamorous rows of spartan terracing. When sport on TV mostly meant darts and snooker, as sponsored by cigarette companies. And when, on Saturdays, men would crowd round the TV shops in shopping centres to see the live scores on Teletext.
Sure, there were the highlights on Saturday night, and the odd live European or cup game — but that was it. So to see the magnificent spectacle of the WWF, with its superhero competitors and death-or-glory passion and hyped-to-the-nines fans, was new and incredibly exciting. Football, for all the feeling and meaning with which we imbued it, could be an elevated boredom. Obdurate opponents, pitches like the trenches, hard leather balls, narrow football boots that always seemed to slice a kick: it was hard to string a move together. More often the ball went hither and yon and you chased after it, your opposing man (because we always, always played 4–4–2) haring down on you, and you tried to pass to a team-mate (yelling “I’M OPEN!” and flinging their arms up) while between three defenders ready to hoof it far from goal (bellowing “AWAY!”).
But the WWF offered instant gratification. How could it not? Look at the size of the wrestlers! There were the Ultimate Warrior,
the British Bulldog, and The Warlord, steroid muscle-monsters with gargantuan strength and outsized egos. There were expert ring technicians like Brett “Hitman” Hart and Mr Perfect, there were high-flying ariel experts like “Macho Man” Randy Savage and Superfly Jimmy Snuka, leaping from the top ropes like incredible jumping beans. There were comedic duos like The Bushwhackers and The Bolsheviks. There were dastardly baddies like Rick “The Model” Martel and “Ravishing” Rick Rude, savage freakish baddies like Demolition,
goonish baddies like Dino Bravo and Honky Tonk Man, and huge towering baddies like Andre The Giant and Earthquake. And there were heroic good guys like the Big Boss Man, Dusty Rhodes, Hacksaw Jim Duggan (with his two-by-four — whatever that was) and of course the all-American hero Hulk Hogan.
Put them together and watch the sparks fly!
The wrestling fever grew as our exposure to the content increased. Some boys managed to buy the actual tapes of the WWF pay-per-views: Wrestlemania, of course, but also the Royal Rumble, Summer Slam and Survivor Series. Not just VHS recordings but the actual official releases — with the glamour of being expensive and difficult to obtain. Gold dust! Then there was the WWF magazine. I had the pocket money to buy one magazine a week, so usually bought Kerrang!, a weekly dedicated to (of course) heavy metal, but several boys in my class bought the monthly WF Magazine. Yet something about it almost immediately repelled me. When it mentioned the wrestlers, some, such as Hulk Hogan, would have © after each mention of their name. Their very names were copyright, like cartoon characters. It was all pretend, I realised — and as Gary says in Weird Science: “Don’t mess with the fantasy”.
It’s hard to say now how much we believed in it all. I think we largely did. The fights were stupendous spectacles of physical prowess and bravery and manoeuvres and evil cheating and huge glory, so it basically didn’t matter. It was simply thrilling. Naturally we tried the moves in the playground. We instinctively knew the Legion of Doom’s finisher (someone given a shoulder-high, then clothes-lined onto the floor) was too dangerous.
There was a good chance you could land on your head and break your neck. But you could do the Demolition Decapitation: one partner holds a victim horizontally on their knee, then the other leaps and gives them an elbow across their neck. You really just hit them with your armpit, which cushioned any impact. So that was alright.
Other moves, like the Boston Crab, depended on how much pressure you used, while others, like the Perfect Plex, didn’t hurt at all beyond the impact on your back. Sometimes we’d wrestle on Barry’s mum’s bed while she worked (after moving all blankets and pillows onto the floor, lest we hurt ourselves), slamming each other with suplexes, splashes, clotheslines and elbows, after strutting in the room to our favourite wrestler’s music. It was great fun. We weren’t big enough to hurt each other.
Disillusion came through a variety of reasons. For me, the first crack in the wall was the copyright symbol, which made it clear how the wrestlers were characters. Next was when Jake The Snake (a long-term fan favourite) turned heel. (Or baddy, in our juvenile lexicon). It was built up and explained in the WF Magazine I read (no doubt borrowed): Jake knew too much dark secrets, he had walked the dark path for too long until he was drawn into the dark side, he was like a snake, cold and secretive: not a warm righteous heroic superstar wrestler. (George Lucas was probably watching and recycled the idea for Revenge of the Sith).
It was a decent piece of characterisation and development — with his rasping voice and intense air Jake was a great heel — but even then the shift struck me as artificial. The suspension of belief started to evaporate. It was the same with the Macho Man Randy Savage — his face (or goody) turn about the same time felt clearly staged. I understand now why the WWF changes things about: it keeps the dynamics fresh, and most fans have a short period as devoted enthusiasts, so there needs to be change for the hardy perennial performers, otherwise they’d be feuding the same old rivals. But these were clearly staged, scripted events. And if that’s what the WWF was really delivering, then it was just contrived bullshit. And so my fandom was extinguished by the time I was 13.
And yet. Twenty-odd years later I started watching WWF again. I was drawn in by the Wikipedia page listing the terms of the business — check it out, it’s highly revealing — which led me to watch the old pay-per-views from my era of fandom, 1990 to 1992. It was funny seeing them in retrospect, through the eyes of an adult who can understand (maybe) what kind of a show they were trying to put on. At its essence, wrestling is about engaging the audience — about hooking fans through a performance and grabbing their emotions. And while, of course, the wins and losses are predetermined — the storyline nature of wrestling being known as kayfabe — very few matches are pre-scripted. Most of the time there’s a basic narrative, but the wrestlers call (tell each other) a few moves in a row, then agree what to do next. Macho Man was famous for meticulously planning his matches: his fight against Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat in Wrestlemania 3 is often lauded as one of the best ever. (It’s largely been surpassed, but in its swift execution and constant turnarounds, it moved wrestling beyond the lumbering dinosaur era. From then on, momentum, shifts and dynamics would be more important than disconnected big bumps — until Undertaker vs Mankind in 1998).
Likewise, the famous face-vs-face showdown of Hulk Hogan vs the Ultimate Warrior in Wrestlemania VI was closely choreographed — for two reasons. One: it was Warrior’s first main event, and his poor ring skills needed all the help they could get. (He looked incredible and had a brilliant entrance, though). Two: as it was two babyfaces matching off, the constant mirroring of each other’s moves, each the equal of the other, resulted in a match of unusually high drama.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfqV3xI8l_s
But usually the wrestlers will do a couple of moves, and then get into a clinch — a headlock or armlock, for example. This is called a rest hold, and lets them catch their breath and plan the next few moves. (You’ll notice, if you didn’t before, how the camera shifts so you can’t see them talking). But realising how it worked didn’t reduce my interest in what was going on. In fact, understanding how big those guys were, and how strong, and what extraordinary risks they were taking actually increased it. Far from being a silly overhyped spectacle, I now understand wrestling to be an enormously dangerous activity performed by enormously skilled athletes putting life and limb into their colleague’s hands. The wrestler they are performing with literally has their life in their care. The trust this engenders must be phenomenal. (Concomitantly, wrestlers have the right to refuse to work with others. Anyone who is stiff, resulting in genuine pain for their wrestling partner, will be shunned, leading to a decline in their professional fortunes).
Also, watching wrestling after my ‘era’ (about 1990–1992) showed how it had changed and developed. The WWF went into something of a slump after 1992, when a steroid scandal hit the corporation. Numerous top stars left, including lead babyface Hulk Hogan. WWF owner Vince McMahon tried to replicate Hulk’s previous success with a near facsimile Lex Luther — an all-American muscle-god, just like the Hulkster. But Lex had little of Hogan’s broad charisma and awesome ability to connect with the audience. (I’m not kidding. Watch his performances: few can project themselves in arenas holding 80,000 people as well as Hogan). And more broadly, the hugely muscled guys of 1990, like the British Bulldog, the Ultimate Warrior and The Warlord, were gone. McMahon pushed a younger generation of younger, nimbler wrestlers, particularly Bret Hart and Shaun Michaels (once in the face tag-team The Rockers, now playing an arrogant narcissistic heel), but also newcomers like the 1–2–3 Kid and Goldust, who was really the son of Dusty Rhodes given a new, provocatively (homo)sexualised gimmick. This upped the athleticism beyond what even Macho Man had achieved. For example Shaun Michaels’ “moonsault” was a backwards somersault from the top rope, initially landing on his opponents in the ring, and then developed to land on them outside the ring — or even to crash onto a commentator’s table outside the ring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l17Dg198ylE
When you see a stunt like that, it takes your breath away, so that the predetermination of the result just isn’t important. Is a play or film predetermined? Sure, but you admire the acting, the drama, the performances. So it is with wrestling.
Of course, the appeal is basic to the point of absurdity. There’s no room for subtlety when projecting to 60,000 people: everything has to be big, over-stated, gargantuan. Most wrestlers have an encompassing gimmick — a big-concept outlining of their character, with elemental characteristics (good or bad, heroic or dastardly, athletic or lumbering dinosaurs). And since the audience for wrestling is primarily, white suburban kids, these gimmicks must appeal to their prejudices. These are nationalist, racial, absurd, and yet effective in their own way. Bad News Brown was one of the few black wrestlers by 1990, and had the character of a New York hoodlum. The Headshrinkers were a pair of Samoan savages given to chewing on turkey legs. The Orient Express were stereotypical Japanese wrestlers given to fast moves and sneaky chops, with their manager Mr Fuji an egregious dastardly mastermind.
The Bolsheviks were idiotic targets, while the Bushwhackers were childlike Kiwis who appealed to the youngster in the audience. And during the first Gulf War, the WWF wrapped itself in the American flag, with Sgt Slaughter and General Adnan “Iraqi sympathisers”, and Hulk Hogan the glorious all-American hero setting the world to rights. The treatment of the women was equally simplistic, reducing them to either Madonnas (as with Miss Elizabeth) or Whores (such as Sensational Sherri).
It’s all juvenile stuff, simplified to the point of stupidity. The characters are living cliches, monumental stereotypes. But a wrestler needs to embody comprehensible characteristics in the most obvious ways. Without any gimmicks, the audience has little emotional involvement, and even the best moves result in near silence. Wrestlers must project and narrate, and for an individual to do so for 60,000 people it has to be through the broadest of gestures, both physically and emotionally. It’s Good vs Evil, Youth vs Experience, Local Heroes vs Foreign Villains, Arrogance vs Humility, Bravery vs Cowardice, Cheating vs Nobility, Size vs Dexterity —basic dichotomies, to be sure, but elemental. Just ask a deconstructionist.
What was most important to understanding the idea of wrestling as performance was seeing how the matches tried to put a story together. The traditional one, which served throughout the Hulk Hogan era, was the babyface taking on a monster heel (a big baddy, in other words: most famously Andre The Giant, but also Zeus, Earthquake, The Undertaker, etc). The face would start bravely and boldly, but run out of momentum, start taking huge amounts of punishment (“Is this the end?” commentators would say), then somehow miraculously recover to overcome gargantuan odds and deliver an immensely satisfying ending, with trademark finishers giving a sense of closure and completion. The 1990s, or the post-Hogan era, took some time to develop beyond this (though the Lex era attempted to replicate former glories). With Bret Hart as champion, main events were more technical than ever, and his matches against Shaun Michaels
and Owen Hart (his brother) are still lauded as some of the finest ever. But there was something just slightly lacking about Bret as a champion and figurehead. His matches while hugely skilful and always telling a story lacked the pizazz and dazzle of Hulk Hogan, Macho Man or even the Ultimate Warrior. Wrestling is above everything else a performance, not a contest.
This was however followed by the Attitude Era, which combined a darker, more aggressive and more sexualized style wit clever metafictional storylines pitting new star, antihero Stone Cold Steve Austin, against the WWF’s owner and CEO, Vince McMahon, who actually started taking part in matches when in his mid-50s, as the evil character “Mr McMahon”. (It’s extraordinary the amount of danger and physical punishment Vince McMahon was willing to run at that age — though this doesn’t forgive his notoriously shark-like running of the business). This harder edge meant that the new staggering athleticism was allied with (or complemented by) moves of breathtaking danger. The gold standard here is the famous Hell In A Cell match between The Undertaker and Mankind in 1998, with a steel mesh cage measuring 16 feet high placed over and around the ring. Early on, The Undertaker literally threw Mankind off the top to crash down onto the commentator’s table, which collapsed under him. He lay there stunned for around eight minutes, shoulder dislocated, people around him trying to establish if he was still alive.
https://youtu.be/9hMp65SzyTU?t=106
Anxious backstage staff and even Vince McMahon gathered round him, clearly genuinely concerned. Mankind was put on a stretcher and wheeled away — but then incredibly got up and continued the match. When both were again on top of the cage, Undertaker slammed Mankind down through the mesh (by now giving way) and onto the mat. This was perhaps less spectacular than the first bump but equally if not more dangerous. Mankind lay there, looking dead, and yet recovered again to see out the match — landing on thumb tacks he’d earlier spread out in the ring. It was brutal, heart-in-the-mouth, death-defying, electrifying stuff. McMahon told Mankind afterwards, “You have no idea how much I appreciate what you have just done for this company, but I never want to see anything like that again.”
Ironically, while Mankind was regaining consciousness, Undertaker was left simply standing there. It was like going back to old-school matches with huge immobile wrestlers slowly trading spots. But elsewhere other match forms were devised, such as the ladder match (initiated with astonishing moves and athleticism by Shawn Michaels and Razor Ramon in Wrestlemania X),
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXi2DPHBZD8
street fights and no-holds-barred fights, veteran matches (to retain the older audience), multiple weight divisions, a renascent women’s division (it had previously been faded out in about 1988), and so forth. Other metafictional devices occurred, as when Vince McMahon bought out the struggling WCW and its roster of wrestlers led “The Invasion”, pitting them against WWE (as it was by now) talent, and so forth, or when other wrestlers “won” ownership of WWE and McMahon had to “win” it back, or when he even wrestled against his daughter Stephanie (“over the direction of the SmackDown series”).
This brand expansion was clever, and demonstrates how the narrative mode of wrestling always needs to keep moving and changing, but the storytelling structure of individual matches has remained much the same: dastardly heels and righteous faces battling out the eternal struggle between good and evil. Yet what enthralls is not the result but the means. Wrestling is the sweet spot between remarkable physical performances and crude but effective storytelling. Of course, it is deeply silly. But then so is any sport or performance when looked at analytically. Grown men are basically play-fighting for our entertainment in wrestling - but that’s just looking at the externals. In matches huge men perform fantastic, death-defying stunts to give the illusion of extraordinary competitive matches, far beyond what any human could reasonably attempt. It goes, like stadium rock (a close cousin of the performative aspect of wrestling), beyond the human into something deep and mythical. These larger-than-life figures act out, at some primitive level, the notion of conflict and struggle. And it only becomes more entertaining when you realise how extraordinary what is happening in the ring. That’s the reality.