The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling

by Shoemaker, David

  There were others—Canadian Pierre Lafleur became the Russian Stomper; Jim Harrell (who had previously wrestled as the military man Pvt. Jim Nelson) became Boris Zhukov in the AWA; and of course, there was the Croatian Josip Peruzovic´, who comically terrorized American audiences in the WWF’s ’80s heyday as Nikolai Volkoff—but perhaps none had the cultural impact of the younger Koloff, who was feuding with all-American pretty boy Magnum T.A. in the NWA in 1986 when a car wreck ended Magnum’s career. Expediency trumped political fervor; the lack of another top-tier babyface to take Magnum’s spot led to Nikita himself seeing the light and defecting to team up with Magnum’s old friend Dusty Rhodes. What’s most incredible was the audience’s quick acceptance of the erstwhile Russian scourge. It was five full years before the fall of the Soviet Union, but it was just after the first throes of perestroika. If the rise of glasnost was a harbinger for the USSR’s fall, Koloff’s emergence as a hero in the Southern United States was perhaps an early sign that the Soviet Union’s geopolitical villainy was on its way out.

  When the Soviet Union finally headed toward dissolution and the Berlin Wall came down in 1990, the Russian infrastructure in the wrestling world began to unravel along with it. In 1992, longtime baddie Nikolai Volkoff split with his partner, Boris Zhukov; embraced America (the country had been so good to him all these years, after all); and was embraced, in turn, by the American fans.

  That year, as the United States was gearing up to go to war in Iraq, a familiar face made his return to WWF television: Sgt. Slaughter, former WWF and AWA star and living G.I. Joe figure. (He actually appeared on the G.I. Joe cartoon.) In years previous, Slaughter had often been the actor through whom American political muscle was deployed in the squared circle, as he feuded against any number of foreign invaders. But the Slaughter that appeared in 1990 was not the same guy. This new Slaughter was disgusted by the fact that fans had accepted Volkoff after so many years of misdeeds, and so he had become disillusioned with his country. He became an Iraqi sympathizer during the Gulf War, and he was accompanied to the ring by two apparent Iraqi military men: General Adnan (formerly known to wrestling fans as Sheik Adnan Al-Kaissie) and Colonel Mustafa (who was very obviously the previously-Iranian Iron Sheik). Villainy overrides accuracy in such cases, one assumes.

  The wrestling world was thrown for a loop—we had suffered losses at the hands of foreigners before, but never had we lost one of our own, never had we lost the ideological fight. In the ring, Slaughter was set against the Ultimate Warrior and Hulk Hogan, the stalwarts of the American Way. In real life, Slaughter was receiving death threats. And why not? Before, guys like Slaughter defended us from our global rivals; now that Slaughter had turned, how could we trust anyone to defend us? In the end, Hogan and Warrior got the job done and dispatched the Iraqi delegation. A short while later, Slaughter reembraced his Americanness and all was right with the world.

  The next time America went to war, following the attacks of 9/11, the WWF couldn’t resist engaging once again with the jingoism of the zeitgeist. But our scourge this time around wouldn’t be strictly a foreign insurgent or even an American turncoat. It was worse: It would be an embodiment of the prejudices that led us into war. In late 2004, wrestling fans were introduced to Muhammad Hassan and Khosrow Daivari, two Muslim Americans (Hassan was an Italian American from New Jersey named Mark Copani; Daivari was actually an American of Persian descent named Shawn Daivari) who were outraged at the biases that had emerged against them since 9/11. They questioned our motives along with our national manhood and praised Allah to boot. In the end, it was probably too high-concept a tack, and certainly too much for the audience psyche, and Hassan and Daivari were rejiggered into more or less straightforward al-Qaeda symps, through whose evildoings the crowd could justify its own prejudices, and who were routinely beaten up by Shawn Michaels and, of course, Hulk Hogan. Despite this unprecedented assault, the American Way managed to stay intact. Later, Hassan and Daivari feuded with the Undertaker. If it weren’t clear enough by then that Hassan’s character had traded in idiosyncrasy for one-dimensionality, he sent a team of ski-masked, cargo-pantsed terrorist-types to beat up ’Taker one night. The show was pretaped, but it aired on the night of the London bombings, when terrorism fervor was again at a high pitch. Public outcry was severe. Never mind the fact that wrestling characters regularly imply such high crimes as assault, rape, and murder. The geopolitical realm was a bridge too far, and the world had evolved as wrestling’s fakery became mainstream knowledge. Whereas with Slaughter, death threats were in order, Hassan’s major misdeed was one not of villainy but of impropriety, and public admonishment from a few media outlets was enough to get him tossed off the air. Hassan eventually parted ways with the company and quit wrestling; Daivari stuck around to help other wrestlers get booed.

  In the years that followed, WWE stayed mostly above the political fray; certainly some of this has to do with the fallout of the Hassan angle, and one could probably pin some of it on former WWE CEO Linda McMahon’s burgeoning political career also. But at the same time, the jingoistic American psyche is worn out from years of military activity in the Middle East, and there’d be little stomaching regular heel tirades against the American colonialist impulse. Our country’s politics have become much more obsessed with Mexican immigration than with the wars we’re fighting. In early 2013, WWE reintroduced Jack Swagger, an all-American collegiate wrestling star, as a sort of Tea Party caricature. (For much of his career, Swagger has been called the “All-American American,” which may be a nod to John McCain’s “the American president Americans have been waiting for” motto from 2008.) With a scraggly beard and newly shaggy hair hanging from his 6-foot-6 frame, he looked like a survivalist Übermensch, and his entrance music sounded like it was lifted from a Fox News show. He also had a new mouthpiece in Zeb Colter, a Vietnam vet and militiaman who directed the brunt of his patriotic fury at undocumented Mexican immigrants who “steal” jobs from hardworking Americans. The point was to use them to score points for then-champ Alberto Del Rio—a Mexican national—and to ridicule the self-styled patriot in the same way that foreigners had been ridiculed for decades prior, much to the pleasure of fans. The WWE’s audience is increasingly Hispanic, and young where the Tea Party is old. And far be it from a wrestling promoter to let ideology stand in the way of making a buck.

  THE BIG BOSS MAN (RAY TRAYLOR)

  Ray Traylor started his wrestling career in the most unremarkable of ways: as a jobber—“enhancement talent,” in gentler parlance. He was one of the average Joes sent out to get clobbered by the stars. For the majority of jobbers, this was the end of the story—they wrestled some matches, they lost some matches, they went back to their day jobs with a story to tell. Ray Traylor wasn’t destined for greatness any more than a thousand other guys. And yet there was something about him. Dusty Rhodes (who knows a thing or two about the common man and, for that matter, the American dream) was the head booker in 1985 in WCW, where Ray Traylor was jerking proverbial curtains, and he saw that something. After watching Traylor lose a few squash matches, Dusty pulled him off television and made him over as a bullying enforcer called Big Bubba Rogers. What name could be more perfect for an overstuffed average Joe from Georgia? Big Bubba would soon be feuding with Dusty himself—then the promotion’s top babyface—and Traylor’s rise from nothing to something was confirmed. The monstrous Big Bubba Rogers, who stalked to the ring in a suit and tie like a mafia enforcer or the doorman at an underworld club, was a villain, but in playing him, Traylor was living the American dream.

  He and Dusty traded wins back and forth, but after Dusty got the decisive victory in a series-ending steel cage match, Bubba was sent packing. He went over to the UWF—formerly Bill Watts’s legendary Mid-South promotion—which the Crocketts had purchased ten days prior. As an unofficial emissary from the new parent company, he immediately won the UWF championship from the One Man Gang, who was leaving to join the WWF.* Big Bubba lost the title to
local favorite “Dr. Death” Steve Williams—just as Traylor himself was called up to New York,* where Vince McMahon and company repackaged him as the Big Boss Man, a wrestling prison guard.

  Or unpackaged, rather. Because even as the idea of the wrestling law officer fed neatly into the play of good and evil at the heart of pro wrestling, it was also a reference to real life, as Traylor himself had been a corrections officer in Cobb County, Georgia, prior to falling into the wrestling trade. In his heyday, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin was fond of saying that the best characters in pro wrestling are the wrestlers who just play themselves but with the volume turned up. The Big Boss Man followed this model—he was little more than the WWF-trademarked version of Ray Traylor—but perhaps this was a foregone conclusion. Traylor didn’t have it in him to play a monster like Abdullah the Butcher or even the Earthquake, another big-boned regular guy turned into a seismic beast. Traylor was too average, too unaffected (and, by all accounts, a total sweetheart backstage). Ray Traylor was destined, it seems, to be Ray Traylor. Even as a bad guy, he was a God-fearing, tax-paying citizen of the world: He was unremarkable, and that was his indelible appeal.

  The Big Boss Man began his WWF career in a wholly pedestrian way too: He beat Koko B. Ware—the bedazzled, macaw-toting mild fan favorite famous for getting beat up by ascendant baddies—in his first pay-per-view match at SummerSlam 1988. But the WWF writers soon saw the same spark in Traylor that Dusty had seen before, and in short order the Boss Man was feuding with the anything-but-regular Hulk Hogan. It turned out to be a sort of back-burner grudge for Hogan: He fought Boss Man at untelevised house shows and on the weekly TV shows, but Hogan spent the majority of his time in those days dealing with his dissolving friendship with “Macho Man” Randy Savage. The Boss Man bided his time teaming up with fellow big man Akeem the African Dream (formerly the One Man Gang),* under the “tutelage” of the huckster manager Slick,* against top good-guy duos like the Rockers and Demolition. But his simmering dispute with Hogan culminated in a near-legendary cage match on Saturday Night’s Main Event, wherein Hogan superplexed Boss Man—all 350 pounds of him—off the cage and into the ring.

  (You can find the video on the web, but let me warn you: It’s probably not as impressive as it sounds and definitely not nearly as incredible as it seemed at the time, especially viewed today through the hardened eyes of a wrestling fan who lived through ECW’s high-flying routines of the late ’90s, but for the time it was good enough to be incredible. Especially for a regular guy.)

  This was the pinnacle of Traylor’s career, the summit of how far his simple appeal would let him climb. When the average wrestling fan looks at his reflection and appraises himself honestly, he probably doesn’t see Hulk Hogan staring back at him. But consider the Big Boss Man: He’s overweight, he’s got a crew cut and goatee, he’s Southern, he’s blue-collar. This is the everyman, to a large portion of the WWF audience. “Justice will be served,” he would say, and wrestling fans heard within it a deeper truth—that was precisely what they wanted from wrestling, and what they wanted from the universe. In his pants and (tucked-in) shirt, the Big Boss Man was Willy Loman in the funhouse mirror of pro wrestling: big and burly, sure, but a man of principle at his core—and yet an underachiever, a man not wired for greatness. He was the archetypal midcarder, almost unremarkable, but somehow—and this can only be to Traylor’s credit—entirely unforgettable.

  When the Big Boss Man became a good guy, it was (of course) in the most commonplace sort of way: Bad Guy rediscovered his conscience and fell out with other baddies. But in this case it was portrayed perfectly. Jake “The Snake” Roberts, you see, had been feuding with the “Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase, and Roberts had taken possession of DiBiase’s self-made “Million Dollar Championship Belt” and stowed it for good measure in the bag that his pet python Damien called home. Since DiBiase was petrified of snakes, as everyone who feuded with Roberts (all too coincidentally) was, and since he had the money to blow, the Million Dollar Man paid Boss Man—via manager Slick*—to retrieve the belt. Boss Man indeed got the bag—and was glad to since the belt was stolen property and such matters were his jurisdiction. But once he realized that Slick had accepted payment for the job, Boss Man did an about-face. His moral code would not be compromised. He returned the bag to Roberts, defiantly staring down both Slick and DiBiase.

  In a matter of mere moments, played out with incredible drama on national television, the Boss Man went from the most diabolical of men to a fan favorite without betraying his character—and we cheered loudly, because we understood him, because he was one of us. Little wonder that in an era in which half of the wrestling superstars on WWF TV were assigned unglamorous middle-class careers “outside” the wrestling world—the garbage man, the hog farmer, the accountant, the repo man—the Big Boss Man was the only prole to achieve any lasting fame. He worked not because he acted like one of us but because he was one of us.

  The Boss Man would soon feud with his old partner Akeem, and then with a heelish lawman from north of the border called the Mountie (played by the wildly underrated Jacques Rougeau).* This latter feud was notable because it featured the Mountie attacking the Boss Man with a cattle prod (complete with overdubbed electric shocking noises) and culminated in a match in which the loser had to “spend the night” in the county jail. (Where two or more wrestling lawmen are gathered, a paddy wagon match is sure to follow.)

  This started the Big Boss Man down a path of increasingly bizarre and ridiculous storylines. For the everyman, this was a sort of ignominy, but it made a certain sense—the Boss Man wasn’t the superhero commanding an audience’s awe solely by the flexing of his sculpted arms. No, he was a (sort of) real person, only with unreal problems. This was underscored by the fact that most of the feuds that would follow were based on cultural grievances or things that happened outside the ring in the backstory lives—as with the aforementioned wrestling accountant.* It was the workaday stiff vs. the grabby hands of Uncle Sam—which probably encapsulates the everyman dream as well as anything else Traylor did. He warred memorably with an ex-con named Nailz, who, the storyline went, claimed that Boss Man beat him in his cell when he was incarcerated. We fans assumed that Nailz was lying, of course, but once that’s decided, the origin of Nailz’s ire is difficult to discern, as are Boss Man’s counterarguments, which relied less on straightforward denial as on legalese—and a bizarre element of introspective admission that the system around which he’d based his life wasn’t perfect: “I’ve read the police report, I’ve looked through your files, I’ve seen the psychological review. I know that you’re a crazy man, that you should be locked up for the rest of your life. That’s just showin’ that sometimes the system don’t work, that they have to let out trash like you. Just a technical error. But the plain and simple fact is that law, order, and justice have been around since the beginning of time, and it’s gonna be around [till] the end of time.”

  One can’t but help hear the echo of Barthes: “But what wrestling is above all meant to portray is a purely moral concept: that of justice.” If the reading of the rap sheet seems a little bit off-subject to the principle of wrestling, well, that was sort of the point. This was a common man, with real-life issues. He just happened to be afforded the unique ability to settle his workplace disputes in a sanctioned wrestling ring.

  When Traylor left the WWF for WCW in 1993, he abandoned law and order for vigilante justice and became known as the Guardian Angel, complete with red beret, but when that personage failed to catch on, he reverted to his old Big Bubba Rogers persona, and then again to his real name. (This was mid-’90s WCW after all.) In his return to the WWF* (and to the Boss Man character), the storylines only got stranger. Despite the privilege of feuding with Steve Austin, D-Generation X, and the Undertaker, there was no real glory; that last conflict ended in a Hell in a Cell match that saw the Boss Man hanged by a noose in the center of the ring. (This was so baldly offensive that the announcer
immediately tried his best to disavow the play lynching by screaming “Is it symbolic?!?” over and over, even as Traylor played dead.) A grudge against Al Snow, another regular Joe type, hinged on the Boss Man killing Snow’s pet Chihuahua and serving it to an unaware Snow for dinner. The Boss Man then battled the Big Show for the WWF championship in a storyline in which the Boss Man crashed the funeral of the Big Show’s father and made off with the coffin, driving off with it chained to the back of his car.