It’s not likely that many fans recognized Strongbow from his previous wrestling existence, as the distance was too great for any real cross-pollination of pro wrestling fandom. And there was no reason for his ethnic legitimacy to be called into question. If he looked Indian enough to the average fan, consider that he was duskier than many of the men who played Natives in Hollywood at that time. And Scarpa was working at some distance from his audience; from the eighteenth row, anybody with headdress, black hair, and schnoz would pass muster. Scarpa fit the bill.
Unlike the other ethnic groups portrayed positively in the WWWF in those days, there wasn’t exactly a Native American fanbase awaiting his arrival, but that wouldn’t mean he would be painted as a heel. With a predominantly white audience whooping their “Indian war cries” in support, Strongbow was a fan favorite from the start. Of course this was storytelling, but it can also be seen as an emerging sociopolitical recalibration; the Indian-as-villain trend had finally met its match in pop culture with the ascendance of the Indian-as-American-hero iconographical meme, though it’s debatable whether a positive stereotype is all that much better than a negative one. It was a pathos of uniquely American tribalism and burgeoning liberal apologia. Just as black performers like Junkyard Dog were becoming fan favorites seemingly in spite of their race, Strongbow was being embraced strictly because of his.
His feud with “Superstar” Billy Graham—the later vintage, evil-karate-enthusiast version—had echoes of Graham’s earlier battles with Wahoo McDaniel in the AWA, but it’s significant that Strongbow wasn’t strictly a cartoon, not any more than was Graham or anyone else on the roster. Though so much of his presentation was based in caricature—and though the usually restrained commentator Gorilla Monsoon (who once teamed with Strongbow) couldn’t resist saying things like “This is gonna be another great big feather in that bonnet that he wears if he can get a victory over ‘Superstar’ Billy Graham”—he was operating in a world of stereotype, of outsize mythic symbolism and representational politics. And Scarpa was a great performer.
In some quarters, Strongbow is purported (incorrectly) to have invented the sleeper hold, but he did nearly as much as McDaniel to popularize such stereotypical offensives as the Tomahawk Chop and the Indian Death Lock, a leg-lock in the figure-four family that was adopted by other mat technicians over time, such as Harley Race and Chris Benoit. His Tribal War Dance—the pain-shrugging preamble to the in-ring endgame—was the direct forebear of Hulk Hogan’s “Hulking Up.”
He epitomized the duality of the pro wrestling world as well as anybody of that time—outside of McDaniel: His feuds were cartoonish on the one hand and alarmingly violent on the other. He also was a notorious bleeder, being at various times busted open by villainous manager Captain Lou Albano (with a cast, with a trophy) and by any number of brass-knuckles-wielding baddies. When he eventually left WWWF for a time and traveled the territorial trail where McDaniel had gone before, he often worked a program wherein he would be attacked by the territory’s top heel and respond with a particularly vicious version of his sleeper hold. In Georgia Championship Wrestling—which aired on TBS and was the precursor, more or less, to WCW—Strongbow debuted to much acclaim and was immediately thrust into a violent feud with “Big Cat” Ernie Ladd, with whom he had previously tangled in WWWF.
In his later days, Strongbow would invest more fully in the tag team scene, an arena even more prone to ethnic generalization than was the singles division. In the early days, his grandeur was such that he was set alongside such literally/metaphorically enormous protagonists as the aforementioned Monsoon and Andre the Giant. But now he would partner with Sonny King to take the tag team titles from “Baron” Mikel Scicluna and “King” Curtis Iaukea, before they lost the belts to dastardly Orientals Mr. Fuji and “Professor” Toru Tanaka. His second tag title win was with partner Billy White Wolf, another on-screen Indian who was actually an Iraqi wrestler who would go on to some renown as Arab menace Sheik Adnan Al-Kaissie and later, during the infamous anti-American turn of Sgt. Slaughter, as his ostensible spiritual adviser, General Adnan. Strongbow later formed a more long-lasting duo with his “brother” Jules Strongbow to take on such foreign menaces as Mr. Fuji and Mr. Saito and, perhaps most poignantly, a new breed of untamed native being amalgamated into the American ethnic experiment: the Wild Samoans, Afa and Sika.
It is probably to the benefit of Native American pop-cultural portrayal that the Polynesian populace emerged as a new witch-doctory substratum, and it’s unfortunate for their replacements that thereupon the American expansion project more or less ended, and so the Samoan caricature is still to this day employed in pro wrestling circles as a race of unhinged prehistorics. (Their numbers, though, do include the success stories of those who escaped from the island’s ghetto: Yokozuna, the fake Japanese sumo, was Samoan, as is the Rock, on his mother’s side.)
This is the wrestling world in those days in a nutshell, though: If you were memorable at all, it was as either a transcendent star or an offensive caricature. It was the rare wrestler who could be retrofitted into a broad stereotype and be transcendent to boot. Wahoo McDaniel and Jay Strongbow were of this scarce breed.
In a sense, Strongbow’s racial inexactitude and McDaniel’s widespread success despite his overassociation with his ancestry were fitting; they were symbolic of an increasingly politically unsegregated America—a country where, despite continuing institutional racism toward African Americans (and segregationist policies toward Native Americans), the definition of “whiteness” was expanding rapidly to encompass the previously dispossessed Irishmen, Italians, and Eastern Europeans. If Native Americans weren’t exactly part of this suffrage movement, their adoption as part of American iconography is perhaps symptomatic of an increasingly open-armed (or guilt-ridden) America.
Neither character was politically correct, but then neither was particularly political. The Native American throughout American pop culture was a sort of egocentric parody, a sagacious mascot meant to rewrite our nation’s lineage through crass appropriation. To an extent, it worked. The types that Strongbow and McDaniel played weren’t noble savages condescendingly celebrated, but they were both noble and savage, and widely adored in a real, concrete way. White kids looked up to them just like McDaniel had looked up to Jim Thorpe all those years earlier. But they weren’t icons by virtue of their achievement; their achievement was dictated by their unequivocal iconography.
Toward the end of his life, McDaniel was profiled lovingly (again in Sports Illustrated) by Mike Shropshire: “Wahoo McDaniel,” the piece begins, “staggers as he attempts to negotiate the step up from the dining room into his kitchen.”* It was a humanization of a lifelong demigod. Even his wrestling-world cohorts lived in awe of him—really, there’s no other way to put it—both as an athlete and as a man. Even when he was alive, legends like Ric Flair and Dusty Rhodes would get nearly misty-eyed in simple recollection of Wahoo’s sense of humor or galling physicality.
It may not be possible to recount the facts of McDaniel’s life without hyperbole, but they’re grounded in memory: that his Little League team was coached by future president George Herbert Walker Bush,* or the time he ran thirty-six miles in six hours on a hundred-dollar bet, or the time he ate a vat of jalapeño peppers, or the time he and Flair wrestled 180 times in one year.*
But Strongbow’s life history is shrouded in uncertainty. Just as with the imprecision of his mother’s ethnic origin, so much else about Strongbow is only vaguely recorded. Upon his death, mainstream outlets restated his life with heretical imprecision; The New York Times, of all places, says that he was “at least 6 feet tall” and “about 250 pounds” (italics mine) and either seventy-nine or eighty-three years old—a fact that one would think could be established more or less definitively. That’s fitting, though; for the man who lived the lie so fully, so much reality is subsumed by fantasy. And so it goes with the Native American tradition in America, swallowed up who
le by the American mainstream, real history no match for the coarse simplicity of pop culture.
The only intercession of reality into the Chief Wahoo mythos was human mortality. In a telephone interview with Slam! Sports McDaniel grapples with the early deaths that had befallen so many of his wrestling colleagues. “I’m telling you, there’s been so many of them gone and died. A lot of my buddies have died,” McDaniel said. “It just seems like when all of them get over 55, between 55 and 60, it seems like ‘boom!’, they’re gone. I don’t know what it is.” He died a few years later of liver failure.
When Strongbow and McDaniel stood in the ring that night to anoint Tatanka, it was as if a rift in the pro wrestling space-time continuum had opened up, allowing these two mirror-image men to inhabit the same space at once. McDaniel looked ill at ease, but it’s unclear whether that was due to his failing health or his discomfort with the sketch’s tone, the sort he had bled so much to overcome in his career. Strongbow, though, was always at home in the WWF ring.
After he retired from active duty, he worked backstage as a WWF booker and was beloved by the next generation of wrestlers. He was a mentor to superstars including Hulk Hogan and Bret Hart. His most obvious protégé, of course, was Tatanka—real name: Chris Chavis—who was, it should be said, actually of the American Indian Lumbee tribe. Because, in the oddball world of pro wrestling, who better than a fake Native American to teach a real one how to act? As Scarpa said himself, one gimmick’s not any different than any other.
THE SPOILER: ANATOMY OF A CHARACTER ACTOR
The Territorial Era is filled not just with men in character but also men under literal masks: plain men who took to anonymity as a means of creating an aura of mystery or—more often than not—fear. The wrestling world has had its fair share of monsters, of ambiguously alien menaces, but nothing engenders in the audience such a direct response of loathing as the masked man. Perhaps it’s because the crowd knows the cue, knows the trope, and so knows they’re supposed to despise the disguised wrestler. Or perhaps it’s because, contra to the foreign wrestler or the monster heel, the fans know that, underneath the mask, he’s just a man, a human like you or me, and to see him act out such measures of villainy—that’s what’s really scary.
The first masked wrestler was likely a Frenchman named Theobaud Bauer who appeared, rather uncreatively, as the “Masked Wrestler” on the European circus circuit as early as the 1860s. (Bauer was also one of the pioneers of the man vs. bear match.) The first time a masked man made waves in America was in 1915, when a multinight international wrestling tournament was disrupted by the appearance of the “Masked Marvel,” a large hooded fellow who was sitting ominously in the audience and trumpeted by a manager who claimed he had been wrongly excluded from the card. The audience’s interest was piqued, and soon the Marvel had joined the tournament. (It was all staged, of course, and he had been on the payroll all along.) It’s a testament to the degree to which wrestling was taken seriously that at least two newspapers, The New York World and The Day, publicly identified the Marvel as Mort Henderson before the tournament was over. In the end, Gotch felled the Masked Marvel and won the tournament, but not before the enormous money-drawing potential of the mysterious masked villain was established.
Nobody embodied the masked nasty better than the Spoiler.
Don Jardine started his career in Canada as a straightforward babyface. Really—his ring name was “Babyface” Jardine. “Hey!” one imagines him shouting, desperate to get the fans’ attention. “Likable vanilla good guy over here!” It’s interesting that a guy like Jardine, who was big (6-foot-5 and nearly 300 pounds) and remarkably skilled in the ring, had to be packaged so artlessly. But while some might look at Jardine’s first persona and see a failure of creativity, it was only the first in a long line of simplistic, classical character types that Jardine would excel with through his career.
Five years later he debuted in Los Angeles, sporting a heavy black beard, as Butcher Jardine. On a trip through Texas, promoter Fritz Von Erich would put him under a mask and dub him the Spoiler. And the crowd, presumably, went wild. Soon he was back in California, wrestling in San Francisco under a mask as the Masked Enforcer #2.
It turns out Jardine preferred the anonymity that the mask could provide: “At least I could go on the streets and not have idiot fans calling me nasty names.” Under the mask, he played the Super Destroyer in Mid-Atlantic in the early ’70s and in the AWA in the latter part of the decade.
Along the way, Jardine would occasionally bring in tag team partners—among them were Ron Starr, Paul Vachon, Verne Siebert, Bobby Duncum, and Buddy Wolfe—who invariably wore identical masks and went by the name “Spoiler #2.” (In such instances, Jardine likewise appended “#1” to his name.)
In the ’80s, the Spoiler wrestled in Memphis’s CWA and again in the AWA. But it wasn’t Jardine—it was a journeyman named Frank Morrell. That’s the peril of anonymity in pro wrestling: When the world’s a fantasy and your face is under a mask, everybody knows you, but nobody knows who you are.
THE
WRESTLEMANIA
ERA
On December 27, 1983, at a taping in St. Louis, Missouri, a tubby middle-aged guy named Bill Dixon climbed into the ring. Dixon was a jobber* and fully looked the part, with his less-than-stylish goatee and moppy helmet of hair that stuck out so far from his head that it made him appear cartoonishly frightened to be there. That night, his fear could have been forgiven: His opponent was a statuesque, mahogany-tanned blond named Hulk Hogan.
This was the day that professional wrestling in its modern form began to take root.
In 1982, Vincent K. McMahon—referred to hereafter as just “Vince”—took control of the WWF from his father. Since he had first met his father at the age of twelve (Vince père had left the family when his son was an infant), Vince had dreamed of being part of the wrestling business; after graduating from college, he formally joined the WWWF and climbed the ranks over the next decade, working as both an announcer—a job he would maintain in various forms until 1997—and a promoter, first starting off in a small-time Maine operation and working his way up to an influential role within the company’s brain trust alongside old-time New York–area matchmaker Toots Mondt and monstrous wrestler turned avuncular announcer Gorilla Monsoon.
With Vince ensconced in the power structure, certain changes to the promotion’s format started becoming evident: The name, for one, was shortened from the WWWF to the WWF, and there was a subtle shift toward showbiz over substance in the in-ring product. The year 1975 saw the debut of “Superstar” Billy Graham, a performer so sui generis in his impact on today’s stars that it’s hard to comprehend how alien he would have seemed in the mid-’70s in a territory that had been dominated for almost a decade by Italian super-everyman Bruno Sammartino—the latest in a long line of ethnic stars in the immigrant-centric New York territory hierarchy—since he beat Buddy Rogers for the title soon after the WWWF seceded from the NWA. Graham was something entirely new: a jive-talking, tie-dye-wearing, bleached-blond bruiser whose wrestling prowess was minimal but whose physique was closer to his old workout buddy Arnold Schwarzenegger’s than Lou Thesz’s. When Graham won the heavyweight title from Sammartino on April 30, 1977, it was a triumph for the new breed of chemically enhanced grapplers; that he went on to hold the title for 296 days was a paradigm shift in the way the pro wrestling world told stories. It was at that point the longest reign ever by a bad guy in the WWF, and a larger anomaly in a sport where long reigns by heroes were the norm; villains were largely props used for the glorification of a babyface. Graham’s reign institutionalized the role of the dominant heel in the New York region and, moreover, created the persona of the “cool” heel, the bad guy whom some fans loved to hate and whom others just loved, full stop. Before Graham, it had been assumed that guys who looked like him—steroidally muscled, flamboyantly dressed—could only be positioned as villains, while the heroes wer
e mostly cast in the image of the common man. Graham eventually would lose the title in February 1978 to a corn-fed regular Joe named Bob Backlund, but the experiment had proved a success. It would inform the younger McMahon’s wrestling vision over the rest of his career.
In 1982, when Vince took over the WWF, he set about a plan of national domination, territorial system be damned. The popular version of the story is that Vince Sr.—who died in 1984—would have rolled over in his grave had he known about Vince’s visions of Manifest Destiny; this is not really borne out by the timeline or the facts, and is likely a simultaneous effort to preserve Vince Sr.’s reputation and to create the legend of Vince Jr. the Visionary.
One thing Vince did do that went against his father’s judgment, though, was to rehire Hulk Hogan. Hogan had worked in the WWWF in 1979 and ’80, as a bad guy.* When Hogan got cast in Rocky III, he had a falling-out with Vince Sr., who supposedly felt that the role would call into question wrestling’s legitimacy. So Hogan left for the AWA, where, capitalizing on his Hollywood celebrity, he worked as a hero, and where he struggled in vain for the championship, which was held (in storyline terms) by old-school baddie Nick Bockwinkel; in real-world terms, AWA owner Verne Gagne either didn’t think Hogan was championship material or didn’t think he needed to put the belt on him just yet, depending on who you listen to.
The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling Page 10