The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling

by Shoemaker, David

  He wasn’t as famous as his brother Bret; he wasn’t as famous as he might have become. But when he died, millions of fans the world over were heartbroken. Maybe that’s little solace for Owen’s family, but that’s something. Owen taught us that real life lay just beyond the ring. He succeeded within the parameters of wrestling’s pretend world, and that alone was enough to make him a star. What made him something greater was that all the while he helped us measure the distance between that pretend world and reality. Owen acknowledged the quotation marks and thrived between them. He could wink without destroying the illusion. His death—this is as real as real can be here—allowed us to see how indelicately we had been treating reality, how McMahon and the WWE and all its fans had become cynical and callous, and that in doing so we were missing the point. We weren’t traditionalists like the Hart clan, but we were guilty of the same misapprehension: We had forgotten the joy that is pro wrestling.

  MAIMING AND KILLING THEIR WAY TO STARDOM

  One night in 1952, two literal giants of the day were in a ring in Montreal. On one side was Yukon Eric, a beloved rustic warrior from the wilds of Fairbanks, Alaska. On the other was Walter (Wladek) Kowalski, one of the sport’s original monster heels. Eric was a sort of ur–Hillbilly Jim, a backwoods powerhouse with a sixty-six-inch chest and limbs like the huge logs he chopped in promotional photos. He wrestled barefoot, his jeans belted with a stretch of rope, and he often wore a sleeveless plaid shirt to the ring. He was a huge star in Canada, and a big enough name in the northeastern United States that A. J. Liebling wrote a piece about him in The New Yorker. If Eric was a jovial Norse god, Kowalski came from the mythos of vengeful Roman deities. Kowalski was 6-foot-7 and 290 pounds in his prime, all sinew and odd angles, a Frankenstein’s monster with anti-American patina. He wrestled Orville Brown for the world championship six months after his first match—a notable accomplishment in those olden days when record and accomplishment meant a great deal—and years later, in 1972, would become the first man in recorded wrestling history to pin Andre the Giant.

  Back to that night in 1952, though. The two rivals were deep into their match when Kowalski climbed the ropes to deliver his signature knee drop. His landing glanced the side of Eric’s head, accidentally clipped one of Eric’s cauliflowered ears—the grotesquely bloated and hardened ears were, and still are to some extent, a common repercussion of the grappling lifestyle—and tore it off the side of his head. At least in part, anyway—the legend is hard to sever from the reality. But he left Eric without at least part of an ear, and to an audience already disposed to loathe the putative foreigner, this was unforgivable. When the papers the next day confirmed the mauling, fan outrage grew to a fever pitch, and the promoter feared for Kowalski’s personal safety lest angered fans try to exact ear-for-an-ear revenge upon him on the street, so it was suggested to Kowalski that he visit Eric in the hospital to give the appearance of contrition.

  In real life, Kowalski (he was born Edward Spulnik but eventually legally changed his name to Walter Kowalski) was a kindhearted soul, an artist and photographer and reader of philosophy and eventually a vegan, notoriously incapable of keeping up kayfabe because he was too nice to be a heel in real life. He said he often dressed in disguise to go out in public so that he wouldn’t be harassed by fans, but it was probably just as much that he didn’t want to do any harassing himself. He would go on in his later years to be a teacher of the craft and a proselytizer for clean living. But he had a wry sense of humor to match the crooked smile on his ogre face.

  Kowalski agreed to go to the hospital—he and Eric were friends in real life after all—but there was a reporter from the paper there covering the plight of the local hero, and when Kowalski got into Eric’s hospital room, the sight of his “foe” in a ridiculous full-head bandage made him laugh. Eric laughed right along, but the sportswriter stationed outside the room reported only Kowalski’s laughter and framed it as the valedictory insult of a vicious monster. The headline the next day said that Kowalski showed up only to laugh in Eric’s face. Suddenly Kowalski had a new nickname—“Killer”—and a clearly articulated purpose in life. In a world of fake injury, inflicting such real catastrophic injury could in those days be a lifelong meal ticket. It wouldn’t be his only moment of semireal violence—in one match, he injured special referee Jack Dempsey, and once attacked Australian talk show host Don Lane.

  Of course, those were relatively minor incidents for the wrestling profession—it was only notable that Kowalski had directly caused the original sin against Eric in front of a paying audience, and from that garnered infamy that would label his every action thereafter as the act of a madman.

  One can’t consider that scene and not think of Mick Foley, the Modern-Era star most famous for graphic self-disregard: He’s thrown himself off the top of a steel cage and through tables and into barbed wire more times than one can—or should—count. Perhaps the most notable moment in establishing his star came in 1993 when—performing as his original character, Cactus Jack—he was wrestling Big Van Vader on a WCW tour of Europe in a brutal episode of a notoriously brutal feud. Early in the bout, Foley was (deliberately) caught in a “hangman,” his head tangled in the top two ropes and his body dangling below, and when he eventually freed himself, his ear was ripped off by the unusually taut ropes. He thereafter declined reconstructive surgery so as not to miss a big match, thinking WCW would build a story around his mutilation. He was wrong, but the mishap would eventually come to define the legend of Mick Foley—a visible, real-world symbol of all the brutality he had put his body through in service of the craft.

  The fame Kowalski and Foley garnered wasn’t unique, though it was severe. A couple of even more drastic instances exist, though they’re mostly lost to history. A lost ear—that’s a good gimmick. But death? In a world in which violence is carefully balanced between gory and vaudevillian, the question stands out in relief.

  On July 27, 1951, a lady wrestler named Ella Waldek was in a tag match in Ohio with Mae Young against Eva Lee and a newcomer named Janet Boyer Wolfe. Boyer Wolfe—who was purportedly being adopted by lady wrestling impresario Billy Wolfe (the widespread implication at the time was that Wolfe, a notorious seducer of his talent, was taking her into his harem despite her being underage)—had wrestled Waldek earlier that day and was complaining of a splitting headache. After a hard bodyslam from Waldek, Boyer shrunk to the corner and onto the ringside floor, where she promptly died. Waldek was distraught, but her career was buoyed: “Boy was I drawing some houses. Everybody wanted to see the stupid blonde who killed Janet Wolfe.”

  Ox Baker was maybe the Platonic ideal of the monster heel, a hulking brute with a bald head, a handlebar mustache, and thick eyebrows that shot upward in Hollywood Asian curls. He made his own shirts that gloated about recent victories or diabolical goals, iron-on letters on ringer tees that seem like hipster irony now but back then read as a kind of murderous commitment to the craft. His big move was a heart punch—Baker was a magnificent talker and a competent wrestler, but he was never a great athlete, so his finisher was more form than substance. But what provocative form it was. The move was so feared that it was sometimes banned for its lethality. Little wonder then that when, in June 1971, Alberto Torres died of a ruptured appendix after wrestling a tag team match against Baker, Baker’s heart punch was blamed. Baker himself was crushed, but when his paychecks started going up, he couldn’t help but see the potential value. A year later in Savannah, Baker was wrestling area promoter Ray Gunkel when Gunkel had a heart attack in the locker room after the match. Baker’s star was born of implicit murder. Wrestling magazines put Baker’s grimacing mug on their covers, proclaiming his deadliness, and the stories of ill-fated happenstance evolved into tales of gruesome in-ring murder.

  Of course, none of these three deaths is particularly famous. Even if they drew big money at the time, the continuing popularity of the sport makes impossible the glamorization of in-ring death. There are
a million other instances of wrestlers claiming to have inflicted the injuries of their foes, but for the most part “killing” is left to the empty threats of angry men with bad attitudes.

  YOKOZUNA

  Pro wrestling has long been a land of expansiveness, a playground for literally outsize men to act out metaphorically outsize tropes and storylines for the teleological gratification of the masses. Nevertheless, when a 500-pound man makes his way down the aisle, people stop to pay notice. Or, hey, maybe they’re a little bit distracted at just that moment by an argument over the relative merits of the feuding tag teams the Nasty Boys and Money Inc., as were announcers Vince McMahon and Curt Hennig when Yokozuna first set (bare) foot in the WWF ring—but once they noticed, they were suitably awed. Oozed McMahon: “Take a look at this! Take a look at the girth! Take a look at five hundred and five pounds of Yokozuna! This man is huge!”

  Led by longtime scoundrel manager Mr. Fuji, Yokozuna—né Rodney Anoa’i—was a behemoth even by the bloated standards of the WWF, for which a new plus-sized hire wasn’t exactly a rare occurrence. But gargantuan wrestlers—be they tall, fat, overmuscled, or some combination of the three—never seem to lose their luster in the eyes of the wrestling audience. Or, more precisely, in the eyes of McMahon and the other heirs of Barnum who run the shows and sign the paychecks.

  From almost the earliest days of the sport, in every fairground or vaudeville hall where a ring was erected and a crowd assembled, there were semiathletic butterballs on hand to shock and awe the audience with their mind-boggling bulk, put on display like their carnival sideshow forebears. These men, though—from Haystacks Calhoun and Gorilla Monsoon to the One Man Gang and King Kong Bundy—didn’t just suit up for the gawking. They whooped and jeered, and once the battle commenced, they punched and chopped and (usually at the end) fell down heavily upon their opponents, the spectacle of their king-sizedness now palpably painful and almost interactive. Still freaks in a sense, they’d nevertheless upped the ante considerably. They weren’t just the sideshow—they were the circus.

  And in 1992, from this esteemed tradition came Yokozuna, the wrestling sumo.* A few things to clarify about Rodney Anoa’i up front: He was not Japanese, as was implied by the flag that he toted into the ring (he was Samoan and was announced as being from the South Pacific Islands or Polynesia, though you could hardly hear it over the traditional Japanese music that attended his arrival); at the beginning of his career, he was probably not the full 500 pounds at which he was introduced (he was rumored to have worn padded tights to increase his lower-torso bulk), though he vastly exceeded that mark by the end of his career; and he was not Akebono, the famed Hawaiian sumo wrestler, as was (and is) often mistakenly assumed.*

  Yokozuna may have been none of these things, but he was monster enough to make up for it. In some ways, his own backstory was even more interesting than his fake one. Anoa’i was the nephew of Afa and Sika, the famed Wild Samoans, the Polynesian antecedents of a massive clan of grapplers, including Rikishi, Samu, Rosey, Umaga, and, by association, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. (Afa and Sika considered “High Chief” Peter Maivia, the Rock’s grandfather, their honorary uncle.) After training with Afa and Sika, Anoa’i wrestled in Mexico and Japan to hone his craft, and did a stint in the AWA under the name “Great Kokina.” Wearing the traditional (wrestling) garb of Pacific Islanders—the three-quarter-length tights and bare feet, with a Troy Polamalu–esque shock of curly, black hair—Kokina was playing to his heritage, but as the modifier made clear, the emphasis was already on his immensity.

  Vince McMahon, always a fan of the physical oddity, soon came calling. And in his characteristically idiosyncratic way, he repackaged Anoa’i as Yokozuna, a sumo grand champion and nominally Japanese powerhouse that set a new bar for racial caricature. Mr. Fuji, who was already a one-stop shop for Asian stereotypes, soon traded in his black suit, bow tie, and bowler hat for a formal kimono, and he would accompany Yokozuna to the ring tossing salt from a wooden bucket. They were escorted by geisha girls for higher-profile matches. Yoko would scream in pidgin Japanese as he bullied his opponents, and his matches almost always culminated with him yelling “Banzai!” and jumping off the second rope, butt-first, onto his victim’s chest.*

  Yokozuna soon competed in the Royal Rumble and won—what with it being difficult to throw him over the top rope and all, an annual theme with the various superheavyweights in that match—thus earning himself a heavyweight title shot at WrestleMania IX. (In the meantime, he would reinforce his anti-American credentials by squashing “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan, second-tier symbol of American jingoism.) At WrestleMania, Yokozuna competed against Bret “The Hitman” Hart in probably the best technical match of Yoko’s career. When Hart somehow wrenched Yoko’s tree-trunk legs in the Sharpshooter leg-lock, his signature move, the challenger’s fate seemed all but sealed. But no: The nefarious Fuji threw salt into Hart’s eyes, blinding him and leaving him open to a Banzai Drop and defeat at Yokozuna’s hands.

  Yokozuna was the champion, but his reign wouldn’t last long enough for him to savor it. Backstage politics were the real victor of the day: Hulk Hogan had returned to the WWF from a leave of absence.* The previously ascendant Hart was viewed anew as merely a stopgap champion, and Yoko too was simply a transitional champion, a means of taking the strap away from one good guy and giving it to another.*

  When Hogan stormed to the ring to protest the match’s decision and to attend to his “friend” Bret (because in those days just before the Attitude Era took hold, all good guys were de facto friends), Mr. Fuji presumptively challenged Hogan to a match, right then and there. Hogan accepted, temporarily (and incongruously) abandoning Bret’s cause and ongoing blindness, and defeated Yoko in a matter of minutes. Hulkamania was seemingly restored, and despite his function as the most transitional of champions, Yokozuna continued on as the first monstrous opponent on Hogan’s dance card. The two titans feuded on until the King of the Ring event. There, Hogan and Yoko battled, and in parallel to WrestleMania, the hero seemed poised to win. And again, it wasn’t to be: A Japanese “photographer” situated outside the ring leaned in for a shot—presumably he was put there by Fuji—and the camera exploded in Hogan’s face. The Hulkster was disoriented, and once again Yokozuna pulled out a victory—and regained the championship—thanks to Mr. Fuji’s conniving. As can probably be surmised from the relative oddity of Hogan losing the title, Hogan was again leaving the WWF to “pursue other interests.” Yokozuna and Fuji boasted about putting an end to Hulkamania once and for all.* When Hogan had beat him to regain the title, Yokozuna seemed secondary to the wattage of Hogan’s star. Whether he had grown into something bigger is questionable, but he was all they had.

  After winning the title this time, Fuji and Yokozuna decided to celebrate in high style, by hosting a bodyslam challenge on the deck of the USS Intrepid—an incredibly hokey scene that culminated in a newly heroic Lex Luger, who had until then been a preening narcissist,* arriving via helicopter and slamming the sumo giant, thus igniting Yoko’s next feud. Bobby “The Brain” Heenan, who was the color commentator for the telecast, insisted that the bodyslam was really more of a hip toss, and he had an argument. Whatever it was, it wasn’t wildly impressive. Despite Luger’s chiseled physique, Yoko was probably more than 600 pounds by this point and unwieldily assembled.

  As a villain, Yoko was a pure product of America’s bizarre cultural moment in the 1980s and early ’90s, when our uncertain geopolitics left Hollywood to ponder the potential ascendance of the Asian workforce with its usual lack of deftness. I refer, of course, to movies like Gung Ho and Rising Sun, which were premised on the notion of the Japanese as menacing exotics with queerly dainty methods, here to destroy America from within. Sometimes geopolitics breaks kayfabe, as with the Sgt. Slaughter-as-Iraqi-sympathizer storyline of 1990. Yokozuna was a part of this tradition as well, if a few years behind the curve, and so in juxtaposition to such a foreign threat, all Lex needed was
a new pair of stars-and-stripes briefs to formalize his rise to Hogan’s place in wrestling’s pantheon of true patriots.

  Yokozuna and Luger feuded until the Survivor Series, when Luger’s “All-Americans” team took on Yoko’s “Foreign Fanatics.” The xenophobic megamatch ended awkwardly, with Yokozuna retreating and All-American Undertaker pinning the overmatched Fanatic Ludvig Borga (yes, the Deadman is apparently a true patriot). The fallout was a new feud between Yokozuna and the Undertaker that culminated in a casket match*—an Undertaker staple—that Yoko managed to win, but only with heaps of outside interference.* For a monster, he was not proving himself to be exactly unstoppable in championship matches.

  At WrestleMania X, Yokozuna fought both Luger and Hart, separately. He first defeated Luger (again with assistance, this time courtesy of special guest referee Curt Hennig) but then lost cleanly to Bret (who, in the interest of competitive fairness, had fought his brother Owen earlier in the night). Bret (and the belt) quickly moved on. Perhaps it was a long-overdue moment of awareness on the part of McMahon and his writers; that Yokozuna, a supremely unpopular foreigner, was allowed to reign atop the WWF for as long as he did might have spoken to the thinned WWF roster during a period of talent migration to WCW, but more likely it was just an incredibly wrongheaded lapse. Unlike many other promoters, WWF has usually tended toward the hero-champion model—contra the Ric Flair–style villain-champion model—and it felt as if the WWF wanted desperately to put someone in that role, but the fans rejected Luger, and McMahon himself didn’t quite trust Hart. And so Yokozuna was left to his minor reign of terror. Regardless, once Hart had reclaimed the title, the WWF spent little time in removing Yokozuna from contention.