The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling

by Shoemaker, David

  In 1997 Hennig turned up in WCW, as was the norm for stars of his era. He was still brawny and tanned and blond, and if his physical gifts were still extant, they were no longer central; he was significant almost solely for his history. He was a former WWF superstar, and it was that fame that buoyed him in WCW. The company was more focused on star power than wrestling ability—its biggest stars were prone to giving speeches in the main event instead of wrestling—and even someone with Hennig’s ability was sublimated to the strictures of the pro wrestling fame game.

  After an unnecessary stint in the formerly cutting-edge nWo—wherein Hennig’s middle-aged girth seemed to be a metaphor for the nWo’s increasing bloat—he was recast as the leader of the heel West Texas Rednecks, a gang of cowboy types that existed predominantly to feud with rapper Master P and his appointed crew of semiexperienced grapplers. It was truly one of the most idiotic angles in latter-day WCW, and that’s saying a lot; the idea that the Southern wrestling fans who still made up a large portion of the WCW fanbase would cheer for an interloping rapper over a crew of experienced ring hands with country-music proclivities was inane. When the Rednecks sang their signature song, “Rap Is Crap,” the fans had a hard time not cheering. If Hennig seemed an odd fit for the troupe, well, he was, although he was a country music fan—his AWA-era tights were modeled on country and western wear—and he embraced his role as the band’s lead singer more convincingly than the other (more authentic) cowboys embraced their roles as rhythm guitarists.

  Despite his willingness in that angle, anything short of “Mr. Perfect” was perceived by fans as a waste of his talents. So the crowd swooned when soon thereafter he reappeared in the WWF, back in the garb and mantle of Mr. Perfect. He returned at the Royal Rumble in 2002, entering the ring when its only two occupants were “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and Triple H. If this was his introduction to the Attitude Era, he was being welcomed in as a headline talent.

  But it was not to be. After a couple of brief feuds, there came an event known in wrestling lore as the “Plane Ride from Hell.” Imagine, if you will, an airplane filled entirely with wrestlers and exhaustion and alcohol. They were flying back from a big show in London, the whole roster on the plane. The story goes that much alcohol was consumed and things quickly got uncomfortable: Hennig and Scott Hall went wild with some shaving cream; Dustin Rhodes awkwardly serenaded his ex-wife, Terri; the legendary wrestler turned booker Michael “P.S.” Hayes got punched out by JBL and later, after he had fallen asleep, had his ponytail chopped off by Sean Waltman; Ric Flair paraded in front of a flight attendant in nothing but his sequined ring robe; and, to top it all off, Hennig challenged collegiate wrestling star (and WWE golden boy) Brock Lesnar to a Greco-Roman wrestling match that ended when Lesnar tackled Hennig into the exit door, and they were pulled apart just before they jeopardized the flight. Of course, this is all thirdhand hearsay, but what’s concrete is that Hennig was fired afterward, the sacrificial lamb for the transgressions of the roster at large.* (Because he took the fall, Hennig took to calling himself “the Pete Rose of wrestling,” which might have been apropos had there not already been a Pete Rose of wrestling: Pete Rose.) Once again, Hennig was rendered expendable in comparison to guys whom he was better than. This time, he probably deserved it.

  He appeared briefly in TNA Wrestling, the wannabe replacement for WCW’s counterbalancing force, in 2002 and early 2003. On February 10, 2003, Hennig was found dead in his hotel room. It was cocaine, painkillers, steroids: the diet of the WrestleMania Era superstar. You take the steroids to make you a star, the painkillers to get you through the aches of nightly matches,* and the cocaine to get you back up from the painkiller malaise. Your heart takes the toll for the drugs keeping you normal.

  Normal is an odd word to use in reference to Hennig. He was pushed as being perfect, after all. But he wasn’t a monster, or a god, or even a sports star. “Mr. Perfect” was the best at everything you’d ever do in life—the best at normal things. He was your coolest friend. But he was never godly enough to climb to the top of the WWF.

  Hennig inhabited his character more fully than any wrestler this side of Kamala. He was “Mr. Perfect.” Because in the ring, in his prime, Hennig had a magic that couldn’t be duplicated and that can hardly be defined. His persona wasn’t kitschy like Rick Rude’s playboy act or absurdly contrived like Ted DiBiase’s “Million Dollar Man” gimmick. Hennig was an asshole whom fans secretly loved, the show-off who was emulated by a cohort of little boys. We wanted to be just like Mr. Perfect, even if we didn’t know why. And this adoration, which so many secretly harbored, came from a generation that simply did not root for the bad guy. Hennig’s charisma defied that. He didn’t even change his character when he occasionally morphed into a good guy—he just started fighting bad guys.

  Little wonder, then, that those young boys grew up to be the generation of assholes. Mr. Perfect epitomized everything we wanted to be years before we could put it into words. (The prominent bulge in the front of his tights probably didn’t hurt matters.) He was the harbinger for a generation of jackassery, of smart-guy sarcasm and holier-than-thou snark—of Internet machismo, Tucker Max, Bill Simmons, and Deadspin .com. We are the Mr. Perfect generation.

  He never achieved top billing, but that hardly matters. It was all about attitude. You have the balls to toss your pencil into the air on live TV, it almost doesn’t matter if you catch it. Hennig did, but that’s beside the point.

  INTERLUDE

  THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR

  When the Ultimate Warrior made his shocking (and final) return to the ring on WCW Monday Nitro in Fall 1998—and I use shocking here loosely since “shocking” returns became, over the years, as much a part of the Warrior’s shtick as the facepaint and tassels—Hulk Hogan’s response was “I . . . I thought you were dead.” He wasn’t the only one. The question going through the mind of the curious wrestling fan was more pointed: Well, yeah, me too. Was that even the original Ultimate Warrior at all?

  Since his first “shocking” return in 1992 at WrestleMania VIII, when he rescued Hulk Hogan from a beatdown at the hands of Sid Justice and Papa Shango, the pro wrestling world had been abuzz with an urban legend: that the Ultimate Warrior had disappeared from the WWF in August 1991 because he had died, and upon his return the character was being portrayed by a new wrestler.

  The evidence was circumstantial but, in the way of conspiracy theories, somewhat compelling. This new Ultimate Warrior had a shorter haircut, blonder hair, and a fleshier, less-defined physique.* And under that mop of hair and behind his unmistakable, all-obscuring facepaint, half of the bodybuilders on Muscle Beach probably could have done a convincing impersonation. The Ultimate Warrior’s frantic style and garbled speech, though unique in that era of wrestling, wouldn’t have been too difficult to imitate.* Just imagine: The Warrior’s signature music plays, some imposter of a muscleman scuttles to the ring, the crowd goes wild—one can easily imagine Vince McMahon thinking he could pull off such a ruse . . . and the entire audience falling for it.

  Jim Hellwig, the man who would go on to become the Ultimate Warrior, started off as a bodybuilder—he won the title of Mr. Georgia in 1984 and placed fifth in the 1985 Junior USA competition—but he abandoned that calling as a member of a group of bodybuilders who jumped into pro wrestling as a stable called Powerteam USA. Soon, Hellwig defected from the troupe along with another Powerteam member named Steve Borden (who would go on to a long, successful career under the name Sting) to form a tag team in Jerry Jarrett’s Continental Wrestling Association. They debuted as the Freedom Fighters and were slated to be good guys, but in the Jerry Lawler–Bill Dundee days of the CWA, the crowd was accustomed to cheering for pudgy tough guys, and Hellwig and Borden’s chiseled physiques soon were drawing boos.

  They renamed themselves the Blade Runners, a point-for-point knockoff of the Road Warriors (right down to the facepaint and the movie-title team name), and they soon took that act
to Mid-South wrestling (which soon became the UWF), where they found some success. Eventually, though, Hellwig struck out on his own and left for the Von Erichs’ WCCW territory. He dubbed himself the Dingo Warrior and modified his facepaint to a tribal, full-face style that would stay with Hellwig throughout his career.

  He briefly tagged with Lance Von Erich (who was himself, one could say, a fake brought in to replace a dead man) and competed individually for the Texas Heavyweight Championship. What is most significant about this period is that he began fully fleshing out the character that would soon be known as the Ultimate Warrior—and the further into the character he descended, the further “Jim Hellwig” faded into the background. Here again, though, the Warrior’s tenure was brief. He left WCCW in 1987 for the big leagues of the WWF.

  Almost immediately upon his arrival, the Warrior—the Ultimate Warrior now, to set him above the Road Warriors, who were not yet WWF property—became a sensation. His in-ring shortcomings were effectively hidden behind a frenetic match style and mostly short, decisive brawls. He was not so much a man as he was a force of nature, and he was no longer billed as being from Queens, New York, as was the Dingo Warrior—he was now from “Parts Unknown.” He feuded with Mr. Perfect, “Ravishing” Rick Rude, and the Honky Tonk Man, from whom he won his first Intercontinental Championship.

  During this period, the Warrior began to hone his signature interview style; low on coherence and heavy on growling mysticism, it was a sort of carefully cultivated inanity. And as the years wore on, the Warrior’s promos became idiosyncratically obsessed with death and preoccupied with theories of the afterlife—often touching on issues of masochism, destiny, and messianic visions. He described the feeling of seeing a fan in facepaint like his thusly: “I know that that warrior is ready to make that sacrifice so that I shall live.” He was unique—incredibly strange and off-key for his era.

  Before long, the ecstatic crowd response made it inevitable that the Warrior would rise to the top of the ranks in the WWF, and indeed, he was chosen to be the heir to Hulk Hogan and his successor as World Heavyweight Champion. The two megastars squared off at WrestleMania VI with both title belts on the line. The stakes were not just grand but also dire: The Warrior gave an interview before the match in which he talked darkly about going into the cockpit of Hogan’s plane, taking the controls, and crashing it. The Ultimate Warrior emerged victorious—earning a handshake from the fallen Hogan after the match—and the proverbial torch had been passed. As Hogan stepped back from the limelight (to dedicate himself fully to his Hollywood career), it seemed that the Warrior Era had begun.

  But his reign didn’t prove to be as durable as his predecessor’s—despite the hype and despite the Warrior’s self-professed “destiny,” it’s almost laughable in comparison. As an insurgent, the Ultimate Warrior was irrepressible, but as a champion he was dull. The eccentricity that once made him stand out made him seem dark and bizarre in comparison to the shining light of Hulkamania. When Hogan rallied his little Hulkamaniacs to his cause, it seemed a joyous army; when the Warrior spoke to his “little warriors,” he seemed to be preaching to a cult. If Hogan was the wrestling Billy Graham (the evangelist, that is, not the actual wrestler), the Warrior was Jim Jones.

  He lost the belt less than a year later to Sgt. Slaughter, who at that juncture—during the first Gulf War—was a nefarious, over-the-hill Iraqi sympathizer. Hogan returned to feud with Slaughter and retake his position atop the WWF, while the Warrior was relegated to a fatalistic feud with the Undertaker in which the Undertaker shut the Warrior inside a coffin, suffocating him. (He was revived, thankfully, by EMTs.) A corollary storyline with Jake “The Snake” Roberts saw the Warrior buried alive and (in a separate incident) bitten by a king cobra; it was a wonderfully dark yarn that saw Warrior approach Jake to help him conquer his fears—the only chink in the Warrior’s armor—only to have Jake submit him to further psychological torture. The culmination of the snakebite scene—wherein Jake is revealed to be working for the Undertaker and explains himself by saying, “Never trust a snake”—was rivetingly sinister. At SummerSlam 1991, the Warrior revisited his feud with Sgt. Slaughter and his Ba’ath Party compatriots, Colonel Mustafa and General Adnan, as he teamed with Hogan to dispatch the baddies.

  And then the Ultimate Warrior disappeared.

  It was said later to be the result of a contractual dispute, that the Warrior felt he was owed money by Vince McMahon and that Vince disagreed and fired him. But whatever the case, the Warrior would make his aforementioned first (shocking) return at WrestleMania VIII, when he came to Hogan’s aid.

  And so the Ultimate Warrior was back, picking up where he left off. Or was he? If this new man wasn’t the old Ultimate Warrior, then who was he? Kerry Von Erich? Jim Powers? Some unknown 6-foot-2 muscleman? After all, the WWF has pulled similar switches over the years. The Killer Bees’ whole gimmick was based on their masquerading as each other; there was the Dave/Earl Hebner switcheroo at WrestleMania III; the Undertaker (Mark Calaway) was replaced for a stretch by Brian Lee (known lovingly to fans as the “Underfaker”); Jim Ross brought imposter versions of Diesel and Razor Ramon to Raw after Kevin Nash and Scott Hall, the men who originally played the roles, defected to WCW in 1996.

  Which is all to say that even if rumors of the Warrior’s actual death were unfounded, the idea of replacing him wasn’t at all unlikely.

  And for anyone looking for clues, the Ultimate Warrior’s career sent off many more signal flares than did all of the Beatles’ album art and reversed tracks after Paul McCartney “died.” There were the thanatophilic promos, the morbid feud with the Undertaker, and now, upon his return, a new grudge against voodoo doctor Papa Shango, another mystical overseer of the hereafter. Shango cast a spell on the Ultimate Warrior that left him vomiting multicolored bile and “possessed” him at one point, causing a blood-like ooze to trickle down from his scalp during an interview.

  Although much of this “Warrior is dead” theorizing occurred prior to the heyday of Internet message boards, there are glimpses across the web of various Hellwig death theories: that he died of liver failure due to years of steroid abuse, or that his tasseled armbands cut off his blood circulation. Every time an “establishment” source entertains the theory long enough to joke about it only reaffirms the conspiracy theorist’s mind-set.

  Whoever it was underneath the paint, the Ultimate Warrior’s career was intermittent at best from that point on. Around this time he legally changed his name to “Warrior.” It has been sold as a defiant act of copyright protection, and that may well be true. But one is left to wonder if it didn’t also conveniently put “Jim Hellwig”—and any lingering questions about the identity of the man behind the character—to rest.

  In 1995, in an odd turn of events, WWF rival WCW, then the home of Hogan, introduced a “new” character called the Renegade*—a fighter whose entire gimmick, although it was never stated as such on air, was that he impersonated the Warrior. Hogan proudly proclaimed Renegade to be his “ultimate weapon”—wink, wink.

  The WCW audience was at once energized and perplexed. And for those convinced that the Warrior had been replaced all those years before, this was further proof that it could be done. It may have been a case of WCW trying to cash in on the persistent popularity of the Warrior without having to pay the actual man. But pro wrestling is a strange, incestuous world where innumerable character names and countless storylines are veiled references to offscreen stories. Many fans are aware of these traditions—it’s part of the game, and the WWF (and other federations) has conditioned its viewers to be conscious of this sort of signifier. The story of the Ultimate Warrior, whether or not you take his death as fact, is one of these metatextual games—it’s basically Nabokov with muscles and facepaint. And at the time, there were certainly whispers that with the Renegade, WCW was trying to make a comment about the Warrior’s authenticity.

  The “real” Ultimate Warrior return
ed (again) to the WWF in 1996, but this stint was even briefer than before—only about four months. After another money-related dispute, the Warrior said his final farewell to the WWF.

  He turned up in WCW in 1998 for a poorly planned feud with his old nemesis Hogan. In one sequence, Hogan looked into a backstage mirror and saw the Ultimate Warrior looking back at him. This is supposedly a storyline idea that the Warrior came up with himself. It was intended to symbolize that the Warrior had gotten into Hogan’s head, but one wonders whether the Warrior himself was trying to broach the subject of his very existence. Did the Warrior only exist in the imagination of his foes?

  Hellwig—or whoever it was—certainly emerged from wrestling a different man—the animalistic bodybuilding egotist of yore is today a clean-cut, buttoned-down conservative speech giver.

  Only his fascination with death seems to have remained constant. In various online outpourings, the Warrior has made light of Michael Jackson’s death (“Well, you gotta give him credit for one thing. He spent all his money [and then some] before he died”), said that Heath Ledger was “better off dead,” and advised Hulk Hogan to do himself in as well. When asked about the wrestlers who have died in recent years, the Warrior was brusque: “I’m not like some of the idiots I used to work with. . . . I don’t have any sympathy for them.” On his blog, he makes dismissive but telling remarks about Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesus—both spiritual leaders who were killed before their time.