Pro-Wrestling Grappling With Good And Bad: Pro Wrestling, Adapting Its Dramas to Our Morally Ambiguous Times Page Pro-Wrestling Grappling With Good And Bad: Pro Wrestling, Adapting Its Dramas to Our Morally Ambiguous Times Page
Last updated 16 September 1999
ST. LOUIS--The last time The Rock came here, Josh Sitzes is explaining, the crowd hated him. They booed him, taunted him, called him "trailer park trash."
"Now, look," says Sitzes, gesturing around the Kiel Center, filled to capacity with 22,000 professional wrestling fans. The Rock stands in a corner of the ring, high on a turnbuckle, his newly won World Wrestling Federation championship belt held aloft over his hairless, buff body. He bellows at the crowd. The crowd howls in appreciation.
"People hated him, but then the WWF started calling him 'The People's Champion' and got everyone to like him," Josh says. He shrugs in a world-weary manner, like an amused cynic trying to explain the Meaning of Life. He is 11.
That's today's pro wrestling: One day you're the villain; two weeks later, you're the good guy. Or vice versa. Whatever the fans want. Wrestlers waffle like politicians. Every match is a plebiscite. And, like a political party trying to seize a Congress or a governor's mansion, the wrestling organizations keep a finger in the wind.
In the '50s and '60s, pro wrestling fought its way out of tiny, chicken-wire Southern clubs and hit TV. In those days -- the era of Gorgeous George and Dusty Rhodes -- good guy wrestlers stayed good for the bulk of their careers and the bad guys, "the heels," remained despicable. It was a black-and-white age of Kennedy vs. Khrushchev. Of Boris and Natasha vs. Rocky and Bullwinkle. The wrestlers, like the other two-dimensional actors, fit the times.
Forty years later, pro wrestlers remain moral combatants, heroically sized proxies for good and evil. But two changes have occurred: Pro wrestling has skyrocketed in popularity and these days seem a lot grayer. No one believes a character is all good or all bad all of the time.
"It behooves us, business-wise, to listen to our audience and give them what they want," says Vince McMahon, 53, owner and chairman of the World Wrestling Federation, a private, fourth-generation family business based in Stamford, Conn. "They are far more sophisticated now than they've ever been. This is a complex world. To have the whole black-and-white issue jammed down their throat -- they'd find that boring."
McMahon's bitter rival is Eric Bischoff, 43, president of World Championship Wrestling, owned by Turner Broadcasting System. The two organizations are headlocked in a weekly struggle atop the cable ratings (the WWF on USA Network, the WCW on TBS and TNT). Bischoff, a former wrestler, has challenged McMahon to a match, which he has thus far declined. But both know how to market their product in today's murky sea of morality.
"For example, there was never any doubt that John Wayne was a good guy," Bischoff says. "He wouldn't step over that invisible line. Now, look at the characters Arnold Schwarzenegger plays. He's the hero in films, but part of his being a hero is doing things that bad guys wouldn't do. That is a reflection of our culture, even more than pro wrestling is."
Despite William Bennett's outraged writings, despite V-chips and Web filters, "good" and "evil" are almost antique terms in much of our popular culture. They are too judgmental. Actions today are either "appropriate" or "inappropriate."
McMahon chooses a political parallel: The impeachment hearings underway against President Clinton.
"We know all too well that this particular president has a few flaws. Are those significant enough flaws such that he shouldn't be president? That's for each and every one of us to decide," he says.
The comparisons between wrestling and politics have come easily since former wrestler Jesse "The Body" Ventura's surprise election to the Minnesota governorship on Nov. 3. And wags have already joked about the new governor breaking a budget deadlock by pile-driving the opposition leadership. Indeed, Ventura may actually suffer a credibility drop by switching from professional wrestling to professional politics.
But the deeper comparisons are the more compelling: Like politicians, pro wrestlers provide a tabula rasa on which a substantial number of Americans impose their ideas of heroism and villainy. Wrestling shows captured three of the top five (and seven of the top 10) in last week's cable TV ratings, with the No. 2-rated "WWF War Zone" seen by 4.2 million viewers (by comparison, the top-rated show on broadcast TV, "ER," was seen by 27.9 million viewers). While "mega-events," such as a Mike Tyson fight or a Spice Girls concert, still top pay-per-view ratings, wrestling matches follow close behind and are consistent earners, with both organizations broadcasting one per month. Here in St. Louis, on a recent Sunday evening, fans have paid anywhere from $15 to $200 per seat to watch one of the WWF's five yearly major tournaments, one of about 225 bouts each organization holds per year.
And why not?
In an age of sullied, disappointing icons, what public figure is fit to be a hero anymore? Intern-fondling pols? Till-diving evangelists? Blood-doping Olympians?
Enter the pro wrestler, a real-life action figure. The wrestler is, perhaps, the only athlete who operates in an atmosphere of intellectual honesty. There is no pretense anymore as to whether pro wrestling is real -- McMahon himself testified in court that it's not a sport. Pro wrestling is a carefully scripted exercise in choreography, wherein heavily muscled athletes engage in a violent-looking pas de deux to a preordained outcome, determined by fan preference. Sure, they smash each other in the head with folding chairs and occasionally draw their own blood with miniature bits of razor embedded in finger or wrist tape, but none of that has anything to do with the outcome.
"What we do is create emotion," Bischoff says. "We make people laugh and angry and satisfy their need for redemption."
Bischoff acknowledges that he traffics in a complex psychology, layered with irony. In an era where "amateur" college athletes are compensated with $80,000 college educations and pro baseball players throw spitballs and cork their bats, pro wrestling offers a sort of twisted honesty.
"We are not a fake sport," Bischoff says. "We are a real entertainment."
Perhaps Bischoff should hire Josh Sitzes as his corporate spokesman.
"At school one day, my music teacher said, 'Wrestling's fake,' " recalls Josh, a stocky, green-eyed lad wearing a blue Orlando Magic basketball jersey and overlong denim shorts. He may only be a sixth-grader, but when it comes to wrestling, he is an old soul. "I said, 'It's not fake, it's not real -- it's fixed.'
"I said, 'Let me take a steel chair and smash you on the head and see if you think it's fake,' and he said, 'Well, I don't think I could take that,' and I said, 'Well, there you go.' "
There is a hard purity to wrestling's naked opportunism. Unlike politicians, who profess to believe in certain values and often sell out, pro wrestling has only two beliefs: to thrill and to make money. If it fails to do either, the fan is, at worst, bored. But not betrayed.
Josh and his mother, Chris Sitzes, 38, both of nearby Arnold, Mo., are serious pro wrestling fans. They travel to shows all around the Midwest, hanging around hotel lobbies to chat up their favorite grapplers. She is involved with a number of local minor-league pro wrestling organizations; Josh aspires to be a wrestler himself.
Unlike many his age, who say they like pro wrestlers because of the violence involved, Josh finds the heroes within the cartoon characters.
"They're the nicest people you'd ever want to meet," Josh says. "I idolize most of them. They teach you so much."
Like what?
"Like, do not smoke, do not chew, do not drink," he says. He's quick to upbraid WWF wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin, the 250-pound, shaven-headed superstar who sometimes guzzles beer in the ring.
"I don't think he should do that in front of kids," Josh says, perhaps forgetting that he, himself, is a kid. But then he eases off, remembering another lesson that pro wrestling has taught him:
"But if that makes him money, then that's okay."
Chris Sitzes knows her son is up too late on a Sunday night, and reminds him to get into bed as soon as he gets home -- she's staying behind to talk to some of her wrestler friends, while another adult takes Josh home.
"I think they're excellent role models for kids," she says. The thoughtful men behind the fake-blood-spewing, crotch-grabbing characters they play, she means. McMahon, on the other hand, fairly spits out the phrase "role model," calling it a "passe" idea nowadays.
"The faces they have in the ring don't matter," Chris Sitzes says. "It doesn't reflect the people they are."
It's all a harmless night out for Patti Hays, 31, from New Baden, Ill., just across the Mississippi River. The hair on her 5-year-old son Ryan's head is a blond downy fuzz, just growing back from Halloween. She shaved it all off -- at his request -- so he could be a li'l Stone Cold for trick-or-treating.
"It's just entertainment for me," she says. "I don't think whether you're good or bad in the ring really matters."
Maybe not to the wrestlers, who are highly paid, professional actors and athletes, with salaries starting in the low six figures and rising into the millions. They can separate their characters from their daily, go-to-the-grocery-store personalities. But it's not clear that pro wrestling's bread-and-butter fan base -- hormone-mad teenage boys and rowdy twenty-somethings -- can or wants to make that separation.
Just before the match, Bruce Canan, 46, a health care worker from St. Louis, is herding his three boys to their seats. He says pro wrestling has moved uptown from the old days -- 10 years ago -- when most fans "didn't look like they were from Earth." Nevertheless, a quick scan around the arena suggests that much of the crowd is not here for ironic reasons. Black is the color of choice. Another popular item is the Stone Cold Steve Austin foam middle finger -- an obscene variation of the "We're No. 1" big foam hand. Children everywhere are wagging them.
"We're not kiddie entertainment," McMahon says. "We want to have the image of the Bad Boys of TV. We relish that image. We want people to say, 'Omigod. I heard they're going way too far.' That's going to increase viewership and they're going to get hooked on the story lines. When they tune us in, they'll see we don't go way too far -- there's no murder, no rape, no robbery. How bad can it be?"
Indeed, there are no capital crimes committed during the St. Louis "Survivor Series Deadly Game," a single-elimination tournament with more than a dozen matches. But there is plenty of boorish behavior and obscenity -- and that's just from the fans.
A row of young boys -- younger than Josh Sitzes -- calls the wrestlers sexually derogatory names with an enthusiasm that makes it clear they've just learned the words. One father yells at a fan standing in front of him: "Sit the [expletive] down!"
His daughter, maybe 7 years old, sweetly parrots: "Sit the [expletive] down!"
Father claps a hand over daughter's mouth. "Don't yell that!" he admonishes. Too late.
After the match, a gang of grad school friends is walking out. They, too, are vaguely troubled by the sexuality and profanity that's suffused the evening.
"It's supposed to be about bad versus good," says Tami David, 25, a graduate student at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. "I wonder what the target population is. It's not for children anymore." Nevertheless, WWF action figures and other merchandise can be found in any toy store.
The others agree, remembering wrestlers of their youth, such as the late, gentle Andre the Giant, the 7-foot, 500-pound Frenchman. Despite his formidable size and fearsome presence, he was beloved by fans as a Good Guy. Nowadays, the Giant would just be a big bore. Wrestlers have a shelf life, and switch from good to bad depending on what the fickle fans demand and how long their marketability lasts.
Exhibit A: Hulk Hogan, one of the WWF's first superstars, used to wear cheerful yellow and tell kids to say their prayers and take their vitamins. Since then, he's defected to rival WCW, donned black and adopted an outlaw persona -- Hollywood Hogan.
Jason Herman, 25, also a grad student at Mizzou, reflects on the night's champion, the Rock:
"He was bad two weeks ago, now he's good," he says. Then predicts: "Now he'll go back to bad."
What the hell. It's just a show, right?
Big, Bruising Role Models
There was no such confusion two weeks ago at MCI Center, where Bill Goldberg -- WCW heavyweight champion -- spent 2 1/2 hours signing autographs and promoting a December wrestling show at the arena. Like Austin, Goldberg is a monstrous mound of man -- 6-foot-3, 290 pounds -- with a shaved head. But Goldberg is a Good Guy.
Some high school students from Mount Vernon are among the more than 900 fans who've stood in line to get Goldberg's signature, to shake hands, to compare fist size. For them, Goldberg is Da Man.
"He's a role model for us," says Andrew Marek, 17.
"You don't see these guys spitting on the refs in the ring," begins Brandon Zerante, 17, listing a lineup of pro sports malefactors. "You've got Roberto Alomar -- spitting. You've got Chris Webber -- drugs . . . "
"Allen Iverson," interjects Ben Wells, 16.
" . . . Allen Iverson -- drugs. Whatever. Other pro athletes have forgotten it's about entertaining."
Inside, after the autograph session, Goldberg, 31, politely eats two sandwiches, his massive paws making a baguette look like a bread stick. He thinks of himself as a role model -- as a Jew, he has refused to wrestle on the High Holy Days. Not because he is observant, he says, but because it would offend his Jewish fans.
But already, some fans are getting impatient with him. A sign at a recent bout read: "It's getting Old, berg." He's been a pro wrestler for only a year and a half. But he knows, one day, he'll have to turn bad. The market demands it. It's given him pause.
"I've posed that question to myself many times. I hate to say I don't know what I'll do," he says, his voice a quiet growl, like an idling tractor. "I'm going to have to ask Hogan, because he was a good guy for years and he made that change and he hasn't gone back."
"What Bill is sensing is that [fans] expect more out of Bill," Bischoff says. "They don't know what 'more' is, they just want something different, whether that's if he loses, or turns into a bad guy or bites the head off a Doberman. They don't care what it is as long as they get something that takes the character to the next level."
As a psychology major at the University of Georgia, Goldberg has struggled with the idea of having separate ring and real-life personas -- which he says he has so far avoided.
"I'll let a lot of people down, I think," he says, thinking back on the autograph line earlier in the day, which frequently broke into chants of "GOLD-berg! GOLD-berg!" "But that's where the entertainment part comes in. I think what I'll do is separate myself -- I'll be a jerk in the ring but be the same guy outside."
Rest easy, big guy. Even if the fans aren't trained in Jungian duality, they'll probably get it.