There is no art form more intrinsically and blatantly American — in its casual violence, its bombastic braggadocio, its virulent jingoism, its populist defiance of respectability, and its intermittently awe – inspiring beauty — than professional wrestling. This lucrative enterprise is not a legitimate competition, but it is indisputably an expression of creativity. Its practitioners have a time – worn saying: “This ain’t ballet.” But it’s not that far from ballet: a kinetic method of storytelling, one that requires tremendous skill (and physical pain) to perform.
Although a wrestling match is infinitely customizable, the typical setup is as familiar as apple pie. Two wrestlers enter a raised square platform — the ring. Its floor is made of canvas and foam, stretched so tight that it looks like a hard surface but, in reality, left loose enough that it acts as a kind of weak trampoline. At each corner are metal ring posts, with thick elastic cords stretched around them. The wrestlers tussle inside the ring, grabbing each other for semi – choreographed, semi – improvised attacks, flips, and falls (“bumps”) that require cooperation and mutual expertise to execute. If the match isn’t scripted as a draw for one reason or another, one of the wrestlers “wins” by either pressing their opponent’s shoulders to the canvas until a referee counts to three (a “pin”), or by putting their opponent in enough fictional — or at least exaggerated — pain that they give up (a “submission”).
There are, broadly speaking, two roles wrestlers can play in the ring: that of the face and that of the heel . “Face” is short for “babyface”: the innocent, unblemished hero. The etymology of “heel” is more complicated, but one theory holds that the term has its roots in the Hebrew Bible, where Jacob grabbed his brother Esau’s heel during their birth in an attempt to come out first and steal his twin’s birthright.
Traditionally, fans are supposed to root for the face. But in wrestling — as is the case in much of the best fiction — the good guy isn’t necessarily the protagonist. Just as important, and sometimes more so, is the heel, the one who seeks to get ahead through malice, who feeds off the hatred of the crowd, and who often gains the upper hand at the match’s end, breaking the hearts of all who want to see justice done.
* pro wrestling, with all its spectacle, is a lie — but that the lie encodes a deeper truth, discernible to those few who know how to look beyond what’s in front of them. To those fans adept in reading the signs, another narrative emerges, and another beyond that. Suddenly, the pleasure of watching a match has less to do with who wins than with the excitement of decoding it.
Maybe a heel gets caught in a sex scandal, or is accused of beating his girlfriend; no matter, just have him own it as part of his gimmick. The fans may be offended by his continued presence on their screens, but their offense can only make him more successful — and there will always be those who respect him, even like him, for his “honesty” about his vices.
Neokayfabe exists in the tension not just between fantasy and reality, but also between revulsion and attraction, honor and hedonism, irony and earnestness.
* Vince is likely the closest thing to a friend that Donald Trump has.
* On the all – too – common occasions when wrestlers die of wrestling – related causes — painkiller overdose, steroid – related organ failure, traumatic brain injury, in – ring snafu, and the like — the wrestling community has a tendency to write the deaths off as the cost of the lifestyle. Amid the grief, there’s a voice in the backs of fans’ and colleagues’ minds, telling them that the deceased knew what they were getting into when they sold their bodies to the Business. C’est la vie, c’est la guerre , the voice says.
But only a true sadist would assert that wrestlers’ dead wives and girlfriends had it coming.
* Informed government regulation of wrestling has never existed in America. There has never been a union for wrestlers. Wrestlers are not staffers; everything is freelance. There is no off – season. There is no employer – provided health insurance. The travel is relentless. In lieu of serious medical care, this physically grueling ecosystem has historically been a free – for – all of drink and drugs to ease the pain and bulk the body — all of it permitted by promoters. And the pay, as one might expect, is terrible in comparison to every other athletic industry of its size.
So, why bother? Here lies one of the grand, tragic ironies of wrestling: much like with ballet, in order to achieve success as a wrestler, you have to want it to a degree that is both inspiring and objectively unhealthy. You have to love it more than you love your own body and mind. Your love has to overcome your instincts for self – preservation, let alone self – interest. That love, once it burns, is hard to snuff out. It’s the love that comes from athletic achievement and the gratitude of the audience, yes, but it’s more than that.
“See, what a lot of people don’t understand is, once you step in that ring, you’re addicted,” is how a former WWF grappler named Princess Victoria (Vickie Otis) once put it. Those words could be comfortably placed in the mouth of any wrestler. There’s a particular chemistry, perhaps even a magic, in acting out a thrill – packed, physically exhausting pantomime of the human experience to thunderous cheers and boos. People talk about wrestling characters as successors to the flamboyant, archetypal gods of ancient myth. Imagine a job that lets you feel like Zeus.
* It was August 10, 1977, and [Terry] Bollea was slated to have his in – ring debut in Fort Myers. He was getting a ride to the venue from two established grapplers then working in Florida, Buddy Colt (Ron Read) and, more importantly, Quebecois import Pat Patterson (Pierre Clermont), who would later go to the WWF and become a key staffer. Patterson was openly gay, and has often been held up as a trailblazer for queer representation in the industry, especially since his 2020 death.
However, he was also an alleged sexual harasser.
“We got you in the car ’cause we’ve been chosen to initiate you tonight,” Patterson allegedly told Bollea.
The younger man was confused.
“Well,” came Patterson’s clarification, “we’ve got about a hundred and fifty miles to go, and before you get to the arena, you have to give one of us a blow job.”
The twenty – three – year – old Bollea protested: he wasn’t gay and had no desire to do anything like that. He hoped for a punch line, but the older Patterson and Colt looked and sounded deadly serious.
“I can’t do this,” Bollea told them. “This is fucked up.”
As is common for sexual harassment victims, he recalled feeling shame and terror: “I just wanted to wrestle, and they took advantage of how serious and focused I was,” he wrote. “They tortured me. It was the longest car ride of my life. On top of worrying about the match, how I’d do, if I’d look like a fool in front of a stadium full of people, they put this fear into me that they wouldn’t let me wrestle at all if I didn’t do this horrible thing.”
The car got to the parking lot. “Okay,” said one of the older men (Bollea didn’t specify which). “Since you didn’t give one of us a blow job before your match, we’re gonna have to tell all the other guys that you failed your initiation. So after your match, in the shower in the locker room, everybody’s gonna grab you and fuck you in the ass.”
Bollea laced up his boots and overcame his dread to execute his twenty – minute match against B. Brian Blair (Brian Leslie Blair), “and instead of basking in the moment of finishing my first match in this arena full of people, I’m only thinking about one thing: Now I’ve gotta go back in the dressing room and fight for my fucking life ,” he wrote. “I was shaking, practically bawling, thinking, I don’t want to be a wrestler anymore .”
As Bollea nervously opened the locker room door, he found all the wrestlers waiting with beers in their hands, shouting their congratulations at him for becoming one of them. It had all been a prank — a “rib,” in the parlance of the Boys, and not even a particularly extreme one, on the scale of how these men can treat each other. After this hazing ritual, “the other wrestlers stopped treating me like some dumb – ass kid. For a moment at least, they treated me like one of their own.”
But the trauma lingers: “I didn’t understand why they would do something like that,” Bollea wrote. “It’s still so weird to think about. Even now, it still upsets me.”
* Stossel just wanted to prove that wrestling was fake.
As the winter afternoon waned into evening on the 28th, the wrestlers arrived in the familiar MSG locker room. Among them was David Shults, who was putting his boots on when Vince arrived. As Shults later recounted, Vince told him, “Listen, we got a guy out here making a joke out of the business. I want you to go out and interview with him. Blast him. Tear his ass up. Stay in character, Dr. D.” Even if this dialogue never happened, it didn’t really need to — Shults, pro that he was, already knew that kayfabe had to be upheld at all costs. Protect the Business.
So Shults went out to talk with Stossel.
“Why are you called ‘Dr. D’?” Stossel asked Shults from behind the camera, the film crew’s bright lights casting a shadow onto the blank concrete behind Shults’s skull.
“Why not?” Shults replied, his eyes those of a killer. It went downhill from there.
Eventually, Stossel got to his point: “I think this is fake,” he said.
Later, Shults would recall the moment clearly, since it was the one that essentially led to the end of his career.
“Now, I’m thinkin’, Vince wanted me to stay in character ,” Shults would tell a reporter. “Dr. D would slap the hell out of somebody that said that.”
And so, in character, Shults growled, “You think it’s fake?” and slapped Stossel on his left ear so hard that he would successfully win money for hearing damage in a later lawsuit. Stossel dropped to the floor, gripping the side of his head.
“What’s that?” Shults asked. “Is that fake? Huh? What the hell’s wrong with ya?” Stossel rose to his feet. “That’s an open – hand slap, huh?” Shults said. “You think it’s fake, you son of a bitch?” He slapped Stossel on the right ear, knocking him down once again.
Stossel jumped back up, and he and his crew scrambled away down the hall. Shults went to the ring to wrestle.
