Of all the cultural landscapes lined up for this book, wrestling is guaranteed to be the least understood of all of them.
It's even quite possibly the lowest rung on anybody's cultural ladder of things you could find exciting (apart from porn maybe), and yet it continues to be the gift that keeps on giving as it re-frames its points of reference often enough to remain as important to me today as it was when I was first introduced to it 35 years ago. Man that makes me feel old.
I found out a few years ago that my mother once went out with a guy in the wrestling business. Sadly, the wrestling scene in North Wales in the late-sixties was not the same as that of the WWF (hereafter known by its new trading name: WWE) in the late-eighties. Indeed, she dated some guy who used to carry a spit bucket. This in itself sits fine with me. I understand that the alternative was either some kid who rode the bakers bicycle or somebody who could build a dry-stone wall.
My love affair began around 1973 when I was exposed on a weekly basis to the UK scene. For the next ten years or so, I was fascinated with the lifestyle I thought these guys lived. To me, this was the pinnacle of fame and ambition. Hey, I was seven years old when it began - most people probably don't realise that all you can ever aspire to in this life is what's visible on the ladder in front of you. I know there's a school of thought that says your heroes should be real people like your Dad or maybe an uncle but in the absence of anybody worthwhile to look up to, my mind sought out the highest denominator possible and like a beanstalk, in front of me it grew tall and strong.
I had it figured out pretty early on that the big names were normally the guys with the least talent and it amazes me today that people still accept this. The legends that are Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks (as this is the era we're talking about) proved this to be true week after week. Looking back, it's hard to see how captivating two behemoths running slowly at each other can actually be, but for a time, they were.
Inside of this Saturday afternoon televised show were two guys I couldn't get enough of: Marc 'Rollerball' Rocco and the immortal Kendo Nagasaki (though not I suspect, literally. If memory serves me correctly, he owns a chain of carpet stores somewhere in the Midlands). Rocco had massive amounts of talent as a technical wrestler and all the charisma he probably needed to take his career over to the States in search of the big money should he have chosen to. He could have made a bigger name for himself here at home if he had been a babyface (that would be a "good guy" for the uninitiated) but he made such a good heel (and that would be the "bad guy" term), that his whole demeanor would have been destroyed had he done so. Kendo Nagasaki on the other hand, possessed something else entirely.
Choosing to hide his face behind - you guessed it - a kendo mask, the first time I saw him I was sold on the entire concept. He was a bloody good wrestler too, one of the best but as anybody who has ever used a mask in their career will know, when you live by the mask, you die by the mask.
All of this did nothing to help me at school. See, I also learned from wrestling that when you're in a team, others can let you down heavily and you can lose, even when it's not your doing. Personally, I'm no stranger to losing but at least there's a certain nobility in screwing up on your own terms. When you like wrestling and choose to sing the praises of a slightly out of shape man in a mask, your teachers simply don't get it. I could have chosen a footballer, a rugby player or maybe a tennis hot-shot and any of those would have been OK with the gimps but alas, I was more likely to get lessons in how to bring down the Cuban Government than learn how to slap on a Full Nelson. Today - still - football is king and those who control the ball , control the top of the ladder, but there is a way out. You simply choose to be king of the gutter as opposed to the ladder in order to cultivate any kind of cultural survival mechanism at all.
In my year at school, as there was before and after my time in every school across the land, there were two guys that ruled said football ladder. They looked, acted and swore they were destined for the big time. All these years on, one of them still works in the DIY store that he worked in back then. He is around seven stone heavier than me and that's pretty much it for him I guess. The other had a couple of years on the B team of one of the better teams in the national league and now works in one of those "Hand Car Wash" franchises that have sprung up in every supermarket car park in the country. I like this story because, while I wouldn't have begrudged them any success at all - it would have made no difference to me whatsoever - I feel that it provides a light in the tunnel for anybody who is utterly shit at sports and persecuted by games teachers across the land for being so. Let's look at the facts here anyway - anybody who chooses to be a sports teacher at school obviously wasn't good enough to do the sport they loved for a living. This is why they make others lives into a living hell.
I digress. This affair with Saturday afternoon World of Sport wrestling lasted until they took it of the air. Some many years later, the ITV network began screening the WWE show "Superstars of Wrestling" at 4am. I had left home by this time and while I did have a television, it was the smallest TV in the world with an aerial that was little better than a stick stuck in the back of it. But some things are worth persisting with and I discovered that if I built a tower out of nearly all of my albums and books, then balanced the aerial on top, said Superstars of Wrestling was watchable - but I do use the term loosely. It did however give me an introduction into the likes of Curt Hennig and Bret Hart. It probably should have given me an introduction to Hulk Hogan as well but he was far too 'famous' and 'important' to appear on the weekly house shows. Go figure.
As the years went by, I made friends with others who were similarly culturally challenged, until eventually, the WWE cut through into the mainstream via the magic of BSkyB satellite and cable network. My dirty little secret was no longer culturally insignificant - over the following years we became a veritable army. At one point, it was the most culturally significant thing on the planet for no other reason than - love it or hate it - it was great for journalists to write about. There was always some scandal or other for a journalist to dip their pen into. Despite its mainstream popularity, I stuck with it (which is unlike me) because there was no alternative. Through thick and thin, scandal and bad business, I was by their side standing tall brandishing a foam finger at anybody who would listen.
Then one day, the penny I had put in the wrestling slot decided to pay out a jackpot...
On one of the first major UK tours they ever undertook, I thought I'd check it out in the flesh - and it was pretty hot. This was in the years when nobody was really sure if it was 'fake' or not. Knowing what I know now, despite its 'set-up' of storylines, it's more brutal than you could ever imagine. (When the lid was lifted on this, it got even better for me because then you had to consider how good these guys were at not hurting each other and how the hell some of the moves were worked out). For some reason on this particular evening, I had chosen to hit Birmingham instead of London. That's a cultural suicide in itself as I can honestly say that I despise Birmingham more than any other place on earth.
When the show was over, I found that I had missed the last coach home (the car had a hole in the exhaust the size of Texas), and with the next one being at 5am, I was faced with the prospect of walking around my least favourite city for the next six hours. If I had turned a different corner that night, we never would have met - Andre the Giant and I that is. Well, we never actually met but I saw him hobbling on his giant crutches through the lobby of a hotel I was passing by. Going inside for closer inspection, I discovered a couple of others minor wrestlers holed up in the bar. This was good enough for me, but with only enough money for one drink, my prospects of sitting the whole night out there were pretty damn slim...
It turned out to be the most revealing night I have ever spent anywhere. As I sat in this innocuous hotel bar trying my very best to be inconspicuous (which in this case - and this case alone - turned out to be remarkably easy), almost every single wrestler on that tour appeared over the course of the following hour.
With the exception of the Nasty Boys and Davey Boy Smith, who were the biggest dicks I've ever met, every single one of those insane gargantuans was a pleasure to meet, but I really could have lived without seeing the Undertaker in a tracksuit. Two people genuinely surprised me that night. The first was the Texas Tornado, Kerry Von Erich who, of his own free will, came and sat next to me and shot the breeze simply because he wanted to. We talked about nothing and everything. Classy. The other guy who knocked me out was Ric Flair, who offered to buy me a drink, asked if I'd enjoyed the show and was pretty humble all things considered. While the rest of the troupe wandered around in track suits, Ric had come down in a suit - it was most bizarre.
Whilst Ric Flair appears to have escaped the circus with his legend intact, Von Erich was not so fortunate. In 1986, he was involved in a motorcycle accident that almost killed him. The damage sustained to his foot was so bad that doctors amputated it. Wrestlers being the tenacious breed they are, he opted to continue his career with a prosthetic foot. Sadly, life was a bit too much for Kerry in the end and he shot himself in the heart. I find this incredibly sad for somebody who was capable of carrying in in the face of such odds. As a matter of further interest, two of his brothers, Mike and Chris, also committed suicide. They were wrestlers too.
Two things of interest here. Is there any other job in the world where so many people die before their time should be up? Of this particular line-up, over 50 percent of the people I met that night are now dead. Can you imagine if that was your place of work?
The list of wrestling casualties outside of that tour is simply phenomenal. Wrestlers are dangerous people to have as role models and heroes. Whilst Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks also died, their lives simply ran out because of their size. Indeed, I doubt whether anybody on the World of Sport roster could afford cocaine, let alone anabolic steroids and the seemingly endless list of painkillers that the WWF guys were toting.
To bring it into focus, let me elaborate on three icons of this once very private world. Lex Luger was the consummate underachiever. He was a man who could have had the world at his feet but the bottom line was a combination of being extremely dull and the fact that he didn't appear that he could be bothered. After something like his seventh run at the pot of gold, he got further into trouble and during the period 2003 to 2005, found himself involved in gun crime and DUI offences whilst his girlfriend - Miss Elizabeth, the kind of woman in whose mouth butter would be quite safe in - died from a lethal cocktail of pills for which he was charged with 14 drug possession counts. As so many of his peers have done, in 2006 he signed himself over to God and became a born again Christian. God, seemingly bored with the amount of them coming to see him for aid, had seen enough and in 2007 Luger suffered a nerve inpingement and wound up quadraplegic.
Most of this is not common knowledge, unlike the case of Chris Benoit, who after years of hard slog finally became a main event superstar of actual value. The guy is one of the top five technical wrestlers of all time. Nobody with an ounce of wrestling knowledge will disagree with this statement. He may even be the best wrestler ever. So what would make a man at the top of his game get up one day and decide to kill his wife and seven year old son and then hang himself? The well documented case of drug and steroid abuse aside, tests were eventually made on Benoit's brain by a neurosurgeon in West Virginia who stated "Benoits's brain was so severely damaged, it resembled the brain of an 85 year old Alzheimers patient." The actions and death of Chris Benoit was a real low point for me. The guy was the best of the best and I said so innumerable times to as many people who would care to listen. Not quite so bad as maybe finding out your hero is a child molester, but it's not that far off either.
The saddest story of all though was told to me by Bret Hart at a hotel in Chelsea one morning. Despite Bret's brother Owen dying in the ring in the most obscene circumstances, he looked genuinely sad when he told of the death of Ray Traylor - better known as the Big Bossman - who simply sat down on a sofa. When his wife returned to the room moments later, she simply found him sitting there, dead.
These stories are the tip of a huge iceberg. For a sport that is as "fixed" as it is, it sure isn't "fixed" very well or securely but still, whenever I say those immortal words "I like wrestling", I get "the look" closely followed by thw words "Big Daddy!" and/or "Hulk Hogan!" - which is a bit like somebody saying they like football and me shouting "George Best!" and "1966 - what a year!", ie: fucking stupid.
So, wrestling is a hard life - the rewards can be incredible but the price some pay is way beyond reasonable. In fact, for a sport with relatively few athletes performing professionally, a quick Google search on the subject reveals the number of pros to die since 1985 and before the age of 60 is 88. Can you imagine the same relative statistics in football? Out of those 88, 41 of them died before they had even hit 40 - all in the name of what? Entertainment?
We've has come a long way since the days of the spit bucket story. Apart from the obvious here, it's a part of what I genuinely find appealing about wrestling - you never quite know what's about to happen next, which really is saying something about the most predetermined sport in the world. Could opera survive these killing blows? Tennis? Theatre? No, I don't think so, but despite most of the players in the wrestling game willing to put their lives (willingly or not) on the line every night of the year, why do I still feel like a cultural fraud?
Is singing in Italian at a volume dogs run away from really a more valuable cultural skill than delivering a Hurricanrana off the top rope? Is cricket really a better sport? It has no right to lord it over another sport like it does because at it's base level, anybody can play it. At best, it's a game of hitting a ball with a stick of wood. I never once got chosen first to play rugby or football, but in cricket you can get a game every time! Anybody can stand far away from the action and maybe catch a ball.
Admittedly, that bowling technique is hard as nails but so is slipping on a figure four leglock without getting the legs mixed up.
Next: Chapter 2: The Smoking Gun
Posting 25th May
Footnote: please feel free to leave comments, factual errors, report typos etc. Anything that will sharpen this up is much appreciated.
