The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling

by Shoemaker, David

  In his heyday, the Ultimate Warrior vociferously defined himself as more than a lone man. He was a symbol for a creed, a lifestyle—and, at times, it certainly sounded like he was talking about some sort of suicide pact or death cult. Little wonder that questions about the Warrior’s transience became so prevalent. That fans to this day are uncertain about the Warrior’s survival speaks to both the gravity of the supposition and to the tenacity of the conspiracy theorist’s mind-set. And, of course, the cult of death that has sadly come to define the wrestling world.

  It should be said that these rumors are false; reports of the Warrior’s death have been greatly exaggerated. The conservative crank and sometime steroid denialist of today is the same Jim Hellwig who quivered and growled in the ring throughout the ’80s and ’90s. There’s really no evidence to the contrary. But, hey, it makes a good story. That’s what pro wrestling is about.

  And what of Renegade, the Warrior’s WCW doppelgänger? Rick Wilson was released by WCW in 1998. His fate was all too real: Deep in a battle with depression, he committed suicide in February 1999.

  THE

  MODERN

  ERA

  In 1993, the WWF’s Prime Time Wrestling show was killed off due to low ratings and replaced with a new concept show called Monday Night Raw. Whereas Prime Time leaned on the WWF’s cult of personalities, featuring pretaped matches from house shows, overdubbed with commentary by the legendary announce team of Gorilla Monsoon and Bobby “The Brain” Heenan, Raw featured live matches filmed in a small studio.* This was no small thing: In the Prime Time era, the wrestling action was secondary to the commentary, and the outcomes almost always plainly preordained. On Raw, the machinations of mainstream wrestling entered real time.

  It goes without saying that this format wasn’t entirely a revolution; it borrowed heavily from the format of the rival NWA/WCW shows of the era, with live audiences* interacting with the matches in a way that finally—for the WWF—acknowledged the crowd’s necessary participatory role in the wrestling enterprise. But the thing that really set it apart was the combination of the WWF’s cartoonery combined with the format’s reality. The various NWA shows focused on wrestling’s rough realism, but the WWF, with its neon spandex and immaculate production values, rendered the sport a new thing, a model of pop-cultural excess. By adapting the format of its old-school rivals, the WWF found the path to the future.

  Meanwhile, although Ted Turner had been eager to purchase WCW,* he didn’t have the time or expertise to be much of a hands-on owner. He left the operations to a series of vice presidents and showrunners, none of whom found a stride that accommodated both the ardent fans of the old NWA and the Turner network heads. After middling seasons under the guidance of Ole Anderson and Dusty Rhodes that did little to grow the promotion to national, WWF-level popularity, and finally after a disastrous run with former Mid-South promoter Bill Watts running things, a dictate was given that WCW would never again hire a “wrestling guy” to run the show. But the nonwrestling heads who had been previously tasked with running things—like Kip Frey and Jim Herd—hadn’t been able to acclimate to the particulars of the wrestling world, and turned off more fans than they attracted. So, perhaps bereft of other options, WCW was handed over to a man named Eric Bischoff, an announcer with the company who had also worked in sales and marketing at Minnesota’s AWA.* Bischoff wooed the Turner brass by emphasizing his marketing skills, and they in turn liked his vision and perceived creativity.

  Although his first year in WCW (starting in 1993) wasn’t significant outside of the in-ring return from the WWF of WCW mainstay Ric Flair,* Bischoff came in with a sort of Hollywood slickness that the wrestling world—and WCW in particular—hadn’t seen. On advice from Mike Graham,* who was then employed in the WCW front office, Bischoff initiated a pursuit of Hulk Hogan, who was on one of his numerous periods of leave from the WWF (this time filming the television show Thunder in Paradise, which was basically Magnum, P.I. with muscles and boats) and was for the first time open to working for the competition. Eager to see his wrestling venture compete with the WWF, Ted Turner anted up the money to acquire Hogan—and, soon thereafter, Randy Savage—and, on Bischoff’s request, gave WCW a prime-time Monday night spot on his TNT network,* airing head-to-head with WWF Monday Night Raw.

  The Territorial Era had been defined by the old-school NWA style—a rougher, gruffer, more reality-based (or at least reality-insistent) form—and when the WWF rose to prominence, it was with a product largely defined in contrast, with an emphasis on pop-culture tie-ins and slick production. And so when the WCW unequivocally appropriated the WWF formula in 1994, it signaled the end of the old school in the wrestling mainstream. In 1991, the remaining NWA promoters had been fully alienated by WCW’s growing superiority, and when the NWA began making demands of WCW and its champion, WCW pulled out of the NWA altogether.

  In 1994 in Philadelphia, the last NWA affiliate of any significance solidified the shift. Eastern Championship Wrestling owner Tod Gordon—who had just hired as his head booker a former WCW manager named Paul Heyman*—was approached by former Mid-Atlantic promoter Jim Crockett* about holding an NWA title tournament to reestablish the legitimacy of the dwindling confederation.* Gordon agreed, but when NWA president Dennis Coralluzzo started trying to exert influence, Gordon got peeved and turned to his booker for advice. Heyman hatched a plan that would upset the power balance in the wrestling world. ECW staple Shane Douglas won the NWA title tournament and then—on orders from the ECW brain trust—cursed the belt, threw it down, and grabbed an ECW belt from ringside. He declared himself champion of “Extreme Championship Wrestling.” And so ended the reign of pro wrestling’s old guard.

  It could have been just another death rattle from an increasingly illegitimate NWA. But Heyman’s vision was broader: He was attempting nothing short of a revolution—a pro wrestling version of the grunge music movement.*

  The tenor of the WWF-WCW Monday showdown was evident from the very start. The inaugural episode of the unsubtly named WCW Monday Nitro (which aired for an hour in September 1995—the show was subsequently expanded to two full hours) was filmed in the Mall of America and featured the surprise return to WCW of Lex Luger. Luger had just been with WWF, and though his contract had expired, his defection was a shock—especially because, unlike Raw, which was taped live but aired on later dates (this was less expensive since you could tape multiple shows on one day or weekend and spread the products out over the following months), Nitro was airing fully live, like an actual sporting event. To the average fan, it appeared that Luger had been wrestling for the WWF the night before. The era of the surprise appearance in pro wrestling had begun.

  In May, Scott Hall, who had until eight days before been known as WWF star Razor Ramon, appeared unannounced on an episode of Nitro in “street clothes”—jeans and a denim vest—and interrupted a match, evincing a subtle disregard for the kayfabe code, and said to a confused audience, “You all know who I am, but you don’t know why I’m here.” He was joined in the following weeks by Kevin Nash, who was known to wrestling fans as the WWF’s Diesel. They were presented not as Razor and Diesel—although Hall was still using his faux-Cuban Ramon voice—but as the actual guys behind the characters: Kevin and Scott, two regular dudes setting out to break the fourth wall. Their arrival wasn’t billed as a talent signing (although both would later say that it was the guarantees of huge amounts of money that attracted them); it was implied that the duo were usurpers from the WWF—“up north,” they’d say, with deliberate vagueness—bent on destroying WCW from within: It was a parable of WWF’s industry dominance, and through this storyline based around WWF stars, WCW planned to wrest control of the wrestling world from the competition.

  On July 7, 1996, at WCW’s Bash at the Beach PPV, Hulk Hogan came to the ring to save Randy Savage from a beatdown at the hands of the “Outsiders”—as Hall and Nash had come to be known—who had also dispatched WCW’s other two headl
iners, Sting and Luger. But Hogan, in one of the most shocking moments in wrestling history, joined in the attack on Savage and aligned himself with Hall and Nash, announcing to the wild boos of the crowd and the buffoonish indignation from the announcers, that they were establishing a “new world order” in wrestling.* While the nWo* was a gimmick borrowed from New Japan wrestling, it proved to be a game changer for American wrestling. Seemingly overnight, wrestling storylines went from elementary Good vs. Evil rehashings to postmodern meditations on the nature of the sport.

  What was emerging meanwhile in ECW was certainly revolutionary, even if the term is defined down within the context of play fighting. In a landscape suddenly wanting for a different direction, ECW was a thumb to the eye of the status quo. The wrestlers looked different, to be sure—rather than the baby-oiled muscleheads common in the WWF and WCW in those days, ECW wrestlers were often fully clothed, beer-bellied brawlers. The style of fighting—eventually dubbed “hardcore”—was rough and frequently bloody. Weaponry of all sorts—from folding chairs to stop signs to household cutlery—was allowed; referees were present but largely irrelevant. Wrestlers were sent crashing through folding tables, sometimes towers of them, into the metal ring railings or ropes of barbed wire. These matches, with the nothing-fake-about-it injuries the wrestlers suffered, undeniably felt genuine, and they went a long way toward discrediting the increasingly campy style of WWF programming in the eyes of many fans.

  Just as the bloody matches upset the conventions of the sport, ECW storylines frequently blurred the distinction between the real world and wrestling unreality. Douglas damning the NWA belt was just the start. Other highlights included the time Tommy Dreamer “accidentally” “blinded” the Sandman with a cigarette—and then, upon realizing what he had done, seemingly broke character and apologized profusely. WCW castoffs Steve Austin and Brian Pillman appeared at different times between major league jobs, seemingly off their respective rockers and intent on sabotaging their own careers with irreverence (in the case of Austin) and insanity (in the case of Pillman). Once, hardcore legend Mick Foley saw a (presumably sarcastic) sign that read “Cane Dewey”—a call for hitting Foley’s young son Dewey with a “Singapore cane,” one of the traditional weapons of the genre—and excoriated ECW fans for demanding violence. Moments like these garnered ECW attention from savvy fans of the mainstream promotions and from the WWF and WCW themselves, by brutally breaking down the fourth wall. To the wrestling traditionalists, this was sacrilege, but slaughtering sacred cows was ECW’s ritual: That was the way they did business.

  And just as WWF and WCW were moving to large-scale stadium shows as the home for their television tapings, ECW embraced the small-venue ambiance and the intimacy with (and ardency of) their crowds; the famous chants that emanated from ECW audiences (“Ho-lee shit! Ho-lee shit!”) formalized an interactive nature of the product in the wrestling world that hadn’t been seen since the Territorial Era heyday.

  ECW wasn’t competition to WCW or the WWF by a long shot—it didn’t even have a national television deal*—but in the growing Internet era, awareness of the ECW among serious wrestling fans was growing rapidly. And as the predominant independent American operation, it functioned as a petri dish for talent and ideas to develop. In a battle for viewers, with WCW and WWF rosters depleted by expanded programming time (both companies eventually ballooned to around six hours of television a week) and poaching each other’s talent, the major leagues would take notice.

  Meanwhile, the WWF was struggling to develop an identity that could rival that of the insurgent WCW megalith. What they had stumbled into was “Attitude,” an ethos of crass language and lewd innuendo that was ushered in by the incredibly compelling adolescent antics of Shawn Michaels and Triple H—known as D-Generation X. DX is often seen as the WWF’s answer to the nWo, but there are subtle differences: DX grew much more accidentally and organically and was, in the end, much more real. Michaels and Triple H often pushed the line of actually getting themselves fired, while Hall and Nash’s faux corporate takeover only entrenched them in the WCW power structure. While the nWo was the going issue on-screen in WCW, DX’s unexpected success was changing the WWF behind the scenes. As McMahon was dragged grudgingly into accepting the DX ethos, some old-school personalities disapproved—none more so than champion Bret Hart.

  If WWF found its new identity in “Attitude,” the era had its seminal moment, almost accidentally, on November 9, 1997, at their Survivor Series PPV. It was the moment where Attitude met reality, and a new wrestling world was born. The year before, WCW had tried to lure Bret Hart—the WWF’s de facto flag bearer since the defection of Hogan—away from the WWF with a three-year, $9 million offer.* Hart chose to stay with the WWF, which signed him to an unprecedented twenty-year deal. A year later, however, competition with WCW had left the WWF near financial shambles and the company’s lowbrow turn had cast Bret, ever the moralist, as the odd man out. Vince pled financial distress to Bret, telling him he couldn’t afford to live up to the deal he’d agreed to just a year before, and suggested he contact WCW to see if he could still get a big contract from them. Bret did—WCW head Eric Bischoff apparently had no idea McMahon had steered Hart to WCW—and agreed to decamp for WCW in the coming weeks. The only problem was that Bret was the WWF champion, and the last week of his tenure took them on a tour through his home country of Canada.

  The facts here aren’t so much unclear as they are itchily contradictory. McMahon wanted Bret to drop the title to Shawn Michaels—who was the other major star of the WWF at that point and who, through his lewd jokes and overt sexuality, represented the depravity of the new movement, and who, moreover, had a long-standing real-life beef with Hart—at Survivor Series in Montreal. Bret didn’t want to drop the belt to Shawn, and he definitely didn’t want to lose in his last big WWF match in his home country. The WWF’s story is that solution after solution was shot down by Bret, and McMahon and company were left without a choice. Bret’s take is that McMahon took Bret’s reluctance as a guarantee and, instead of working for another solution, decided to sneak the championship away from him. What all parties agree upon is that McMahon conspired with Shawn and referee Earl Hebner so that when Shawn locked Bret in his own finisher,* which was part of the script Bret had agreed to, Hebner would call for the bell as if Bret had tapped out.

  It should come as little surprise that when this transpired, Bret did not take kindly to it. He stood up, spat expertly in the face of McMahon, who was standing ringside, and proceeded to wreck the announcers’

  tables. Backstage, he punched McMahon in the face. Left without any option but to acknowledge the truth, WWF embraced it.

  It wasn’t just an inversion of kayfabe—it was the one night where reality indisputably reigned. For wrestling fans, unreality is our passion but reality is our drug. And the wrestling world did not implode. Instead, at the moment when these men first became fully human to us, kayfabe evolved, and the next night a newly evil Vince McMahon—formerly an on-screen announcer but now known as “Mr. McMahon,” the owner (presumably a character closer to reality than his previous one)—explained to the WWF audience that “Bret screwed Bret.” Reality was being written into wrestling’s revisionist history.

  Meanwhile, WCW was collapsing under the weight of its own monolith. All the talent signings had come to pass, every heel turn and face turn had been done and done over, and without any more shocks, story progression went into a tailspin. Along with the high-dollar contracts, some of the top-tier hires were given contractual storyline control, which obviously becomes a problem when more than one person has it, especially when you’re trying to navigate such intricacies in the context of five hours of live television a week. Despite all their accumulated talent, there was nowhere to go but nowhere. To attract viewers, both companies scheduled main event matches between major stars—a departure from a previous dependence on promos and “squash matches”*—but WCW became increasingly depende
nt on fourth-wall-scratching promos and false finishes: shocks for their own sake. Every episode of WCW seemed to end with a much-hyped megamatch, and every week that megamatch would end inconclusively, with other wrestlers interrupting the proceedings (if the match even started in the first place). This stood in stark contrast to ECW, which prided itself on having decisive finishes (the crowd would chant the “One . . . two . . . three” along with the ref’s count), and the WWF, which was realizing the value of definitiveness. The WCW audience grew disaffected.

  The WWF, with a newfound vigor epitomized by Mr. McMahon and new stars like “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, the Rock, Triple H, and Mick Foley, was suddenly cruising. One Monday night in January 1999, Foley—who had wrestled over the years as Cactus Jack, Mankind, and recently, Dude Love—won the WWF championship. Foley was a longtime midtier wrestler, a pear-shaped masochist known for his bloody brawls, his passion for the sport, and his also-ran status. The match was taped six days before airing, so WCW, still puckish about the rivalry, sent announcer Tony Schiavone out that night to preempt the news: “Fans, if you’re even thinking about changing the channel to our competition, do not. We understand that Mick Foley, who wrestled here at one time as Cactus Jack, is gonna win their world title. Ha! That’s gonna put some butts in the seats.” Fans turned over to WWF en masse, and WCW’s eighteen-month choke hold on the ratings charts ended permanently.*

  Despite losing talent to both of the major federations, ECW’s profile was growing steadily. But that very prominence spelled out the end for ECW. It had succeeded to the extent that it was decidedly not WWF and WCW; the closer ECW got to the wrestling mainstream, however, the more its identity was thrown into question. When ECW finally got a national television deal with TNN,* its drift to the mainstream seemed complete. But here in particular ECW was too successful for its own good. Seeing how well wrestling programming was performing for the network, TNN signed up the WWF—the big leagues—to take ECW’s place. Despite the ever-expanding world of cable television, ECW couldn’t find another home quickly enough—its reputation for violence dissuaded many a network—and in 2001, in debt to both creditors and wrestlers, Heyman declared bankruptcy and the WWF bought all of ECW’s assets. Heyman, who went to work for the WWF as an announcer, has often called ECW “the first victim” of the Monday Night Wars.