The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling

by Shoemaker, David

  Rick Rude descended from a long line of these oiled-up alpha males, defined not so much by the jealousy they inspired in others as by the esteem they assumed for themselves. From the legendary Gorgeous George to “Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers, they played on a trope that falls somewhere between the philandering star quarterback and the macho beachcomber who kicks sand in your face and steals your girl.* Rude refined this role into a lewd, chiseled Casanova—his disgustingly obvious sexiness as much a part of his antiappeal as his disdain for the average Joes in the crowd. To drive the point home, throughout his career, Rude was constantly presented in stark physical juxtaposition, both to his fan-favorite, pot-bellied, common-man opponents—guys like Jerry Lawler, Tommy Rich, Dusty Rhodes, Jake “The Snake” Roberts—and to a series of slovenly or slight (or plainly unimpressive) managers—scrawny Jimmy Hart, obese Percy Pringle, clinically unkempt Paul Heyman, and the embodiment of annoyance, Bobby Heenan. “Here’s you,” the contrast seemed to be reminding audiences, “and here’s him.”

  His time in Texas’s World Class Championship Wrestling—where he was managed by Pringle and where he feuded with their unusually comely everymen, guys like “Gentleman” Chris Adams and the Von Erichs—focused his act and honed his ’80s-pornstar-chic image. In the ascendant era of wrestling in the late ’80s, he was the bridge between the old pompous pretty boys and the new chemically enhanced poseurs—between the cockiness of the old and the physique of the new. He briefly teamed there with his future rival Jim Hellwig, a.k.a. the Ultimate Warrior (who was then the Dingo Warrior).

  His star power was conspicuous in the charisma-deprived ranks of WCCW, and it wasn’t long before he moved back to the Jim Crockett territory—then basically the entire NWA—in search of greater things. He formed a team with stocky tough guy Manny Fernandez under the guidance of Paul Jones. They called themselves the “Awesome Twosome,” which, it should be said, was about a hundred times more fitting a moniker than that of the team with which they’d soon feud, a megapopular duo of underdeveloped oddballs who’d caught fire as the Rock ’n’ Roll Express, despite the fact that their only ties to rock ’n’ roll were mullets and bandanna-trimmed tights. In the midst of this rivalry, though, Rude got the call-up from the WWF.

  Rude’s foray into the big time was nothing short of a mode shift in the pro wrestling world. Previous WWF heels were bad guys by virtue of being vaguely discourteous, antagonistic toward fan favorites, and abusive toward the referees; Rude feuded with the fans themselves and unsubtly questioned the manhood of his opponents. Rather than just emasculate us, Rude found a more insidious, intelligent means of questioning our manhood. He engaged us directly, narrating his own ring entrance as he walked from the back in a sequined robe, microphone in hand, and he insisted that all the fat, out-of-shape “couch slobs” in the audience sit down and shut up while he showed them what a real sexy man was supposed to look like. It was about as concisely obnoxious as heel shtick would ever get. He institutionalized the in-ring sketch by having Heenan bring a “lucky lady” from the local crowd into the ring to get a kiss from the heelish heartthrob. The audience booed, the woman in the ring swooned, and then Rude ditched her and posed, laughing, hips gyrating.

  It was a distillation of the amoral narcissist; Rude wasn’t so much a heel who happened to be attractive as he was a 100 percent pure concentrate of machismo and self-absorption, a Lothario for his own sake. He could have any woman he wanted, but his objective was never love or even lust; it was heterosexual avidity purely for show. And he seemed not so much to objectify women as to coolly demean them. The object of his affection was solely himself. It was hardcore pornography minus the sex.*

  It’s probably not too much to say that at times he seemed to prefer grappling with other underdressed men to any sort of meaningful female embrace. He handled the women offered to him with disregard; only his rivals were able to affect Rude on a primal, emotional level. Conspicuously, the kiss he would lay on female fans and the reverse neckbreaker with which he dispatched his opponents were both called the “Rude Awakening.”

  This, more than anything, hits at the core of our hatred of Rude. Consider his hip thrusts, his mustache, his washboard stomach, and his overapplication of baby oil—not to mention the fact that he seemed to be both dramatically oversensitive to hits to the crotch (his wincing, wobbling reaction to inverted atomic drops was classic) and oddly prone to getting pantsed in the ring. Rude embodied all the nudge-nudge jokes about pro wrestling. With Rude in the ring, perhaps for the first time, the sport’s homoeroticism was undeniable. Little wonder the crowds booed him.

  After one match, Rude approached a conspicuously seated woman in the crowd who seemed unimpressed with his routine. Rude was pure preening bully, demanding her attention—and affection—and, when rejected, Rude asked whom, if not him, she was there to see. She answered that she was there to see her husband, Jake “The Snake” Roberts. An argument ensued. Rude grabbed Cheryl Roberts by the wrist, and Jake stormed down the aisle to intervene. An epic rivalry was born as the two men fought violently: Jake because his wife had been dishonored and Rude because he had been rejected.

  Rude had long worn his pant-length spandex in varieties of airbrushed splendor, with catchphrases and/or tough guy imagery (incongruously) depicted in various shades of neon. When his feud with Roberts reached fever pitch, Rude began airbrushing his tights—his crotch—with Cheryl’s face. After one match, when Rude dropped trou to reveal the special-edition Cheryl tights, Roberts ran into the ring and yanked them off him. The audience erupted at the sight of Rude disrobed down to his briefs; the home audience saw only a postproduction hazy black blotch, creating the firm impression that Rude had been left naked—left as bare as he laid our pastime.

  Not long after, Rude began decorating his tights with his own face, a level of narcissism previously unmatched even in wrestling’s ego parade.* To be self-absorbed and overconfident was perhaps an act of sensible egomania; to paint one’s own treasured visage with one’s crotch as canvas was an unprecedented affront to our wrestling sensibilities. Previously, ring gear had largely been an afterthought, a series of unspectacular minibillboards reminding us of things like nicknames (“Mr. #1derful”) and the names of special moves (“Thump”). If anything, such sewn-on words distracted us from the fact that we were looking at a man’s pelvic region. Rude’s attention-grabbing ensembles inverted such convention. They underscored the fundamentally homoerotic nature of the enterprise: His comeliness was indistinguishable from his physique and also from his, ahem, manhood. The masturbatory allusion was not ambiguous. When Rude rotated his hips in the ring, hands behind his head, he wasn’t showing off for the crowd or playing mind games with his opponent: He was sucking his own dick.

  After his feud with Roberts wound down, Rude returned to self-adulation and put out an open challenge for a flexing competition, naively assuming that no one could match his physique. He was shocked—shocked!—when his invitation was accepted by the Ultimate Warrior. The posedown at the Royal Rumble ended with Rude attacking Warrior with his warm-up bar, and a new feud was started.

  The Warrior was wildly popular with the crowds and was quickly climbing the ranks of the WWF despite the fact that he was very limited in the ring, and Rude—as stated, a much better grappler than most other muscleheads of his era—was tasked with carrying him through a series of matches. They feuded through much of 1989, with Rude taking the intercontinental title from the Warrior at WrestleMania and dropping it back to him in August. They feuded again in 1990 after the Warrior had become heavyweight champ—their most notable fight was in a steel cage match at SummerSlam—but in this later iteration, Rude was never presented as a credible threat to the ascendant Warrior. By that fall, a dispute with the front office had sent Rude packing. He had just started a feud with the Big Boss Man; WWF on-screen president Jack Tunney explained to viewers that Rude had been suspended for sleeping with the Boss Man’s mother.

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sp; Rude’s following run in WCW is interesting simply because of how well he fit in. The WCW product was still basically an outgrowth of its predecessor, the NWA—a gritty, old-school Southern counterpart to the WWF’s antic play fighting. It’s a tribute to Rude’s versatility that he could tweak his character—turning down the gigolo, turning up the tough guy—so as to work himself seamlessly into the WCW counterculture. On some level, this was because, despite the excessiveness of his WWF persona, the core conceit of the Rick Rude character was so basic, and so universally deplorable.

  Rude soon won the U.S. Championship—the counterpart to the intercontinental belt that Rude had long held in the WWF—and a couple of years after his debut he defeated Ric Flair for the heavyweight strap. It was significant again in juxtaposition to his WWF run—despite his high profile there, he never threatened Hulk Hogan’s title reign, and his heavyweight feud with the Warrior petered out until he was left feuding with second-tier faces like Big Boss Man.* After Rude beat Flair, he feuded with fan-favorite Sting. In 1994, during a match with Sting in Japan, Rude was dropped awkwardly—some would say recklessly—onto the edge of a steel platform outside the ring and injured his neck, functionally ending his wrestling career. He started collecting on a Lloyd’s of London insurance policy and faded from view.

  Rude’s later act—the Lothario in winter—would be sad if it weren’t so forgettable. The remainder of his career was a strange sequence of brand hopping. He still seemed to be in immaculate shape, but because of lingering neck issues—and/or an inclination to continue collecting insurance payments—he couldn’t compete. He turned up in ECW in 1996 and teased an in-ring return, but he never wrestled. He went back to the WWF the next year as a bodyguard for Shawn Michaels and Triple H’s new D-Generation X faction, and the crowd popped memorably when he first appeared.

  With his history, he was a perfect fit for the promotion’s new generation of sex-obsessed disorderlies, but rather than play off his persona, he was mostly content to stand by as hired muscle, significant only as an echo of his old self: the physical specimen now reduced to department-store mannequin.*

  The one truly memorable part of this era was his November 1997 defection to WCW. The two promotions were deeply involved in their battle over Monday night viewership at the time, and WCW saw in Rude a chance to score a puckish point. WWF’s Monday night shows were pretaped every other week, and Rude—paid by appearance—didn’t have a long-term contract. So on November 17, mere moments after Rude appeared with DX on the WWF’s taped show, he turned up live on WCW’s Monday Nitro with his beard trimmed down to a mustache—the classic Rude look—to underscore the difference in time stamp.

  But just as with DX, Rude was just a prop. WCW had no real plans for him.* He joined the nWo, managed his old friend Curt Hennig, and the two were soon embroiled in the endless inanities of nWo infighting. He last appeared on WCW television in 1998, and he died a year later while purportedly training for a WWF in-ring return.*

  In his heyday, Rude was a foil of the highest order and a legitimate spectacle; it was nearly impossible to turn away when he was on the screen. But more important than the way we watched him was his effect on the way we watched wrestling. In a metaphorical sense, Rude pulled wrestling’s pants down and revealed it for what it was. It was a necessary development in the sport’s evolution. The audience was increasingly in on the joke—that wrestling was scripted—but still willfully oblivious to the other joke. It was this revelation that made Rude so entirely detestable to the wrestling audience; by putting his face on his crotch and then putting his crotch in our face, he made the homoeroticism far too evident. That he wasn’t played for a buffoon like Adrian Adonis with his feather boas or Goldust with his platinum wigs only made matters worse for fans: He was a credible tough guy. He was unignorable, and so he was insufferable.

  THE “BRITISH BULLDOG” DAVEY BOY SMITH

  On Saturday afternoons in the ’70s, at around four, England watched the latest chapter in the ongoing rivalry of expanding waistlines between the nefarious, leviathan farmhand Haystacks Calhoun and the blond, beer-gutted hero of the British working class Big Daddy. It was on ITV’s World of Sport, the weekly sports show that drew in wide audiences with its coverage of British mainstays like football, cricket, snooker, darts, and, of course, pro wrestling. It was on that program on September 2, 1978, that a rangy fifteen-year-old called Young David went to a draw with an old hand named Bernie Wright. Young David was probably 150 pounds, which was beyond scrawny compared to Big Daddy and his ilk and, for those familiar with David’s own frame fifteen years later, might come as something of a shock.

  Despite his slight stature, when Davey Boy Smith* walked into class on Monday, his secret hobby wasn’t a secret anymore; he was a certifiable famous professional wrestler, and now everybody knew it. He’d never be an average bloke again.

  He and his cousin Tom Billington, known widely as the Dynamite Kid, would go on to team extensively on ITV, and when Billington was recruited to Stu Hart’s Stampede Wrestling in Canada, Smith came along for the ride; he lived at Stu’s son Bret Hart’s house since he was still a minor. By 1983, when Smith was nineteen, he and Billington were splitting their time between Canada and Japan, the mecca of the international wrestling world. A year later, Vince McMahon bought out Stampede Wrestling, and the British Bulldogs were soon stars all over the world.

  Davey Boy Smith was only twenty years old.

  A brief step backward here. That to the mainstream wrestling fan Davey Boy Smith is the bigger star of the British Bulldogs is not exactly pro wrestling sacrilege, but it certainly is a hole in the institutional memory of the enterprise. Many wrestlers—Bret Hart and, of course, Davey Boy Smith, most notable among them—have called the Dynamite Kid the greatest pound-for-pound wrestler of all time, which is to say that he’d be the best in the world if he weren’t so short. (He was billed as being 5-foot-8 but was probably closer to 5-foot-6.) What Billington lacked in height, he made up for in tenacity; from rough-and-tumble Lancashire, England, he was raised by an ex-boxer father and trained to be not just a pro wrestler but rather a stout “real” fighter. Perhaps it was partly him overcompensating for his height or maybe it was simply his desire to succeed in life and stay out of the mining work that his father had fallen into, but the severity of his technique—the damage frequently inflicted in the practice of pantomime violence on his opponents and on himself as well—is the memory about Billington that persists most widely to this day.

  But that wasn’t the whole of his skill. His matches with Tiger Mask in Japan in those early years are (justifiably) the stuff of wrestling-industry legend. Watching the matches in the context of their time, they seemed to incorporate the entire history of the sport and evolve into a new, electric thing. For Dynamite, it was a revelation to be working for the first time with guys who could keep up with him. Watching the early British Bulldogs matches in the WWF, one is struck by the athleticism and technical skill that both of the Bulldogs employ: Davey Boy was clearly inspired to greatness by his cousin—in his later years, Smith said of Billington that he “looked up to him like he was a god”—and the Dynamite Kid was seemingly driven to some sort of masochistic perfection by something deep inside of him. For lack of a less obvious diagnosis, you can almost see the Napoleon complex working itself out in the ring. He dominated his opponents with a stiff, unrelenting frenzy when he was in command and brutalized himself with his high-wire performance, flinging himself (literally) headfirst into whatever position would make each move look most impressive.

  Billington’s abandon and his lunatic desire for success were always intertwined, so when, on a tour through Germany in 1983, the Junkyard Dog supposedly turned him on to anabolic steroids, he jumped headfirst into that as well. And later, back in Calgary, when Jake “The Snake” Roberts supposedly got him into speed,* it was a natural fit. Insomuch as Smith was influenced by Billington in the ring, he was certainly influenced toward
such illegal predilections outside of the ring as well.

  Nothing in Davey Boy’s career can be considered minus this lens: Despite being half a foot taller, he was always toiling for respect in the Dynamite Kid’s shadow.

  In the WWF, Smith and Billington feuded with the Hart Foundation—Bret Hart and Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart—who had also come over from Stampede,* as well as the “Dream Team” of Greg “The Hammer” Valentine and Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake, from whom the Bulldogs finally claimed the WWF tag team championships after a yearlong pursuit at WrestleMania 2. The late ’80s were the halcyon days of tag team wrestling in the WWF, a period when a shared land of origin and matching flashy outfits were all the characterization a duo needed, and a minor grievance was all the beef necessary to send two teams on a months-long rivalry.

  In 1986, on the night Hulk Hogan battled King Kong Bundy inside a steel cage, the British Bulldogs were ascendant in the tag team world. They were among the biggest stars of the era. Despite the nasty breakup, the American soul still holds a candle for its British ex. How else to explain how a Canadian impersonating a Scotsman like “Rowdy” Roddy Piper would naturally be a heel while a prickish judo-kicking Brit like “Gentleman” Chris Adams would be the toast of Texas wrestling—or how a pair of brawny Brits could be one of the most popular tag teams of the ’80s and ’90s?