The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling

by Shoemaker, David

  On March 23, 2001, WWE bought WCW and, in doing so, swallowed its only competition. This transaction happened, as things often do in pro wrestling, both in real life and on-screen. WCW was bought by Vince McMahon’s company for a mere $3 million due to the fact that parent company AOL/Time Warner had decided to stop airing WCW broadcasts and that without a TV deal there weren’t many serious offers.* On television, news of McMahon’s takeover—which had trickled out into the mainstream—was preempted by his son, Shane, who appeared live on WCW Monday Nitro to inform his dad that he’d been outmaneuvered. (In reality, it was McMahon outmaneuvering the expectations of the fans, who were expecting only a triumphant Vince.) This led to a famously underwhelming storyline in which Shane’s WCW stable—already diminished because WWE chose not to take on the onerous contracts of stars like Kevin Nash, Ric Flair, and Bill Goldberg—joined forces with a reunited ECW posse, under the “ownership” of sister Stephanie McMahon, to challenge Vince and the WWE stalwarts. Dubbed the “Invasion,” it quickly petered out when wrestlers began haphazardly switching teams, and it became clear that this was not the clash of civilizations fans had been dreaming of.

  To be fair, there was no way WWE could have lived up to the expectations of its fans, who had been fantasizing about a WWE vs. WCW war since the Outsiders first appeared on WCW. And of course, many fans had been waiting much longer than that. Prior to the WrestleMania Era in the late 1980s, talent sharing between regional federations was the norm, and it produced feuds like the acclaimed Dusty Rhodes vs. “Superstar” Billy Graham series that sold out Madison Square Garden several times in the 1970s. But since then, the industry model had changed and such crossover bouts stopped occurring, as rival companies like WWF and NWA had no desire to acknowledge the other’s existence, let alone to work together.

  For years, wrestling fans dreamed of matchups like Hogan-Flair and Sting-Savage and argued about the relative merits of the companies. But it wasn’t until the inception of the nWo that reality started bending to the point that anything seemed possible again, and it wasn’t until five years later that McMahon’s acquisition of WCW made it a reality. But even then, it wasn’t the reality that fans had dreamed it would be. It couldn’t be—there’s seemingly something about wrestling that demands two opposite poles for either to be appreciated. The WCW Invasion could have been handled better, but its failure was preordained.

  As soon as WWE swallowed its chief competitor and assumed the mantle of wrestling’s lone megapower, the company seemed to fall into an identity crisis. The McMahon family is the on-screen representation of WWE’s brain, and when the family is divided, as it was in 2001, WWE fans are forced to process not just the obvious Oedipal fracas but an odd uncertainty about the stability of that brain. With no competition left, the McMahons had only each other to fight with. As the Invasion storyline fizzled and WCW was fully subsumed into the mother company, WWE, seemingly hungry to re-create the duality that characterized so much of the company’s history, split Monday Night Raw and its Friday show, SmackDown. The two shows became separate “brands,” with different wrestlers, different announcers, and even, briefly, separate pay-per-view events. The two shows only crossed over at the annual draft lottery, in which wrestlers were “randomly” swapped to boost ratings and freshen storylines.

  The separation proved untenable, if only because WWE was (understandably) more interested in ratings than in adherence to logic: Why limit their biggest stars to one show a week? Why hamstring storytelling by segregating your talent pool? It wasn’t long before the borders of the brands became fuzzy, and eventually, Raw formally reverted to an everybody-is-invited event.

  And yet, duality persists. A second-tier federation called TNA Wrestling emerged, snapping up some of the era’s lesser free agents and combining them with up-and-coming stars of the independent scene. It even hired Bischoff and Hogan—who was, at this point, not able to wrestle due to age and accumulated injuries—and briefly aired its show on Monday nights to try to re-create the Monday Night Wars aura, but that never caught on. “Super independent” promotions like Ring of Honor and Chikara have taken ECW’s indie-rock mantle, each finding a following in the Internet age despite not having a truly national TV show upon which to base itself.

  And yet WWE—which changed its name from WWF in 2002 to distinguish itself from the World Wildlife Fund*—persists. Wrestling may never again be the widespread cultural force it was in the television era of the ’50s, or the WrestleMania Era of the ’80s, or the Monday Night Wars Era of the ’90s—but it’s fair to wonder whether anything in a world of 500 TV channels and infinite Internet distractions could ever have the level of informational solidarity that wrestling once exerted.

  On June 27, 2011, a wrestler named CM Punk—with his tattoos, ragged facial hair, and decidedly unenhanced physique, the antithesis of the Hogan mode of wrestler iconography—interfered in the main event on Raw, costing present-day lead-actor John Cena his match. With Cena lying half-broken in the ring, Punk walked to the top of the entrance ramp, sat down cross-legged, and proceeded to issue one of the most defiant fourth-wall-breaking monologues in wrestling history.*

  He started off by calling himself the “best in the world” and called Cena and Hulk Hogan and the Rock ass-kissers. He said that the fans’ complicity in the whole commercial enterprise is what drove him over the edge. He threatened to win the title at the next pay-per-view event and take the belt with him to New Japan or Ring of Honor. The coup de grâce was when he said that “I’d like to think that maybe this company would be better after Vince McMahon is dead, but the fact is it’s gonna get taken over by his idiotic daughter and his doofus son-in-law”—that’s headline wrestler Triple H, for the uninitiated—“and the rest of his stupid family.” And then the mic went dead and the screen went black.

  It wasn’t for real—it was a “worked shoot” promo, a pro wrestling trope featured heavily in ECW and WCW during the preceding era, in which a wrestler seemingly goes off script and speaks truth to the audience (a “shoot”) but the whole thing is in fact scripted (thus it’s “worked”). But nonetheless it was one of the biggest moments in modern wrestling history. The “worked shoot” is a vital part of wrestling. Fans are in on the joke—they always have been, more or less—but in the Modern Era, it’s necessary to wink a little more, to give the audience assurance that you’re in on this together.

  Wrestling’s come a long way since ECW and the early days of Raw, when the crowd was embraced as a coequal partner in the enterprise. It’s come a long way since Jack Pfefer “outed” the industry as a less-than-honest sport. And guys in spandex are still beating each other up in the ring, and we still know it’s fake, and we still don’t mind.

  THE ATTITUDE ERA: A DIGRESSION

  On June 7, 1999, the Corporate Ministry—a semisatanic posse fronted by the Undertaker, long a devilish sort but only newly a brawny Antichrist—gathered in the ring to present to the world their Higher Power (alternatingly known as the “Greater Power”), the mysterious person from whom they’d been taking their cues since their inception early that year. The Corporate Ministry was an amalgamation of the Corporation, the WWF’s institutional front-office menace, and the Ministry of Darkness, the Undertaker’s demonic troupe. The Corporation had been established by Vince McMahon in his feud against “Stone Cold” Steve Austin but had since been taken over by Vince’s usurping son, Shane, leaving Vince to battle alongside the company’s top babyfaces—Austin and the Rock—to try to topple the Shane-’Taker army of devils and suits.

  The night’s surprise was the most obvious turn one could have imagined, and yet it was the only truly fulfilling one: When the comically oversized druid’s hood was pulled back, the Higher Power was revealed to be Vince himself, who had been stringing his erstwhile heroic foils along all this time. “It’s me, Austin! It was me all along!” he said, to which announcer Jim Ross replied with a combination of revulsion and boredom: “Aw, son of a b
itch.”

  It was a couple of years into the WWF’s famed Attitude Era, but rewatching the video, it somehow feels as if the whole movement was building up to this moment. Nothing better encapsulates the intrinsic egotism of the Attitude Era than Vince’s simple statement: “It was me all along” wasn’t just assertion of authority; it was a proclamation of masturbatory volition. The secret force that had been governing the company over the proceeding few years wasn’t a mysterious godfather; it was the “me” of self-involvement, “me” in the broadest sense possible. The Attitude Era was the era of ego.

  On June 23, 1996, the WWF held its annual King of the Ring PPV. That night, an up-and-coming Austin took on Jake “The Snake” Roberts, a megastar of the WrestleMania Era returning for a second shot at glory in a WWF sorely wanting for star power. Sadly, this did not turn out to be the Roberts fans had come to love years prior; the Machiavellian snake handler had been replaced by a Bible-thumping, sober-living, tubby shell of his former self. (He now wore a sleeveless snakeskin-print shirt, which was obviously a functional decision to hide his middle-age gut but which also served metaphorically as a serpentine hair shirt, an act of penance on the part of the God-fearing Jake for his prodigal heyday.) In a postmatch interview, a victorious Austin went on a tirade, famously saying, “You sit there and you thump your Bible, and you say your prayers, and it didn’t get you anywhere. Talk about your Psalms, talk about John 3:16—Austin 3:16 says, ‘I just whipped your ass!’”

  That, for my money, was the inciting incident of the Attitude Era, the moment in which irreverence became a catchphrase. It was the moment when everything was subsumed into the advancement of the product, and the product was the self. Jesus Christ be damned, this was Austin’s moment.

  The era that followed saw the WWF turn away from its kid-friendly past and tear headlong into a crass, PG-13-rated parade of sacrilege. There was a sexual revolution—from the button-pushing idiosyncrasy of Goldust’s transvestite homoerotics to the Maxim-style processions of scantily clad Amazons like Sunny and Sable (not to mention the bygone tradition of a Diva appearing in Playboy at WrestleMania time)—that rendered incomprehensible the implication-laden chastity of Miss Elizabeth and her ilk. There was violence—starting the prior year with Brian Pillman pulling a gun on Austin and culminating in the Undertaker tossing Mick Foley off of a steel cage and through the announcers’ table—to which even the grittiest bullrope matches and parking lot brawls of earlier years paled in comparison.

  On December 15, 1997, some time after such deviancy had become the wildly successful norm, Vince appeared in a commercial on an episode of Raw, formally explicating and defending the new direction his company had taken. “It has been said that anything can happen here in the World Wrestling Federation, but now more than ever, truer words have never been spoken,” he said, speaking from a nebulous backstage area, outfitted in a WWF-logoed letterman’s jacket. “This is a conscious effort on our part to open the creative envelope, so to speak, in order to entertain you in a more contemporary manner. Even though we call ourselves ‘Sports Entertainment’ because of the athleticism involved, the key word in that phrase is Entertainment. . . . We borrow from such program niches like soap operas like Days of Our Lives, or music videos such as those on MTV, daytime talk shows like Jerry Springer and others, cartoons like The King of the Hill on FOX, sitcoms like Seinfeld, and other widely accepted forms of television entertainment. We, in the WWF, think that you the audience are quite frankly tired of having your intelligence insulted. We also think that you’re tired of the same old simplistic theory of ‘Good Guys vs. Bad Guys.’ Surely the era of the superhero urging you to say your prayers and take your vitamins is definitely passé.” That last line was a direct assault on Hulk Hogan and his ’80s-era role-modeling, which, of course, Vince himself had scripted. In justifying the bawdy turn his company had taken, McMahon had sacrificed himself at the altar, condemning his ’80s-era masterwork as retrograde in this new era of ribald mythmaking.

  Of course, the platform upon which he made this pronouncement—that of the owner of the company—was something of a novelty. Even though he had been the public face of the organization for years, it was only a couple of months earlier, at the Survivor Series, that McMahon had been revealed on-screen to be the owner. (Previously he had been a mere announcer. In retrospect it’s easy to see his announcer role only as micromanagement, but it’s still stunning that he could sublimate the glory that comes with ownership to the minor celebrity of the commentary gig.) When Vince appeared the night after the Screwjob to plaintively explain what had transpired the night before, he might as well have said “It was me all along!” because that, more than the watered-down details of the fracas with Bret, was the real reveal.

  It was a difficult time for McMahon and the WWF, as they were struggling in a ratings war against rival fed WCW, and Bret’s departure after the Survivor Series might have been the nail in the coffin. But if the road toward eventual victory would be paved with cuss words, bloody foreheads, and underboob, the most pivotal moment in the turn toward this brave new world occurred when McMahon outed himself as himself and let his ego run wild.

  And such egoism would manifest itself in the supplication of the id of the wrestling fanbase. Of course, the most offensive bits were more often than not mere allusions. The ribald troupe D-Generation X trafficked almost wholly in heterosexual innuendo—their gang sign was the crotch chop, which involves one making X-shaped indications toward one’s genitals—even though their physical associations seemed to be only with each other and a brawny, Neanderthal-jawed woman named Chyna. Their proclamations of sexual prowess were little more than metaphorical masturbation. Similarly, the forays into gratuitous nudity on the parts of the more traditional beauties on the roster always ended in thongs and bras—though this happened with incredible frequency—except for one instance in which Sable appeared with black paint covering just the nipples of her cartoonishly immobile breasts. Such gestures didn’t deliver so much on their implicit promises as they did draw attention to the guarantor.

  The exploration of the id wasn’t limited to that of the audience, and this was probably the most lasting contribution of the era—that wrestlers’ personalities took on a level of depth and reality to coincide with the increasing grittiness of their environs. The Undertaker went from comic book zombie to gruesome satanist—and was confronted with a walking id in the form of his “half brother,” Kane—but more importantly he was revealed to be a corporate peon, ultimately always answering to McMahon. Mick Foley embraced all three parts of the personality in different on-screen forms: Mankind, Cactus Jack, and Dude Love were id, ego, and superego. Innumerable real-life issues became storyline fodder, and the celebrity of the noncombatant wasn’t limited to McMahon, as other backstage characters—most prominently head writer Vince Russo—became celebrities in and of themselves in the minds of the fanbase.

  The biggest stars of the era—Austin, Foley, the Rock, Triple H, even the Undertaker during his phase as a leather-and-denim-clad biker—abandoned “characters” such as they had been heretofore known as in favor of outsize versions of their own personalities, and all of them embodied the “Me” ethos of the period to a T; with the exception of Foley, who was basking in a much-deserved reign atop the industry, the others embraced their celebrity with catchphrases that amounted to lyrical “fuck yous.”

  The most commercially significant moment of the Attitude Era was Mike Tyson’s involvement in WrestleMania XIV. He was introduced into storylines by Austin flipping him the bird, and his deciding role in the Austin-Michaels main event boiled down to Tyson deciding which of the competitors was cooler. He sided with Austin, and Michaels was gone from the fed the next day. Without hipster bragging rights, after all, what was the point of continuing?

  It’s ironic that the final valedictory in the WWF’s campaign against WCW came in the form of an old-school wrestling win, the traditional tale of
a benighted hero finally making it to the top. On the same night that WCW most wrongheadedly chose shock over substance (in a much-hyped main event, Kevin Nash relinquished the title to his stablemate Hulk Hogan in a match that saw Hogan barely touch Nash, who then comically lay prone for Hogan to beat him—it’s known infamously as the “Fingerpoke of Doom”), the WWF put its belt on Mick Foley, the long-suffering fanboy turned human pincushion who had emerged in that era of ego as the fans’ proxy.

  The Attitude Era was one of the greatest periods in wrestling history, but those aspects that came to define it weren’t its best features. So much of that time can be summed up in pleas for attention—“Look at my tits,” “Look at my dick,” “Look at me bleed”—but in the end, wrestling matches and simple stories of triumph proved decisive.

  After he revealed himself as the Higher Power, McMahon ridiculed all those who had bought his act of penance: “Every damn one of you were made fools of!” Which is about as good an epitaph for fans of the era as I can imagine. The WWF had cut its product with transitory crack, and we all enjoyed the high.