The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling

by Shoemaker, David

  The Road Warriors soon became official fan favorites and feuded with the Fabulous Ones and the Fabulous Freebirds—underhanded brawlers from “Badstreet,” Atlanta, who at SuperClash 1985, at Comiskey Park, emerged from the dugout wearing (highly questionable) stars-and-bars facepaint to simultaneously profess their Southernness and mock the Warriors’ style.*

  By 1986, though, the Road Warriors were such stars that one territory couldn’t contain them. Their career over the next several years—and, really, over the next twenty—is difficult to reconstruct and, as is often the case in comic books and monster movies, highly repetitive. They shifted between the major and regional promotions frequently and feuded variously with just about every tag team of the era. They feuded in the NWA (which by then encompassed their old Georgia Championship stomping grounds—and which would eventually transform into WCW), squaring off with the unimaginatively named Russian Team (which included their old friend Krusher Khruschev). They feuded in Memphis against Jerry “The King” Lawler and Austin Idol.* They traveled everywhere, even doing a stint with the storied New Japan promotion, and wherever they went, they took their battering style with them, gaining fame and notoriety around the world with seeming ease.

  It’s not hard to see why: The Road Warriors were monstrosities and megastars; their physiques and personas were both overblown and yet, for a generation that had grown up with cartoons and science fiction movies, relatable—and certainly a harbinger for the future of professional wrestling. When eventually they signed on exclusively with the NWA—the rest of the territories having more or less dried up—they brought a new sort of pop-culture legitimacy to the company, making the old-school, Southern-based organization more competitive with the zeitgeist-surfing WWF of the ’80s. The stars of the NWA were happy to borrow on the cool quotient of the Warriors. Dusty Rhodes, who was both the top babyface there and the head booker at the time, quickly aligned himself with the Warriors, winning with them the NWA Six-Man Tag Team Championship and later fighting alongside them against the Four Horsemen.

  Other notable feuds in their early NWA run were with the Midnight Express (see the aforementioned scaffold match) and with the Powers of Pain, a plain rip-off of the Warriors who had basically been running their shtick in the NWA before the originals got there (but to significantly less acclaim). In the territorial days of pro wrestling, the appropriation of storylines or gimmicks from another region was not at all unusual, but this was the end of that era and the beginning of national television deals, making the ersatz Road Warriors found in nearly every promotion particularly galling. The NWA’s Powers of Pain (the Warlord and the Barbarian) were a sort of prehistoric Road Warriors; the Blade Runners (Justice and Flash, a.k.a. the Ultimate Warrior and Sting), who mimicked the act right down to the movie-title swipe and inhabited one of the outer reaches of the NWA kingdom, were the minor-league Road Warriors; and WWF’s Demolition (Ax and Smash) were the Road Warriors gone corporate. There was even a weird British team that stole the name and about one percent of the aura; it’s unclear how much they were influenced by Hawk and Animal, but it’s fun to imagine that they were trying.

  The Road Warriors’ feud with the Powers of Pain amounted to little more than a steroid-addled pissing contest: The two teams actually had a weight-lifting competition that saw the otherwise feral Powers in matching Gold’s Gym tank tops and the Warriors in gaudy Zubaz parachute pants.* Just when things began to turn serious—when the Powers of Pain heard that they were scheduled to compete against (and lose to) the Warriors in a series of scaffold matches—the imitators abruptly quit and signed on with the WWF.*

  With all their foes vanquished, the Warriors eventually embraced their monstrous natures and turned to the dark side—and against their friend Dusty Rhodes, whom they attempted to “blind” with a spike from their shoulderpads. (Rhodes came up with the story but ended up losing his front-office job over it. The execs at TBS, which aired NWA shows, had demanded that they do away with on-air bleeding. One need only see the plenitude of scars on Rhodes’s forehead to grasp how off-putting such a change would be for him.)

  As the NWA transitioned into WCW—and into a truly national promotion—the Road Warriors remained prominent, but friction with new showrunner Jim Herd nudged the Warriors out the door in 1990. It was another instance of the Warriors walking out at the height of their popularity, but in this case, we have the first clear instance of a dispute with higher-ups causing their departure. This would become their new tradition. Hegstrand in particular was a serial collector of grievances; there was always a wrongheaded booker, some éminence grise holding the Warriors down.

  The pair quickly landed in the WWF, and it seemed like a perfect match. The WWF was the home of muscle-bound Technicolor, and the Warriors had long been WWF-style wrestlers operating outside the WWF. Their impact was immediate: The Powers of Pain split up to keep confusion at a minimum, and a feud with Demolition commenced. Due to the failing health of Ax, Demolition had recently engaged a third member, Crush. The Road Warriors teamed up with the Ultimate Warrior, who, despite starting off as a Road Warriors ringer himself, had established himself as one of the WWF’s top stars. At this point, Vince McMahon did away with the “Road Warriors” sobriquet and started referring to the team as the “Legion of Doom” to avoid confusion with his other Warrior.

  The L.O.D. won the tag team titles from the Nasty Boys (a couple of silly street brawlers, two chubby white guys with mohawks, mullets, and black shirts splatter-painted in multicolor neon), which made them the only tag team to hold the belts in the WWF, WCW, and the AWA. But they lost the titles several months later to Money Inc.—the “Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase and his accountant, Irwin R. Schyster (a.k.a. Mike Rotunda)—whereupon they disappeared again, taking a leave of absence. When they returned, they had their old manager Paul Ellering back in tow, and for some reason, he had with him a ventriloquist dummy named Rocco, supposedly to bring inspiration to the team. The role of the manager for the monster wrestler (or tag team) is significant: He is an ambassador to the real world. Even when the monsters speak English, as the L.O.D. did, a manager can provide a human element—a plausible answer to the questions like “Does Hawk have a checking account?” But the addition of Rocco the puppet pushed the L.O.D. in the other direction, from cinematic realism to cartoon lunacy.

  When L.O.D. faced Money Inc. at SummerSlam 1992, the trio rode motorcycles to the ring. According to Laurinaitis, Hawk was inebriated before the match and missed his parking spot outside the ring, forcing Animal to dismount on the wrong side of the bike and scald his leg on the exhaust pipe. He wrestled the match with his tights burned into his calf.

  Any machismo bequeathed by those Harleys, though, was nullified by the fact that Ellering rode in with Rocco on his handlebars. Hegstrand was galled by the inanity of the storyline. And as was his wont, he quit the WWF in a huff. What’s notable is that he did so without discussing it with Laurinaitis. (Animal stayed in the WWF to try to finish out the L.O.D.’s obligations there, but a back injury derailed his plan.) No longer were the Road Warriors underappreciated in Hegstrand’s mind; now it was just Hawk who was underappreciated. Hegstrand’s decision-making, always prone to fits of pique, was becoming increasingly bizarre, and the stories of his substance abuse multiplied. At that point, the AWA was a shadow of its former self; options were diminishing, and Hegstrand’s temperament was threatening to become his Kryptonite. He traveled alone to Japan, where he replicated the Road Warriors gimmick sans Animal, teaming up with a famous (and similarly itinerant) wrestler named Kensuke Sasaki.

  Hegstrand was a huge draw in Japan, as have been many other overgrown Americans. Such achievement evinces a sort of circus-mirror inverse of the state of U.S.-Japanese relations at that point. While the American economy of the ’80s and ’90s was ravenous for Japanese electronics and automobiles, the only American export that the Japanese had any interest in were white giants like Hawk. The country that deca
des earlier brought us Godzilla and Mothra was now more than happy to take our monsters back in trade.

  Hegstrand soon turned up again in WCW, wrestling solo and later in a loose tag team with former imitator Sting, and in the new and growing federation ECW. He could never really make the singles career work, though. (Nor could Animal, who made a go of it in WWE after Hawk’s death.) Like so many tag teams that achieve massive success, the Road Warriors were necessarily plural. Even megastars have a niche. Fans wouldn’t take Hawk fully seriously as a solo act if he didn’t evolve beyond the old gimmick, but the old gimmick was too popular to give up. Animal finally returned to the scene, and the Road Warriors reunited in WCW and made their way through various disputes with the Faces of Fear (Meng and their old foe the Barbarian), the team of Sting and Lex Luger, the Steiner Brothers, and Harlem Heat. They left WCW six months after the reunion and returned to the WWF. It was the start of the Monday Night Wars, and WCW was in the midst of hiring away loads of WWF talent. Vince McMahon was glad to take something away from his deep-pocketed rivals, even if it meant forgiving Hegstrand for walking out several years before. In the WWF, Hawk and Animal teamed up with “Stone Cold” Steve Austin against the militant Canadian Hart Foundation stable.

  For two decades, the Road Warriors had been cutting-edge, futuristic in style and fashion-forward in affect. In the ’90s, other acts began to catch up, and against the upstart New Age Outlaws, their vintage was finally beginning to show. The Outlaws embodied the WWE’s Attitude Era, and their crass stylings, sing-along catchphrases, and almost comical movesets indicated a new age of pro wrestling. The L.O.D.’s time had come; they certainly weren’t the monsters they used to be.

  One night on a pay-per-view preshow, during a live interview with Vader, Hawk accidentally walked through a nearby door in the background, realized his error, and recoiled comically. It was a moment’s lapse, but in retrospect it serves as a metaphor for the death of Hawk’s mystique.

  After another brief hiatus, the L.O.D. was repackaged in WWE as L.O.D. 2000, the Legion for the new millennium, their old medieval armor replaced by shiny silver shoulderpads and metallic hockey helmets. The immutability that had long been the Warriors’ calling card was discarded, and their aura seemed to go along with it. Hawk’s displeasure with the redesign was obvious: He tossed his helmet into the crowd, and it was never seen again. The team soon took on a third member, Darren Drozdov, who was going by the name “Puke,” and the storyline pivoted to focus on Hawk’s alcoholism, an unsubtle reference to Hegstrand’s real-life substance-abuse issues. This sort of after-school-special storytelling was common in those days, but the L.O.D.’s old-school personas stood at extreme odds with the earnestness of the angle. So did Hegstrand’s notorious pride. The story led to a despondent Hawk climbing atop the big-screen “Titantron” above the entrance ramp and “attempting suicide” by jumping off to the floor below. Fans groaned, and Hegstrand felt slighted—legitimately, this time. The L.O.D. quit the WWE soon after.

  Post-WWE, Hegstrand reportedly descended further into his self-abusive behaviors. In 1999, however, both he and Laurinaitis became born-again Christians, and Hegstrand cleaned up his life. The duo appeared on some of the Christian wrestling events of Ted DiBiase—the former “Million Dollar Man”—and on TNA Wrestling a couple of times, and then one final time on WWE Raw in May 2003. They were hoping to parlay that appearance into a full-time contract. They didn’t get one.

  Five months later, Hegstrand died of a heart attack at his new house in Florida. At the time of his death, he and Laurinaitis were working on a book about their careers.

  The Road Warriors never truly evolved with the times—at first because they were never in any one place long enough to evolve, but moreover because they never really had to. In the Territorial Era, they were the future incarnate, but in the Modern Era they were the last of the territorial wrestlers, dinosaurs migrating from place to place—perhaps ill-suited for long-form, postmodern storytelling but wildly popular nonetheless. When they appeared for the first time in TNA, they got the biggest cheer of the night—an eruption that could only be described as a “Road Warrior pop,” as TNA announcer Jeremy Borash put it. They got bigger cheers than anyone else because they represented everything to the crowds: the present, the future, and the past. The Road Warriors were by then both timeless and comfortably dated, and their wanderings around wrestling’s demimonde hinted at very human neuroses and vulnerabilities. They were antiheroes for a Marvelized audience that had acclimated itself to rooting for eccentric baddies. They were beasts we could love, Calibans forever straining at Prospero’s leash.

  THE FABULOUS KANGAROOS: THE FIRST GREAT TAG TEAM

  When one thinks of international villainy—especially in the grotesquerie of the wrestling world—one rarely thinks of Australia. But it was indeed a couple of brutes from Australia who ushered in the modern heyday of tag team wrestling. There were foreign menaces before them, and there were certainly tag team matches, but no team codified the concept of the tag team as we know it until the Fabulous Kangaroos came along.

  When Aussie Al Costello conjured up the idea of a nationalist Australian gimmick in 1957 to buoy his lackluster career, he mentioned it to promoter Joe Blanchard, who suggested he pair up with Roy Heffernan (“Australian rules” was already established as a synonym for a tag team match, so perhaps wrestling as a tandem was unavoidable), and the two made their debut soon thereafter in Stu Hart’s Stampede Wrestling.

  The Kangaroos were huge stars everywhere they went. (And, for the record, they were tougher than they sounded. They were Australians in the hardened, island-of-criminals sense.) They were arrogant, aggressive, and vicious in the ring. One night in Madison Square Garden, the crowd became so incensed at the Kangaroos’ underhanded tactics against fan favorites Antonino Rocca and Miguel Perez that people started throwing fruit into the ring. When the audience was on the verge of riot, the houselights went up and the PA system starting playing the (American) national anthem—which someone apparently decided was the most effective calming mechanism to a jingoistic mob. The ire the Kangaroos engendered was valuable, though: That card supposedly drew 20,000 fans and earned a then-whopping $63,000 at the gate.

  One night in Winnipeg, the fans started throwing their chairs at the Kangaroos (and their partner that night, Stan Stasiak), resulting in stitches in the head and leg for Costello and broken ribs for Heffernan. The villains took refuge under the ring, and the fans tried to set the ring on fire to smoke them out before calm was restored. (No word on the presence of the Canadian national anthem that night.)

  It’s not hard to see the Kangaroos’ legacy in the decades of tag team wrestling that followed. They predated the defining characteristics of the greatest teams throughout the history of the sport: the brutality of Dick the Bruiser and the Crusher, the “otherness” of the Assassins, the teamwork of Arn Anderson and Tully Blanchard or the Midnight Express, the haughtiness of the Fabulous Ones, and the savagery of the Wild Samoans. Unlike other teams that had come before, they were two parts of the same whole: This wasn’t two wrestlers teaming up; this was a team in and of itself. Ironically, this made the men themselves not just subordinate to the gimmick but disposable too—a turn we’ve seen over the years in some of the most successful tag teams, like the Midnight Express and Demolition—as Heffernan was eventually replaced by Roy St. Clair and later the American Don Kent, and after that the team marched on without either original.

  But the Kangaroos’ greatest innovation might have been self-promotion. They stalked to the ring with a banner bearing their team name, wore bush hats to underscore their foreignness, put marketing flyers crassly extolling their accomplishments in every seat at their first Madison Square Garden show, and, perhaps most notably, made cardboard boomerangs with their names and pictures and tossed them into the crowd. Because even villains need publicity.

  “RAVISHING” RICK RUDE

  The Super Posedown at R
oyal Rumble 1989 wasn’t much of a bodybuilding expo, but it was probably close to the average person’s idea of one: On one side stood the chiseled and oiled “Ravishing” Rick Rude, flexing and diabolically gyrating his hips; across the ring loomed the Ultimate Warrior, the WWF’s grotesquely muscle-bound comer, grunting and shaking and nominally “posing” for the audience.

  Warrior certainly had the crowd on his side, but then, so did anyone standing opposite Rude, arguably the most loathed bad guy of his era. It’s not hard to hate a guy with his own face airbrushed on the crotch of his pants, after all. But Rude’s act—the classic Lothario shtick with the volume turned up to 11—wasn’t as simple as it seemed.

  Rude was born Richard Erwin Rood in Minnesota at a time when the state was a fertile ground for wrestling talent. He went to high school with Tom Zenk and Nikita Koloff and trained with Eddie Sharkey, who also trained the Road Warriors, Curt Hennig, and Barry Darsow.

  Rude worked early on in Canada, Georgia, and Memphis, mostly as an insignificant babyface, but his turn as an evildoer in Jim Crockett Promotions in 1983 determined his life’s purpose. He made a return to the Memphis territory in ’84, and it was there that Jerry Jarrett gave him the nickname “Ravishing” and helped define the role Rude would inhabit for much of the rest of his life.

  Rude came along at a cultural moment when image—read: physical perfection—was at a premium in the wrestling biz. But he wasn’t all mustache and musculature: Contra most of the statuesque brutes of his day, Rude was actually a considerable in-ring technician. His sojourn through the South saw him forge a new archetype for the pretty boy bad guy. Early playboys of that sort were bleached, tanned jerks who projected their churlishness broadly, in the manner of the oversized masks of ancient Greek theater, so that they would be at least as detestable from the back row as from the front. This was, after all—in the words of Barthes—“where the most socially-inspired nuances of passion (conceit, rightfulness, refined cruelty, a sense of ‘paying one’s debts’) always felicitously find the clearest sign which can receive them, express them and triumphantly carry them to the confines of the hall.”