The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling

by Shoemaker, David

  Similarly, in 1988, a famous villain named the One Man Gang, who sported a mohawk and denim vest and generally looked and acted like a monstrous Hells Angel, was repackaged with minimal explanation as Akeem the African Dream, a white man of African descent who dressed in a dashiki and spoke in jive while sluicing his forearms through the air like a ’70s-movie pimp. This character too was supposed to be a joke aimed at Rhodes, who counts semiforgotten African American Sweet Daddy Siki among his greatest influences (Siki’s bleached-blond hair, “Siki strut,” and verbal style are direct precursors of Rhodes’s affect). Rhodes was raised in poverty in Texas and pegged his accent more on socioeconomics than race, but he was nonetheless the subject of racially charged ribbing, though, as with Virgil, targeting Rhodes was more a general shot across the bow at the Crockett promotion than anything. (That said, Rhodes once borrowed from the Junkyard Dog’s playbook by returning under a mask after he’d lost a Loser Leaves Town match.) Anyway, Akeem (whose real name was George Gray) suddenly was announced as being from “Deepest, Darkest Africa” (also Kamala’s land of origin) and was speaking in a parody of a parody of a “black accent.” Managed by Slick—who was known alternately as the “Jive Soul Bro” and the “Doctor of Style,” dressed in polyester suits and pageboy hats, and later became, in real life and exploited on-screen, a Reverend—the duo seemed to embody every sketchy African American stereotype in one middling act.

  If one perhaps thought that the introduction of a white African nationalist signaled some sort of postracial era of racial insensitivity, one would be wrong. When late–Territorial Era megastar “Black Superman” Tony Atlas came to the WWF in 1991, he was recast as tribal headhunter Saba Simba. (Atlas credited the Saba Simba character for rescuing him from poverty and saving his life, for whatever that’s worth.) The year 1992 saw the WWF debut of Papa Shango (real name: Charles Wright), a voodoo witch doctor who cast diabolical black-magic spells on his opponents. (Wright would later become even more famous as the Godfather, a wrestling pimp who came to the ring with a bevy of hookers and who implored everyone to take a ride on the “hoe train.”)

  When the famous WCW tag team Harlem Heat (made up of brothers Booker T and Stevie Ray), who had previously gone by the moniker the “Ebony Experience” in the GWF, came to WCW in 1993, they were originally presented as a pair of convicts who had been won in a card game by Col. Robert Parker, a Mark Twain villain of a wrestling manager, who came to the ring as if straight off the plantation, in off-white three-piece suits and a cowboy hat, chomping a cigar and demeaning his foes in a syrupy drawl. They tried out the gimmick at a couple of house shows, with Booker and Stevie in jumpsuits and leg shackles, before it was determined that this might be slightly offensive. In the end, Harlem Heat was presented sans Parker and sans chains, and the team became incredibly popular. Booker T went on to be a world champion in both WCW and WWE, which is a long way from cartoon slavery. Nonetheless, in 2003, while feuding with Booker T, Triple H called out Booker’s (legitimate) criminal past, referenced his “nappy” hair, and said that “people like [him]” couldn’t win championships in WWE and that they were just there to “dance” and “entertain” people.

  Even in the modern WWE, where the Rock’s numerous championship reigns were seen as evidence of a postracial wrestling world, there have been plentiful steps backward for every step forward. First black champ Ron Simmons was repackaged as a bad-guy black nationalist. Black gangsta and rapper personalities persist, from R-Truth to the tag team Cryme Tyme. When black wrestlers weren’t broad stereotypes, they were subtle ones, playing ominous thugs with hip-hop entrance music or slam poets with hip-hop entrance music or comic relief with hip-hop entrance music—or, in the case of Mark Henry at various points, all of the above.

  All of this does a disservice to the Latino wrestling experience. Stemming mostly from Mexico’s masked luchador history, Mexican wrestlers were introduced into the American wrestling mainstream as conquering heroes (or villains). Mil Máscaras—“the man of a thousand masks”—was a huge star in Mexico and parlayed that into a similar status in the American territories. But for many others, the Mexican style—lucha libre is what it’s called—didn’t translate. Luchadores couldn’t find opponents who could work well with them, and the traditional luchador masks were the stuff of villainy in the United States—and, moreover, crutches used by dull characters. That Mexican wrestlers have often come north without much of a grasp on English hasn’t helped their acceptance into the monologue-heavy American mainstream. The unadorned luchador was the Hispanic Noble Savage from Máscaras, on through the luchador bouts of those early days of WCW Monday Nitro. They were simple, but their portrayal was only offensive in its oddity. In a sense, this was a simpler time, and political correctness was buoyed by it. Once the dam opened, though, offensiveness poured out. As the wrestling promotions tried to integrate their Latino hires more fully by giving them characters—and, often, by removing their masks—they followed the rest of the history of racial identity in the wrestling world down the rabbit hole of straightforward racial stereotype. Before long, Konnan, a superstar in his home country, traded in his colorful tights for Dickies, a wifebeater, sunglasses, and a bandanna: the superhero devolving into a common street thug. It was a caricature we were unfortunately comfortable with. And that became the norm: A team of unmasked luchadores called the Mexicools were ferried to ringside on a riding lawnmower. Los Guerreros, two scions of a proud wrestling family, garnered their greatest fame by “lying, cheating, and stealing” and riding around in hydraulics-boosted cars.

  The Asian contingent followed a similar trajectory. They started off as simplistic devilish warriors and evolved over the years into concise stereotypes. The line between ethnic slur and Hollywood stereotype became increasingly indecipherable: Mr. Fuji’s bow tie and bowler begat a million deadly karate chops and judo kicks. In the late ’90s, a stable of established Japanese wrestlers called Kai En Tai, led by a flashy caricature named Yamaguchi-San, were embroiled in a feud with a wrestling porn star named Val Venis; their beef culminated in a scene where Yamaguchi attempted a castration via samurai sword while shouting “I choppy-choppy your pee-pee!” If the treatment of Latinos in modern pro wrestling has been driven by the perceptions of fearmongering news reports, the depiction of Asians has followed an out-of-date Hollywood template. It says a lot when you can look at such storylines and say, “At least the black wrestlers aren’t suffering this sort of indignity.”

  THE JUNKYARD DOG (SYLVESTER RITTER)

  WrestleMania I: the culmination of the feud between the Junkyard Dog and loathsome Intercontinental Champion Greg “The Hammer” Valentine. The ending of the match goes something like this: Valentine first wins by (illegally) propping his feet on the ropes to leverage JYD into a pin; imperturbable third-tier good guy Tito Santana comes to the ring to alert the referee to Valentine’s maleficence; the ref restarts the match; Valentine, seething, refuses to reenter; Valentine is counted out; JYD wins the match but, per the rules, doesn’t win the title belt. The crowd applauds JYD’s victory, tainted though it was, and JYD does his best to show his gratitude. So it would go for JYD—he was popular, very frequently victorious, but was never granted entrance to the promised land.

  This, for better or worse, is the way we remember the Junkyard Dog, a.k.a. Sylvester Ritter: operating successfully but basically ignobly, unable (or disallowed) to reach the highest level of the game. In retrospect, it’s too easy to dismiss the Junkyard Dog, either as a minstrel-style sideshow (the dancing, the ghetto affectation, the chains around his neck) or as a plain midcarder, a popular but unspectacular sidebar with no upward mobility. But his shtick and his persona made him as popular in the early days of the WWF as anyone save Hulk Hogan, and that’s without the merciless publicity machine that went into the Hulkster’s ascendance. And, if history is any indicator, JYD had already established himself as championship material.

  Sylvester Ritter played football at Fayetteville State
, and it’s often said he was drafted by the Packers, though there’s no record of it. After injuries ended his gridiron career, he turned to wrestling. Usually known as “Big Daddy Ritter,” he did stints in Jerry Jarrett’s Tennessee territory and in Stu Hart’s Stampede Wrestling before settling in at Mid-South Wrestling, where promoter Bill Watts gave him the persona that would make him famous. Running the show in a territory comprising Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, Watts would never be mistaken for a civil rights activist, but he was a businessman, and he knew that an African American wrestler could be a huge moneymaker. Borrowing a line from Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” Watts dubbed Ritter the Junkyard Dog—and, ever the literalist, gave him a dog collar and junk cart. The Sanford and Son reference was flagrant—Watts was borrowing clumsily from a limited knowledge of black culture—and the collar with (ahem) chain leash was borderline obscene. (That Ritter made such a racially charged accoutrement a staple of his later colorblind celebrity is evidence of his magnetism.)

  Prior to the 1960s, black wrestling—insofar as it existed—was almost entirely separate from the wrestling mainstream. Starting in its earlier days of legitimacy and continuing to the ’60s, wrestling was seen in some quarters as a white man’s sport, after boxing had been taken over by black fighters. But by the ’60s, so many sports were integrating that black wrestlers were inevitable, and what’s more, black audiences were beginning to come to wrestling shows in force.* The first major black stars were Bearcat Johnson and Bobo Brazil, and they were soon followed by the likes of Rocky Johnson* and Ernie Ladd, the San Diego Charger who moonlighted as a diabolical heel. It’s noteworthy that until the 1960s black wrestlers were almost always cast as good guys because the promoters worried that black villains would incite white fans to riot.

  From this inelegant tradition sprang the Junkyard Dog. Entering the ring to the thudding bass line of Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust,” JYD was soon the top babyface in the region, and his feuds with (mostly white) baddies quickly became the stuff of (local) legend. Unsurprisingly, the race issue was immediately at the forefront.

  JYD’s long grudge with Michael “P.S.” Hayes and the Fabulous Freebirds—who notoriously “blinded” JYD in the ring with (ahem) hair cream—culminated in a blindfold-and-dog-collar match (wherein both participants were blindfolded and bound together by a length of chain between two collars). Hayes didn’t hesitate to call JYD “boy” to solidify his wicked credentials.

  When Hayes pushed racial buttons, the audience read his racism mostly as an indicator of vileness and booed accordingly—his racism didn’t make him bad so much as he made the racism bad.* And, of course, JYD reacted justifiably. Even with the chains, what Junkyard Dog was doing was a sort of inversion of the racial stereotype act—and, moreover, a kind of artful integration-by-transposition in the world of pro wrestling. By playing up the antipathy inherent in racist sentiment, a wrestling storyline got the Southern audience to cheer for JYD because he was black.

  The Junkyard Dog’s rivalry with his former protégé Ted DiBiase would come to a head in a 1982 Loser Leaves Town match that JYD improbably lost. After all, it was much more common in those days for the bad guy to lose this sort of match as an explanation for his real-life decampment for another territory. When JYD lost, the fans were crushed, but their anguish was short-lived.

  There soon after appeared a masked man who was tall, thickset, black, and went by the name of Stagger Lee. Obviously, it was Ritter in disguise, and as would be expected, the crowd was thrilled, DiBiase was incensed, and the referees were oblivious.* The choice of the moniker “Stagger Lee” was particularly inspired, carrying with it deep mythic resonances. From Greil Marcus’s book Mystery Train:

  Somewhere, sometime, a murder took place: a man called Stack-a-lee—or Stacker Lee, Stagolee, or Staggerlee—shot a man called Billy Lyons—or Billy the Lion, or Billy the Liar. It is a story that black America has never tired of hearing and never stopped living out, like whites with their Westerns. Locked in the images of a thousand versions of the tale is an archetype that speaks to fantasies of casual violence and violent sex, lust and hatred, ease and mastery, a fantasy of style and steppin’ high. At a deeper level it is a fantasy of no-limits for a people who live within a labyrinth of limits every day of their lives, and who can transgress them only among themselves. It is both a portrait of that tough and vital character that everyone would like to be, and just another pointless, tawdry dance of death.

  Billy died for a five-dollar Stetson hat; because he beat Staggerlee in a card game, or a crap game; because Stack was cheating and Billy was fool enough to call him on it. It happened in Memphis around the turn of the century, in New Orleans in the twenties, in St. Louis in the 1880s. The style of the killing matters, though: Staggerlee shot Billy, in the words of a Johnny Cash song, just to watch him die.

  Over the years and by benefit of a widely recorded song,* Staggerlee became a symbol of a black man sticking it to the white establishment. Even to the mostly white crowds of Mid-South, this storyline played to great success. The black-white implications were melded with David vs. Goliath and Good vs. Evil symbolism. “Stagger Lee” was a signifier of a man fighting against all odds—and anyone can sympathize with that. In this way, a vision of black empowerment, smuggled under the guise of universal empowerment, became fashionable to a predominantly white audience.*

  Stagger Lee pestered his foes until the stipulated ninety-day banishment ended, whereupon JYD returned. He feuded with another former ally, Butch Reed, in a series of brutal grudge matches. But being that Reed was also black, the traditional matches were heavily freighted with racial implications: the dog-collar match again, but also the tar-and-feather match and the “ghetto street fight.”

  In 1984 JYD was hired away by the WWF, which was then making itself into the first national wrestling promotion and was poaching the top stars from around the country to build its stable and its audience. They were also rather blatantly assembling a roster that traded on national and ethnic stereotypes to differentiate each wrestler in the broadest strokes possible. JYD was, in no uncertain terms, the Black Guy—just as Tito Santana was the Mexican Guy, Mr. Fuji was the (ambiguously) Asian Guy, the Iron Sheik was the Middle Eastern Guy, Nikolai Volkoff was the Russian Guy, Jimmy Snuka was the Pacific Island Guy, Andre the Giant and Big John Studd were the Big Guys (though Andre was also demonstrably French), and Wendi Richter and the Fabulous Moolah were the Women. “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and Hulk Hogan were, as their names suggest, originally set up as Scottish and Irish Guys, respectively, though their celebrity grew (particularly in Hogan’s case) to demolish those parameters. (Bob Backlund, the long-reigning good guy champ shortly before Hogan’s ascendance, was unquestionably the White Guy.) The Junkyard Dog hardly stood out in this motley crowd of caricatures—except, of course, for his great popularity. JYD was a wrecking ball in the ring. Never the most technically proficient wrestler, JYD’s WWF-era routine was reduced to a crowd-pleasing blur of punches, headbutts, and powerslams.* The chains and white boots from his Mid-South days came along as well—as did “Another One Bites the Dust” until several years later, when it was replaced with a new original theme song (which JYD sang) called “Grab Them Cakes.” The more literal part of his “junkyard” persona was largely abandoned, except in the Hulk Hogan’s Rock ’n’ Wrestling cartoon show, in which JYD not only owned and lived in a junkyard but also spoke lines like “That junkyard rat’s been jivin’ with my junk again.”

  JYD became an idol particularly to the younger audience, and he famously invited kids into the ring to dance with him after matches. So, yes, the trope of the dancing black man. No one would deny that JYD was a panderer, but he was a panderer in an almost visionary way. His crowd interaction, signature moves, theme music, and outsize character presaged later stars like Rick Rude, the Rock, and “Funkasaurus” Brodus Clay.

  JYD feuded notably with Terry Funk, Jake “The Snake�
�� Roberts, “Adorable” Adrian Adonis, and the aforementioned Greg Valentine, who, perhaps borrowing from Hayes, race-baited JYD in some memorable interviews.

  JYD emerged from that feud with only a moral victory. Despite his fame, and despite the WWF’s multiethnic roster, it’s fair to say that in his WWF period, JYD was hamstrung by race. Whether or not the world was ready for a black champion, the WWF title scene was dominated by white men—particularly one white man named Hulk Hogan, whose preeminence made it nearly impossible for other good guys, white or black, to ascend to the top for most of a decade. But being a black icon for a company trying to expand its audience nationwide certainly didn’t help.

  His last feud of note, and probably his most popular, saw him battling “King” Harley Race* over the crown that Race had won in a King of the Ring tournament—but even this honorific would escape JYD’s grasp. Their big match at WrestleMania III stipulated that if JYD lost, he would have to bow to his opponent. And although he did lose (cleanly), he bowed mockingly and then stole the crown, robe, and scepter and strutted across the ring, atoning for his loss: Stagger Lee, terrorizing the white world once more. The crowd cheered wildly—a response that hinted none too subtly at a missed opportunity. It was a poignant moment. (And yes, it’s equally poignant that JYD’s most famous feud in the WWF was against Race.)

  That match was the highest JYD would climb in the WWF. He left the promotion soon thereafter. He reemerged in 1989 in the NWA, which had recently rechristened itself WCW. They too were going national, but they were somewhat late to the game and so were eager to import identifiable WWF talent like JYD. Ritter’s WCW run was unmemorable, though, except for his being part of a mostly ridiculous stable that feuded with the venerable Four Horsemen. Helmed by Sting, they called themselves “Dudes with Attitudes.” Ritter left WCW soon after and “retired” in the way that old wrestlers often do, which is to say that he took a couple of months off and then started wrestling at occasional indie shows.