It wasn’t the first time workers’ rights had become a going issue in the pro wrestling world.
In May 1999, the WWF had a mock labor uprising on Monday Night Raw. The members of the Corporate Ministry were in the ring, filling it roughly from rope to rope. It was a valedictory moment for the new diabolical faction, which had formed just four days earlier, an unholy amalgamation of the Undertaker’s pseudosatanic Ministry of Darkness and Shane McMahon’s Corporation. They were interrupted, as in-ring orations so often are, by four familiar faces: Mick “Mankind” Foley, the Big Show, Test, and Ken Shamrock, all former associates of the Corporation.
They each held an oversized two-by-four—more a blue-collar metaphor than a physical threat—and announced the formation of an opposition group called the Union. Their beef was not strictly physical; yes, they wanted to beat up the Corporate Ministry, but the Union’s complaint was broader. Since the Corporation had formed, its members had been mistreating their foes and steering opportunities toward cronies. Now, by negotiating a merger with Undertaker’s Ministry, the new faction looked like it could dominate WWF matchmaking for the foreseeable future. The Union’s goal wasn’t just to settle a fight but also to protect its members’ jobs. Who knows what events in (real-life) labor relations inspired wrestling writers to go all Marxist, but the on-screen “movement” landed with a thud. The Union feuded with lesser members of the Corporate Ministry while bigger stars the Rock and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin remained above the fray. Before long, the entire storyline was scrapped after Foley went out with an injury.
That either of these stories was even allowed to exist, however, is shocking. The wrestling industry has never seen—nor permitted—any form of unionization by the talent.
Despite the fact that WWE wrestlers are, by definition, full-time employees, WWE designates them as independent contractors. This is “so they don’t have to pay social security and the wrestler has to pay 15 percent self-employment tax,” former WWF mainstay Jesse “The Body” Ventura told Howard Stern in 2012. “How are they self-employed when you’re signed exclusively, you can’t work for nobody else, they tell you when and where you’ll work? They can totally control your life, and yet they’ll call you an independent contractor.” To some degree, wrestlers’ contracts are this way for historical reasons. In the Territorial Era of the 1970s and ’80s, wrestlers were indeed independent contractors and operated as such, but the WWF/WWE absorbed that template when it expanded its territory nation- and worldwide. Now there’s no doubt that wrestlers’ status as “independent contractors” should be seen as a capitalist strong-arm tactic. WWE and its shareholders are surely aware that they’re no longer operating a regional sideshow. Likewise, they’re aware, if not by common sense then by the writ of their own contracts, that the wrestlers they employ are not “independent contractors” any more than LeBron James or Peyton Manning are independent contractors for the Miami Heat and Denver Broncos.
Not that it matters in real life. The walkout and the Union angle were remarkably liberal on-screen performances in an industry fully controlled by right-leaning, antiregulation capitalists.
Notably absent from the walkout were the headline good guys—Cena, Punk, Randy Orton, Sheamus, and Kelly Kelly. It’s hard not to notice the similarities between this development and the storyline years before, when, despite a common foe in the Corporate Ministry, the Rock and Austin didn’t associate themselves with the Union. They were already situated atop wrestling’s pecking order, and factions like the Union would serve only to elevate less-prominent performers. As is often the case in real life, the top dogs felt little need to unionize. They found no common cause with the Union’s plea for better working conditions.
For all the on-screen labor unrest, however, the real wrestling industry hasn’t faced a serious unionization threat. Jesse Ventura tried to organize a union in the 1980s but, according to The New York Times, “found it hard to find wrestlers willing to join him.” When he later sued the WWF to reclaim royalties he thought were owed him (Ventura eventually won a more than $800,000 judgment), it was revealed in the proceedings that Hulk Hogan ratted out his unionization scheme to Vince McMahon. It’s hard to imagine a more blatant example of a top star protecting his status by sabotaging collective action.
There are rumors that famed wrestler and G.I. Joe figure Sgt. Slaughter tried to unionize—or at least agitated for better working conditions—prior to his 1984 departure from the WWF. (And, inevitably, there are rumors that his return as an anti-American villain was payback.)
In 2008, three wrestlers—Raven, Chris Kanyon, and Mike Sanders—sued WWE for “cheating them out of health care and other benefits” and insisted that the “independent contractor” designation was a sham since WWE had “virtually complete dominion and control over its wrestlers.” A federal judge threw out the case, supposedly because the statute of limitations had expired, but this case and others over time have proven that WWE has little to fear from legal proceedings.
Raven and company were essentially blackballed for turning on their employer, but at least their case brought the issue to light. While promoting The Wrestler, director Darren Aronofsky spoke at length about pro wrestling’s labor issues: “The problem starts with the fact that they’re not organized and they’re not unionized,” he said. “There’s really no reason why these guys are not in SAG. They’re as much screen actors as stuntmen. If not more. They’re in front of a camera performing and doing stunts, and they should have that protection. . . . Or, if they’re not even on TV, the ring is a theater. So they’re not just screen actors, they’re theater actors. They’re performers. They should have health insurance and they should be protected.”
Former longtime WWF champ Bret Hart has become a vocal pro-union voice in recent years. “I don’t think that wrestlers will get any type of support until they get a union,” he has said. “I think that any wrestler that says that they don’t need a union is just a sheep that doesn’t have enough brains to know that they do need a union.” Of course, this comes from a guy who probably could have done more to help the formation of a union in his heyday than anyone.
When John Cena appeared on Larry King Live in 2007, King asked if he thought wrestling needed a union. Unsurprisingly, Cena demurred: “I believe that professional wrestlers, WWE-specific and across, they all know what they’re getting into. Nobody is forcing them to get into the ring. It’s a job that they all want to do.” According to Cena, the question of unionization “won’t ever be answered, because I don’t think it’ll ever be asked.”
Well, at least not in real life.
CHRIS BENOIT AND EDDIE GUERRERO
March 14, 2004, was a day wrestling fans will remember forever and that the wrestling establishment would like to forget. It was WrestleMania XX at Madison Square Garden—the company’s two-decade anniversary return to the site of the original ’Mania, the mecca of pro wrestling in the United States. Eddie Guerrero beat Kurt Angle to retain the WWE Championship* and, in the last match of the night, Chris Benoit defeated Shawn Michaels and Triple H to win the World Heavyweight Championship. After Benoit’s win, his real-life buddy Guerrero came out to the ring and the two champs celebrated together while confetti dropped from the rafters. The crowd went wild. Three of the era’s biggest stars—Triple H, Michaels, and Angle—had been felled, backseated at the biggest show of the year in favor of two undersized also-rans.
Guerrero and Benoit were booked as the good-guy underdogs, sure, but their win evinces a stranger, more surprising reality: They won despite the fact that—nay, because—they were favorites of the wrestling egghead commentariat. These fans—the meta fans, the Internet intelligentsia—understand the backstage workings that average fans don’t. They treasure history and reality as much as the storylines, and they prize the qualities that mainstream wrestling’s decision-makers frequently overlook: charisma over size, in-ring ability over physique. And, of course, they a
ll consider themselves smarter than Vince McMahon and all the promoters who have come along to challenge him. Sometimes, they have a point.
Guerrero and Benoit were favored by the “smart marks” because they traveled through Japan and Mexico to hone their craft, and because they went to ECW and showcased their “pure” wrestling styles in stark opposition to the hardcore brawls that ECW was known for. Back in those days, while the golden-tanned beefcakes of the WWF and WCW were broadcast to every cable TV household in America, Benoit and Guerrero were known only to the lucky few who stayed up late to watch ECW and the guys who traded videocassettes of independent and foreign promotions. To name-check either of them was a sort of secret handshake for wrestling fan purity, a gnostic cult growing in the shadow of the WWF’s mainstream religion.
In hindsight, their fame was sort of a Pyrrhic victory. Benoit and Guerrero became legendary for precisely the same reason they hadn’t yet become superstars: They didn’t fit the mold. They were as highly skilled as they were undersized compared to most WWF wrestlers of the ’90s (or most other decades, for that matter). They were great conveyors of theatrics during their matches but, particularly in the case of Benoit, they weren’t compelling actors in backstage sketches and prematch promos. Neither had a face that could grace the cover of Tiger Beat. Hell, for the bulk of their careers, neither face would even move copies of Pro Wrestling Illustrated.
What seemed to make Benoit and Guerrero great was the fact that they weren’t given an easy path to stardom. They were both hired by WCW when, during the Monday Night Wars, WCW expanded its flagship show to three hours and needed talent to fill the time. Guerrero and Benoit were poached by the WWF after they overachieved in WCW. Even then, their ascent to the top of the card was never assured, and the paths they took there were anything but linear. Despite the fanfare that accompanied their signings, the WWF didn’t seem eager to bet the bank on either of them.
This, then, is the core of the “smart” wrestling fan’s adoration for Benoit, Guerrero, and their ilk: In an unreal world of fake rivalries, fake villains, and fake odds to be overcome, Benoit and Guerrero were real-life heroes who deserved success but were held back by the most dastardly foe imaginable—the establishment, the guardians of the pro wrestling status quo. When both men were pushed to the top in early 2004, they were beloved by the average fan because they were scripted to be underdog heroes, overcoming great odds to achieve their lifelong dreams. But at the same time, they were even more beloved by the smart fans because this whole thing was so unlikely. Benoit and Guerrero were never supposed to be scripted as the big winners in the first place.
The first thing you need to know is that Chris Benoit doesn’t exist. That’s what WWE would have you believe, anyway. His matches are scrubbed from DVDs, his name largely whitewashed from the WWE record books, despite the fact that he’s a five-time U.S. Champion, a “triple crown” champion.* He was WCW Champion and (WWE) World Heavyweight Champion, and was slated to become the champ of the WWE-owned ECW brand, but that never happened, because—well, we’ll get to that later. The important thing is that he’s WWE’s forgotten man; the only evidence of his existence are old VHS tapes at yard sales, old wrestling magazines at flea markets, and “out of stock” DVD listings on amazon.com.
Eddie Guerrero, on the other hand, is a name steeped in legacy. His father, Gory Guerrero, was a legendary wrestler in Mexico and the southwestern United States, and his sons all had wrestling careers of significant repute—the modern viewer might recall that Hector achieved a special kind of pro wrestling ignominy for portraying Lazer Tron* in WCW and the dancing turkey the Gobbledy Gooker in the WWF, and Chavo Sr. appeared on WWF television in his dotage as the second to his son, Chavo Jr., who was Eddie’s nephew (even though he was only a couple of years younger than Eddie). But in the Territorial Era, and in the fraternity of wrestling, the Guerrero name was famous. Chavo, who frequently teamed with Eddie during his heyday, is still an active wrestler, and Eddie’s widow, Vickie, is an active player on WWE television.*
Eddie was born in El Paso, where his father promoted shows, and as a teenager he and Chavo Jr. would wrestle during intermissions. After a spell on scholarship for collegiate wrestling at the University of New Mexico, Eddie started his professional career in the CMLL promotion in Mexico, where he benefited from his lineage and excelled because of his talent. He was paired with El Hijo del Santo—literally “the son of El Santo,” “El Santo” being Mexico’s most famous wrestler, with whom Gory had famously teamed. Eddie later teamed with Art Barr, a sort of minor league Ponce de León of the North American wrestling circuit, one of the first prominent gringo stars in the Modern Era to find a place for himself in the Mexican wrestling ranks and popularize the Mexican style in the United States.* Barr and Guerrero became fast friends, and they were soon the most bankable heels in Mexico, known as “La Pareja del Terror.” They later expanded their posse into a group called Los Gringos Locos,* which relied, obviously, on Guerrero’s American birthright, despite his obvious lineage not just from Mexico but also from the Mexican wrestling world. It was a tension that would play out again in his career, though often in reverse, as he would be cast, either literally or implicitly, as a Mexican nationalist through much of his career.
Art Barr died with his young son in his arms—of undetermined causes—at his home in Oregon on November 23, 1994, at the age of twenty-eight. Guerrero and Barr had purportedly just been offered a contract from ECW. Eddie took up Barr’s Frog Splash finishing move in homage to his fallen partner. He took it to New Japan, then to ECW, and then to WCW.
The thing you always hear about Chris Benoit’s childhood is that he idolized the Dynamite Kid. That automatically puts him squarely within a unique quadrant of fandom; most kids of his generation would have hewed toward the Dynamite Kid’s tag team partner, Davey Boy Smith, the taller, better-looking, brawnier of the two—and the one, not coincidentally, who went on to a high-profile career in America as a singles wrestler. The Dynamite Kid was little, particularly for the strictures of WWF television in those days, and although he was immensely talented, talent as such isn’t always what the average fan registers; you can tell when a match is lousy, maybe, but not so much who’s at fault for the ineptitude.
Benoit met his idol as a kid and told him he was going to be just like him. His dad got him a weight set to reward his ambition, and Benoit started training in his teens as a wrestler—driving hours to the Hart family’s Dungeon to learn the craft. “Dynamite” Chris Benoit debuted in Stampede Wrestling in November 1985, when Chris was eighteen. The nickname was more indicator than modifier; he didn’t idolize Billington by that point so much as he channeled him, move for move, down to his physique and the very way he carried himself. After Stampede closed its doors, Benoit followed the Dynamite Kid’s path to Japan, where he eventually donned a mask as the “Pegasus Kid” and achieved a not-insignificant level of notoriety.
In 1994 in ECW, the Benoit mythos was first really allowed to blossom. He was nicknamed the “Crippler” after he fake-injured Rocco Rock (half of the Public Enemy tag team), and the moniker was solidified when he legitimately broke Sabu’s neck in a match. It was a matter of miscommunication rather than brutality—Benoit slammed Sabu with the intention of him landing on his chest, but Sabu twisted to try to land on his back and ended up falling on his head. Nevertheless, Paul Heyman ran with it, and Benoit’s mantle as one of wrestling’s Legitimately Dangerous Persons was established. His in-ring style was as unrelenting as Billington’s, but it’s worth noting that Benoit wasn’t the real-life bully that Billington had been. For Benoit, the Dynamite Kid ring style was a tribute but more importantly a brutal affectation, a means of proving his legitimacy to the fans. If his style wasn’t intended to wreak havoc on the bodies of himself and his opponents, it was nonetheless a side effect.
In 1995, Benoit’s U.S. visa expired,* and he went back to New Japan wrestling, which led—via a talent exchange prog
ram—to WCW. Benoit had wrestled a couple of matches there before, but his re-debut, as part of the New Japan posse, befits his career. Along with Guerrero and Chris Jericho and Rey Mysterio Jr. and others, he was part of an accidental insurgent movement in the wrestling world, a meteor shower of undersized, mega-talented grapplers from the outer edges of the wrestling world—Japan, Mexico, ECW—whose primary purpose was to fill up programming time as WCW expanded its television presence. Their introduction was propelled more by necessity than desire. Wrestling in America is equal parts athletic endeavor and morality play, its stars as much character actors performing teeth-clenched monologues as acrobats, and when Guerrero and Benoit debuted in WCW, they were only given half of the wrestler’s playbook from which to operate: They didn’t ever talk. Despite their purity and devotion to the craft, they were hardly more “pro wrestlers” in the modern sense than was a manager or announcer or valet. They were empty space occupied.
Of the troupe brought in to fill WCW Monday Nitro’s first hour with mostly story-free product over which the announcers could hype the more significant happenings of the later parts of the show, Benoit and Guerrero—along with diminutive flyer Rey Mysterio Jr.—were the ones most fans would have picked out for stardom. Nevertheless, success didn’t come easily. Benoit was the first to graduate to the A-team, as he was picked to be a member of a reformed Four Horsemen stable, alongside Brian Pillman and mainstays Ric Flair and Arn Anderson. Benoit was the brooding, silent bruiser of the bunch, often seen leering in the background of Horsemen promos in a rumpled suit and collarless dress shirt.
When Pillman left WCW in 1996, Benoit was fitted into his feud against Dungeon of Doom ringleader—and backstage booker—Kevin Sullivan. Despite his involvement in the “booker man” stunt with Pillman—or perhaps lending credence to its veracity—Sullivan was about as old-school as anybody in those days, and above all he insisted on the wrestlers keeping up the facade of kayfabe. So when the storyline began to turn on Benoit stealing away Sullivan’s valet, Woman (also known by her real name, Nancy), Sullivan demanded that Benoit keep up the act in real life by traveling with Nancy as if they were an item—this despite the fact that Sullivan was actually married to Nancy in real life. As such things often go, life imitated art,* and Benoit and Nancy were soon an item. (Eventually, Nancy divorced Sullivan and married Benoit.) Unsurprisingly, Sullivan and Benoit’s matches were gruelingly violent, even taking into account that these were two of wrestling’s most famous stiff workers. Benoit said that he respected Sullivan for never taking any liberties with him in the ring. That’s one of wrestling’s most sacred bylaws: Your safety is consistently in the hands of your opponent, so any liberty taken in the ring—any potato punch to the noggin, any submission hold applied too tightly—threatens the very foundation of the pro wrestling art. And Sullivan was too old-school to take a cheap shot at Benoit. Even so, it’s hard to watch their matches and not see the violence as more than allusion; if Sullivan wasn’t exacting revenge, he was definitely seeking therapy in violence.
The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling Page 31