Slouching Toward Bethlehem
“Let me ask you something,” said Joe Joe Russello, Jr., age eleven,
interrupting a conversation I was having with his father. “How can you
write a book on something you don’t know shit about?”
“Well …” I started.
“Because either you got the balls of a fucking lion, asking a bunch of
bullshit questions,” he said, jabbing a finger in my face as his father
looked on proudly, “or you’ve got problems.”
Joe Joe had a point. Sitting in my Manhattan apartment, I had developed a
lot of fancy theories about professional wrestling. I had gone to quite a
few shows, yet always in the same spirit I had crashing debutante balls,
cult gatherings, and Ku Klux Klan marches – to smirk and sneer. Channel
surfing, I’d stop on the wrestling broadcasts long enough to feel
superior. Maybe I just didn’t get it, though. Those tribal rituals you see
on PBS, where swaybacked savages dance about shamelessly naked, have
always seemed pretty ridiculous, too. There was that reverent voice-over,
however, explaining how the seeming imbecilities of the tribal rite
contained and communicated everything that mattered to its culture.
Perhaps professional wrestling was a story that we, too, were telling
ourselves about ourselves.
At the very least it was a popular story. In 2001, at the height of its
recent resurgence, nearly 15 percent of the population considered
themselves fans, and the industry was making more than $450 million a
year. Finding renewed interest every five or ten years, pro wrestling has
been a mainstay of American popular culture for over a century. It wasn’t
quite the cult phenomenon it had been in 1985, when Cyndi Lauper,
Liberace, and Robert Goulet made appearances at the first WrestleMania at
New York’s Madison Square Garden, or that it was in 1987, for WrestleMania
III, when the Pontiac Silverdome in Detriot hosted the largest indoor
gathering in the history of the human race, at least according to
organizers. And despite the energetic marketing of stars like Stone Cold
Steve Austin and The Rock, no rivalry yet equaled the 1911 fight in
Chicago’s Comiskey Park between Frank Gotch and George Hackenschmidt – a
front-page story across the country. But in a brave new world of dot-coms,
instant global communications, and human cloning, the premodern throwback
of wrestling was once again a force to be reckoned with, and its fans
could no longer be dismissed as credulous bumpkins caught up in vaguely
pornographic pleasures. They now constituted a formidable demographic. “We
are the voice of the people,” said Linda McMahon, chief executive officer
of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). Coming up on the 2000 presidential
election, Linda’s husband, Vince McMahon, Jr., was telling his followers
that they, “the average wrestling fan,” would elect the next president of
the United States. And the thing is, he was not completely wrong.
That wasn’t wrestling’s only relevance to politics. As far as I could
tell, both were part and parcel of the same culture of unreality. To
reckon with wrestling, in other words, was to reckon with our cultural
pathologies in a time of extravagant public inanity.
It was in that environment that millions of young men, in an effort to
understand what success and masculinity were all about in America, turned
to the culture’s most grotesque example of ego and ambition. What they
learned wasn’t always very encouraging. With an abundance of enthusiasm,
boys set out to reinvent themselves as models of manliness. They hoped to
defeat insecurities, discover forgotten powers, and show the world they
mattered. A few succeeded, rather spectacularly. But all too often the
journey led to new insecurities, new fears. Getting caught up in the swirl
of celebrity and status, they fell into some disorienting ironies. To
prove their strength, they played the victim. To seem macho, they became
dandies. To assert their heterosexuality, they acted out homoerotic skits.
The fact that all these ironies were right there on the surface and yet
could be acknowledged only in the most roundabout way was what made the
spectacle so fascinating. But it was also what made wrestling so
bewildering, for the wrestlers especially.
I wanted to try to untangle that confusion. First, though, I had to
understand why wrestling meant so much to so many people. What did it say
to them? What did it say for them? And what did it say about the rest of
us?
My first serious attempts to find out were not successful. For a couple of
weeks I followed Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling (WCW) around
the state of Texas. I went to shows in Amarillo, Abilene, Waco, Beaumont,
Houston, and San Padre Island – at least, I’m pretty sure I did. My
travels in Texas are now a blur, but, alas, not of the debauched
drugs-and-hookers, fear-and-loathing variety. It was a blur of
dumbfounding boredom. Whether it was a house show or a television taping,
every match repeated the same undifferentiated routine. Wrestlers made
their self-important entrances, threw each other around in a kind of
bullying ballet until they and the referee perfunctorily brought the
acrobatics to a summary conclusion, at which point they would leave the
ring either exultant or shamefaced. Watching on TV, you at least had the
benefit of histrionic ringside announcers injecting the antics full of
dire meaning. Live, it all just seemed an elaborate demonstration of
pointlessness.
Long after I left Texas, though, I found myself thinking about the fans I
had met. Fans like Frenchie, an elderly convenience-store clerk, and his
young girlfriend, Dee, a nude dancer at Cloud Nine Cabaret; Melanie and
Ryan Bernard, ages nineteen and twenty-one, who, instead of exchanging
rings at their recent wedding, exchanged those bright and brassy belts
that wrestlers wore; the middle-aged brother and sister who brought a
poodle to a show, saying it was their daughter; and Bernice and Beulah,
the pleasantly plump spinster sisters in matching appliqué sweatshirts,
who maintained a website in memory of fellow Texan and former National
Wrestling Alliance champion Kerry Von Erich.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Slaphappy
by Thomas Hackett Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Ecco
ISBN: 0-06-019829-X
