Pro-Wrestling Showtime at the Dean Dome Page

Last updated 6 June 2003

Showtime at the Dean Dome

-- the allure of wrestling --

CHAPEL HILL -- To understand the phenomenon that is professional wrestling, it helps to think of haggis.

Ask any Scot about haggis. It's a traditional Scottish pudding, made by gathering a bunch of animal parts butchers generally don't even try to sell, mixing them with oatmeal and suet, then boiling the whole blend in a sheep's stomach.

You either like it or you don't. If you have a taste for haggis, you're not bothered by what goes into it; otherwise, you can't even think about it without becoming a little queasy.

Well, wrestling is like that. If you don't like wrestling to start with, you never can see past the violence and trash-talking that goes into it. But if you like wrestling -- and 18,598 of you like it well enough to have traveled to the Smith Center at the University of North Carolina six days ago to see it -- all those unpalatable items somehow make for a tasty treat.

Those fans were there to see World Championship Wrestling's "Monday Nitro Live," the weekly show that often tops the Nielsen cable ratings. Most of those fans likely have watched wrestling on television, along with 10 million or so other people each week. This was their rare chance to see it live, and it didn't matter how far they had to come.

Jeremy Brown and Chad Horrell drove from Asheboro, "and we would have come farther," Brown said. "We've been watching for two years straight."

With a few rare exceptions, these were not people who had to be convinced of wrestling's charms. Wrestling -- once the exclusive province of National Guard armories, aging civic auditoriums and down-at-the-heels

entertainment complexes where happiness was served from plank tables on sawhorses at a dollar a can -- has gone mainstream. Although the hard center of wrestling's fan base is young men, as it always has been, there's a surprisingly broad appeal nowadays. At the slightest prompting, WCW officials will note that 25 percent of the audience is women, 23 percent attended college and 31 percent have white-collar jobs.

The Wall Street Journal last year noted, with some amazement, that there even is a wrestling fan club at Harvard University.

The countdown

By 5:30 p.m., an hour before the doors to the arena opened and a full three hours before the first wrestling match began, hundreds of people were outside waiting. Those who didn't leave home until 6 -- in other words, anyone with a job or family responsibilities -- were doomed to be late. There simply were too many people trying to get to one place via Chapel Hill's resolutely villagelike road system.

Not every seat was filled, but only because one whole section of the arena was given over to an arched entrance, through which the wrestlers emerged. Another section of several hundred prime, center-ring seats likewise was empty, because the platform holding a television camera needed a clear line of sight down to the arena floor, and wrestling fans can't be trusted to stay seated. Rather than risk having fans bob into the picture at the wrong moment, WCW officials sacrificed those ticket sales.

But it all came out even, more or less. The arena floor, normally kept clear for basketball games, was filled with plastic molded chairs.

In fact, there were few areas not turned over to fans. Around the ring was a small perimeter with foam mats on the floor to pad the frequent landings of wrestlers thrown airborne, with insufficient runway under them; there was a 10-foot-wide walkway from the arch to the ring; and there was the ring itself. Those essentially were the only off-limits areas. The setup was not designed to keep fans away from the wrestlers; in fact, it was designed to make them part of the show.

And because it's a show, the evening proceeded on a strict time schedule. The ring announcer sometimes counted aloud the seconds until something began, and other times encouraged the crowd to make noise at specific moments. At a few moments -- presumably when commercials were aired -- nothing seemed to be happening.

It was a tad disconcerting at first, but eventually it registered: The typical event at the Smith Center is a basketball game that also accommodates television. Wrestling is, first and foremost, a television show. It just happens to be broadcast not from a stage, but from the middle of the audience.

Tune in

In the television world, professional wrestling is considered "appointment viewing."

That's the industry's phrase for shows people adjust their schedules around. Everyone -- or at least everyone with a TV set -- has an appointment show. "Seinfeld" was one for lots of folks, and "ER" continues to be one. In the last year or so, the various weekly wrestling events have become appointment viewing for millions of cable television customers.

They have two choices. The WCW, which is part of Ted Turner's broadcast empire, has three weekly shows, called "Monday Nitro," "Thunder" and "WCW Saturday Night"; the World Wrestling Federation, a family-owned company based in Stamford, Conn., has a pair of weekly shows, called "Sunday Night Heat" and "Raw." Both also offer pay-per-view and semiregular special events as well.

WCW is the newer of the two, and bought an instant credibility by hiring away some of WWF's top wrestlers, like Hulk Hogan (now known as Hollywood Hogan). It likes to think of itself as a clean, family-oriented broadcast. The WWF, in contrast, happily peppers its shows with profane language and hints of devil worship and claims that its stars formerly were pimps and porn stars.

Both styles apparently work.

"Every time we think it's peaked, it just keeps getting bigger," says Tim Brooks, a research executive for USA Network.

Hardly a week goes by that wrestling doesn't dominate the top spots in the Nielsen Media Research ranking of cable shows. One recent week -- and this is typical -- wrestling claimed the top five spots and seven of the top 10. Even during that news-heavy week in December when Bill Clinton was impeached and air strikes were launched against Iraq, wrestling still managed to shoulder aside CNN long enough to claim three spots on the list of top 15 cable shows. (And, of course, the case could be made that the House impeachment vote itself was a wrestling show, albeit without the self-mocking humor of the real thing.)

Televised wrestling has been around a long time. But only in the last year or so has it hit the top of the Nielsen cable rankings. What happened?

Three things. First, society's collective tastes changed. While there always has been a certain appetite for mayhem as entertainment -- remember, Christians vs. lions was a favorite fight card at the Roman forum, and hangings were great social events in the old West -- it seems to recently have hit a new level. Reality-based programming is the newest trend in television, which is why there are so many shows with titles like "When Good Pets Go Bad" and "World's Wildest Police Videos." Not coincidentally, the sport with the greatest potential for disaster -- stock-car racing -- is the country's fastest-growing sport, in numbers of spectators.

Second, wrestling itself no longer even pretends to be real. Most promoters readily acknowledge that matches are loosely scripted. "It's very choreographed. A form of kabuki, I guess," says USA's Brooks. And when there's no more pretending about wrestling's legitimacy, everyone gets to be in on the joke. This, in turn, helps broaden wrestling's base: People who once were uncomfortable with the thought that watching wrestling somehow gave legitimacy to something that was so clearly fraudulent now are relieved of that moral struggle.

After all, if a con man admits he's a con man, how are you being conned?

Finally, wrestling took a lesson from another of its lowbrow television cousins. Like soap operas, wrestling now has story lines that evolve and mutate from week to week. There are good guys and bad guys, women of questionable virtue, and secret plots and dark alliances. There is treachery and betrayal, mixed with loyalty and brotherhood. There is greed, lust, egomania. Retreats into obscurity are followed by triumphant returns.

It is, according to one common description, soap opera for guys.

Bring on the Nitro Girls

The show began promptly at 8, when the top-of-the-hour commercials were done and Turner Network Television accepted the live feed from Chapel Hill. The ring announcer had spent 15 minutes warming up the crowd and -- after turning schoolmarm-ish for a moment -- warning against throwing things toward the ring or diving over the barricades to attempt an amateur version of the pile driver or flying leg-drop. (The implicit message: It's your business if you try it at home, just don't try it here.) But suddenly there were lights, there was music and millions of people were watching. It was showtime.

Not for the first time that evening, the noise was deafening. Security people had been issued earplugs.

After the TV audience heard its own introduction (shorn of any scolding about climbing into the ring), the Nitro Girls made their first appearance. Although they have names like Tygress and Whisper -- and although their primary job seems to be to shimmy fetchingly for that highly valued 18- to 49-year-old male audience -- only one appeared to have surgically improved on what God gave her. But then again, WCW says it's family entertainment. Perhaps a scarcity of silicone is the proof.

A few minutes later, the first wrestlers appeared at the arch. A menacing, bass-heavy music track filled the arena as two men, both in black, made their way toward the ring. They walked slowly and with a well-practiced swagger. (These two, in fact, could give swaggering lessons to outlaw bikers.) One of them, clearly a bodybuilder, paused occasionally to kiss his bicep, which was so huge it looks deformed.

The crowd noise again was deafening, and not necessarily approving. The two -- Scott "Big Poppa Pump" Steiner and Buff Bagwell -- are WCW's troublemakers. Snatching the microphone from the ring announcer, then grabbing him by the throat, Steiner responded to the crowd in kind. "You're tobacco-chewing, scumbag rednecks," he declared. Bagwell, referring to Duke University's defeat of UNC just days before, added, "You guys will always be losers in Chapel Hill."

After a few more minutes describing the mayhem they planned to perform on their fellow wrestlers, Steiner and Bagwell swaggered back toward the arch and disappeared, fans screaming all the while. It was almost a half-hour into the broadcast, and there hadn't been any wrestling yet.

No one cared.

The plot thickens

Professional wrestling may be the only business where assaulting your boss is considered a good career move.

It happens frequently on both WCW and WWF. Each organization has its own plot -- which unfolds both in the ring and in pretaped or live scenes broadcast between matches -- and those plots frequently call for an employee to inflict a bit of proletariat unhappiness upon his supervisor.

Several weeks ago, for instance, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, WWF's top attraction, went into the ring with WWF owner Vince McMahon over some longstanding grudge. Austin is young, fit and menacing. McMahon is older and years past his wrestling peak. Austin won. At the next week's broadcast, McMahon -- arm in a sling and head sporting a bandage -- limped out and suggested that if Austin simply apologized, they could put the unhappiness behind them and move on. Austin said he was indeed sorry -- sorry that he hadn't whipped McMahon even worse.

The crowd roared its approval.

The other story lines are similarly rooted in mayhem. One dissident group of WCW wrestlers, which calls itself New World Order, wants to seize control of the operation, but this bit of office intrigue is not fought with memos and shareholder proxy votes. They just beat the living daylights out of anyone they find around the figurative water cooler. Other stories are more personal: One WCW wrestler lusts after the wife of another wrestler -- who also happens to be a Nitro Girl -- and demands that they wrestle, with the wife as the prize. The WWF's leading female attraction, a Playboy model who goes by the name of Sable, suspects she's being stalked by a female fan. (Her solution was to invite the fan into the ring, then hit her with a folding chair.) A WCW wrestler, after being led astray by a femme fatale, agrees to set up another wrestler -- his father, actually -- for defeat in the ring. A stun gun figures into the action.

In fact, wrestling is only a minor part of a typical WCW or WWF broadcast. Indiana University's Department of Telecommunications spent a year monitoring "WWF Raw" -- USA Network's top-ranked show -- and found that actual wrestling occupied only an average 36 minutes of the two-hour show. The majority of the shows were spent doing other things.

And it's those other things that have people bothered.

The bad guys

Lisa Williams was at the Smith Center because (a) her Valentine's Day gift to boyfriend Luke Hicks was two tickets, at $39.25 each, for which "we waited all night at Kroger" where the ticket outlet is, and (b) she has a minor thing for Buff Bagwell. Buff, it seems, lives up to his name.

The two of them watch wrestling every Monday, but where Hicks likes to switch back and forth between WCW and WWF, Williams has no taste for WWF. "I don't like all that devil stuff," she says.

The WWF broadcasts are undeniably edgier and darker. The Indiana University study noted that over the course of 50 episodes of "WWF Raw," there were 1,658 incidents of crotch-grabbing or crotch-pointing, 157 raised middle fingers, 128 moments of simulated sexual activity and 47 references to Satanic activity. There is, in other words, an almost gleefully rude nature to the WWF.

What is owner McMahon's response to complaints like this? "Please say that we are out of control, please say that," he told Broadcasting & Cable magazine a few months ago. "What we are trying to do is give people the perception that we just might be out of control. ... The more our competitors talk about how aggressive we are, the bad language and all that, the better off we'll be."

This is not a man exactly stricken with remorse.

But then, he'd be foolish to tinker with a winning formula. One of the few times when "WWF Raw" hasn't been the top-ranked cable show in recent months was in early February -- when it wasn't on at all. USA Network pre-empted it to show the Westminster Kennel Club dog show. (USA paid the price for this bit of programming folly, however, when the dog show drew 2 million fewer viewers than normal for that time.) There even is a spillover effect at work: When WWF's "Stone Cold" Steve Austin appeared on the CBS show "Nash Bridges" last week, the show got its highest weekly rating ever.

WCW officials are only too happy to pile on. At any opportunity, they'll distance themselves from the WWF and declare that their own broadcasts are family-oriented. There's some truth to that claim. At the Smith Center, for instance, ushers were instructed to check every sign brought into the arena and confiscate those carrying profanity or crude slogans. Also, for all the trash-talking and boasting that goes on between wrestlers during WCW broadcasts, hardly any of it falls below a G-rated standard.

Still, there's something more visceral that disturbs some parents. As Pam Stewart, a Raleigh mother, waits for her son to return from a souvenir-buying expedition, she admits she has reservations about being here. The wrestling, with its stylized violence, has the unhappy taste of a bullfight, she says. Worse yet, youngsters imitate it. "They get on the trampoline and do those moves," she laments.

Her son Josh returns, tucking his wallet back in his pocket, and in doing so unknowingly reveals another side to the whole business. WCW, a division of Turner Broadcasting System -- which itself is owned by Time Warner, the world's biggest media company -- has just laid claim to a significant part of a child's allowance.

Wrestling world

For all its fakery, there's real money at stake in wrestling.

It is estimated the two organization take in more than $1 billion a year. There are advertising revenues and arena ticket sales, of course, but there's also licensing fees, pay-per-view events and Josh Stewart's allowance. You can even cross company lines in a single transaction: For instance, buying a WWF music CD ("Stone Cold Metal") and paying for it with your WCW MasterCard.

And for all the real rivalry between the two organizations, there clearly is a mutually beneficent aspect to things. The WCW and WWF reinforce one another. Together they have made wrestling one of the highest-profile events on television, drawing viewers in numbers that surely make the lords of professional football nervous.

In other words, the sum of their impact is greater than their individual ratings.

"It's like having two lawyers in town," USA Network's Brooks says. You don't just get more lawsuits; you get lots more lawsuits.

But wrestling has waxed and waned for several generations, so it's likely this era of prosperity will eventually fade. In the meantime, there is -- if you can look past its seamier parts and keep Junior from practicing body slams on his little brother -- something endearing in it.

Take Bill Goldberg, for instance.

He's the WCW's top attraction, a former pro football player who came to wrestling by default after an injury ended his career. The son of a Jewish doctor, Goldberg declines to wrestle during Rosh Hashana. In fact, he even declines to change his name to some tough-guy moniker. Someone else can call himself The Undertaker or The Rock. Goldberg wanted to simply be known as Goldberg.

So it came to be that on a Monday night in Chapel Hill, as he made his entrance into the arena for the marquee matchup of the night, Goldberg was treated to the sound of almost 19,000 people proving that wrestling is a big tent these days. With all the volume, vigor and sincerity they could summon, the fans -- a true rainbow coalition of young and old, black and white, male and female, sodbusters and city-dwellers -- chanted his name:

GOLD-BERG!
GOLD-BERG!
GOLD-BERG!

A phrase applies here: Only in America.

News researcher Becky Ogburn assisted with this article.