Yoko, for the first time in his WWF tenure, was a monster adrift. No longer the undefeatable champion, he was now almost strictly a spectacle, relegated to the second tier. The only highlight of the ensuing months was a rekindled feud with the Undertaker, wherein ’Taker finally avenged his earlier casket match loss. The rematch was just as chaotic as the first, only this time, for whatever reason, Chuck Norris was present as the match’s “special enforcer.”
Yokozuna retuned to the spotlight later as half of an odd-couple tag team with Owen Hart. By now, Yoko was heavier than ever—purportedly more than 700 pounds—and much like Andre the Giant at the end of his career, his primary role was to stand on the ring apron looking ominous (and enormous) while Owen fulfilled most of the in-ring demands. The duo dominated the tag ranks for months, but when they finally lost the belts, Yokozuna’s WWF tenure was all but over. He turned on his old fiendish friends, had a run as a good guy,* and hung around for a couple more years, but his glory days were far behind him.
In a 1996 SummerSlam match against the emerging “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Yoko’s weight had clearly ballooned, and the ending was built around this newly acquired girth. When he climbed up to the second rope for his Banzai Drop, the turnbuckle “broke,” sending Yoko crashing down onto his back and allowing Austin to steal the victory. Up until now, his immensity had been his calling card. Now it was a punch line.
Even though the WWF didn’t traditionally grant its wrestlers health insurance—or, more likely, because of that—the idea of a wrestler suffering a heart attack in the ring was unappealing to say the least. Whereas once WWF management had outfitted Yoko to make him look meatier, now they insisted that he lose weight, and when the pounds didn’t immediately fall off, they released him.
So what becomes of the monster who becomes too monstrous, the genetic freak who becomes solely a freak show? Despite some appearances, pro wrestling isn’t a World’s Strongest Man competition, and it’s certainly not a World’s Fattest Man contest. And the freak in the age of television—in which the whole world is a sideshow tent—is not one with a long shelf life. That Yokozuna lasted as long as he did in this era is an accomplishment in itself. That he held the belt for as long as he did—from Haystacks to Andre, monsters of Yoko’s ilk were largely seen as division killers and were rarely gifted with championship runs—is unique. He was a grotesque, a caricature, and his career straddled an old-school wrestling world in which racial/ethnic stereotyping was the norm and a new era in which a new style of un-PC excess reigned.
Yokozuna wrestled occasionally at independent shows, including the 1999 Heroes of Wrestling event, where, massively overweight even compared to his later WWF days, he and King Kong Bundy—an earlier big man who seemed half the size of the enlarged Yokozuna—heroically lumbered to the ring to save a Jake “The Snake” Roberts–Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart match that went sour from the start due to Jake’s evident intoxication. It would be his last moment of valor.
On a European wrestling tour in 2000, he suffered a fatal heart attack in his hotel room. It’s safe to say that few were wholly surprised. What was somewhat surprising was that he was still trying to wrestle, or at least still making appearances at wrestling shows. But he was a living spectacle, and the walk to the ring was his display case. It was by then the only world he knew. In his last match, Yokozuna didn’t even enter the ring: He stood on the apron, a literal sideshow now, looking ominous and enormous, and then he went back to the hotel and died.*
LUDVIG BORGA: LAST DAYS OF THE FOREIGN MENACE
If Yokozuna signaled the power of geopolitical scaremongering in the wrestling world, Ludvig Borga showed that the foreign menace wasn’t all that it used to be.
Borga wouldn’t be tops on anyone’s list of all-time great anti-American wrestlers. He’s someplace southward of Colonel DeBeers, Nikolai Volkoff, and the Iron Sheik, and, hell, probably even the Quebecers, the rather bland baddies from the frozen north. But there’s something about Borga that encapsulates the entire U.S. vs. Them fetish of the premodern wrestling era. Like Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, Borga was genetically engineered with the sole purpose of striking fear in the hearts of an American audience—but not so much fear that you ever really questioned the ending.
The origins of this type of storytelling in wrestling go back to those halcyon days when pro wrestling existed not on cable television but in low-rent coliseums and state fairs. Without the ability to attach long, developed storylines to feuds, the promoters grabbed onto the lowest common denominators: blond pretty boy vs. diabolical masked man, American vs. foreign aggressor, nice white person vs. angry black person.
The fact that this sort of lazy booking was still going on in the early 1990s, when Borga surfaced in the World Wrestling Federation, probably says as much about our culture as it does about wrestling’s creative minds, but it was nonetheless standard. Borga—who was actually a Finnish man (of all things) named Tony Halme—was a legitimate toughman who, in an odd historical footnote, fought MMA legend Randy Couture in Couture’s very first match in the UFC. So when Borga debuted in the WWF, entering the ring to the Finnish national anthem and slapping hapless jobbers into his “Torture Rack” finishing hold, even the most thickheaded of wrestling fans knew a confrontation with the newly patriotic Lex Luger was in the offing.
Revisiting Borga’s one notable match—the All-Americans vs. the Foreign Fanatics at Survivor Series 1993—is, in retrospect, almost morbid: It included Rodney “Yokozuna” Anoa’i and Brian “Crush” Adams, who have both since passed; Luger, who suffered a spinal stroke and was paralyzed in 2007 (he has since regained some motor function); and Scott Steiner, who tore his trachea in Puerto Rico and was put into a two-week-long induced coma while doctors operated on him.
Unfortunately, the Luger vs. Borga singles tilt was not to be. Borga hurt his ankle in a match soon thereafter and was never heard from (in WWF storylines, anyway) ever again.
Halme’s public life didn’t end there, though. As Jonathan Snowden of Heavy.com tells it: “Halme also wrote four books and had a gold single, ‘Viikinki,’ from his first and only album. And, like Finland’s version of Jesse Ventura or Antonio Inoki, Halme was elected to Parliament.”
That he turned out to be a real-life Finnish nationalist—or, rather, nativist—is sort of beside the point, as are his alcohol-related arrests, his stint in a mental institution, and the “SS” purportedly tattooed on his calf. He was important to us wrestling fans as a symbol: Evil Personified. Or, at least, Evil Oversimplified.
BRIAN PILLMAN
It’s June 1993, and Brian Pillman is killing his idols. He’s parodying “Nature Boy” Ric Flair, one of the most respected and venerable wrestlers in the world. The segment is called “A Flare for the Old,” a lampoon of the Nature Boy’s “A Flair for the Gold” interview segments. Pillman is dressed in a sequined robe over a pair of briefs a la Flair, and he’s wearing a shaggy gray wig and glasses. Pillman and Austin had been teamed up as the Hollywood Blonds to act as “mechanics,” in Austin’s terminology, a couple of good workers, good athletes with strong personalities that would serve to make their opponents even more popular—like jobbers, only several notches higher. The Hollywood Blonds are the bad guys in this feud, but the fans are laughing along with their irreverence. It’s safe to say that this was not exactly what WCW had planned.
Their script is mediocre—it’s basically “you’re old, we’re young” sass talk that most viewers have heard before. But their delivery is impeccable, and the final product borderline galling. The week before, they appeared on an actual “Flair for the Gold” segment and kicked off the rivalry, but Pillman and Austin avoided the usual sort of physical confrontation that fans would expect. They weren’t pompous, self-congratulatory heels like, well, Flair was; they were sneering visions of the future of wrestling. They grinned cruelly, they snarled knowingly: This might be the first time that mainstream wrestlers really didn’t seem to g
ive a fuck.
It was an act, of course, but it was as believable as anything wrestling fans had seen in years. This was Brian Pillman’s oddly significant contribution to the wrestling world throughout his heyday: He didn’t give a fuck, so we never knew what was going to happen. We never felt safe when Pillman was on-screen, and the wrestling establishment would never recover from the wounds he delivered, and that’s a good thing. That the danger was in some ways a real thing—that the sneer was a reference to the disregard that he had for himself in life—is tragic, but it only makes his career the more compelling. The result was good; the acknowledgment of reality is sad. But you can’t consider Brian Pillman without acknowledging reality, because reality—or the presumption thereof—was what made him great.
Brian Pillman was born in 1962 under one of those bad moons that people talk about. His dad died of a heart condition when he was only two months old. When Brian was two, he was diagnosed with throat cancer, and his childhood was riddled with throat surgeries thereafter; he underwent more than forty when all was said and done. When something like that doesn’t kill you, a personal determination often takes hold: The high school football coaches said he was too small to play, but he ended up the team’s standout; he wasn’t heavily recruited but ended up making the Miami (Ohio) squad, where he was a two-time All-American playing as a relatively minuscule defensive tackle; told he was too small to make the pros, he still had a stint with his hometown Bengals,* then almost caught on with the Bills, and finally played for the Calgary Stampeders of the CFL until a leg injury forced him out of the game. But that didn’t deter him, and that’s one of a few phrases that appears over and over again when you start reading about Brian Pillman: “The Leg Injury Didn’t Deter Him,” along with “Before His Time” and “Increasingly Unhinged.”
After he healed up, he found his way to Stu Hart’s wrestling school, where he excelled, and then to a top spot in Stampede Wrestling, and then to WCW, where he once again found his stature questioned: He was shunted into WCW’s rarely compelling lightweight division of the early ’90s, which wasn’t so much a showcase for highfliers in the lucha libre/puroresu mode* as it was an orphanage for the less beefy guys on the roster, although Pillman did have one incredible match against Japanese highflier Jushin “Thunder” Liger at SuperBrawl 1995. Pillman impressed everyone with his aerial repertoire. And he was impressed upon the fans as a fresh-faced, athletically gifted comer, though, based strictly on his size, a guy not expected to reach the upper echelons of the wrestling world. As Paul Heyman put it in an interview: “He was on a totally different level than everybody else who was in the industry at the time. . . . Brian’s style in 1988–1989 was more of a 1995–1996 style. He was way ahead of his time.” That didn’t mean he was at the top of the game, though.
It was only in turning heel and working with Austin that Pillman was allowed to start becoming something greater. He and Austin would do a big move in the ring and then they’d celebrate by pantomiming like they were operating an old movie camera, holding the handle with one hand and cranking with the other, all the while grinning diabolically. Or they’d do it outside the ring, pointing their “camera” at the real camera. It was a “Hollywood” thing, obviously, meant to incite the crowd, but subtly, they were acknowledging the scripted-Hollywood pretense of the whole endeavor. They were reminding us that this was all just a TV show and that they were just actors. The crowd booed; Pillman and Austin cackled as if to say, “You didn’t want to know? We don’t care.”
Despite his feuds with the Horsemen, the critical acclaim the Blonds constantly received, and his occasional upper-card billing, Pillman couldn’t work his way into a top spot. WCW split up the Blonds when they seemed to be on the cusp of real popularity; Austin maintains to this day that it was because they were getting so much response from the crowd. They were soon feuding with each other, safely ghettoized away from the main event scene. The WCW midcard must have begun to feel like an NFL practice squad to Pillman, like failure even in the face of success, and he once again started fighting his way through. By late 1995 he had begun conceiving a new character that would revolutionize his career.
And it was around that time that people started noticing that Pillman’s character was becoming—here it is—increasingly unhinged. He behaved erratically. Normally, wrestlers interact with the cameras like traditional sports stars do: They address them directly during interviews but go along as if they’re not there when competing or when entering or leaving the game. Pillman would find the camera on the way to ringside and grin menacingly at it, eyes bulging, as if to simultaneously undermine the pretense of the endeavor and underscore his compliance with that nonexistence. He even spat at the camera, as if directly assaulting the fourth wall with his insolence, with his very DNA. On a show in January ’96, seemingly off script, he grabbed announcer Bobby Heenan by the neck, and Heenan—who had a history of neck issues—said, “What the fuck are you doing?” live on the air. Heenan later said that he reacted so harshly because he assumed it was a fan who was suddenly manhandling him. But that’s exactly the point: Pillman was doing something wholly unexpected—both at that moment and in a broader sense. He was an irritant, and just what wrestling needed.
WCW chief Eric Bischoff has never been called a traditionalist, and often he’s blamed for losing sight of what has made wrestling work through the decades in his quest for bigger-faster-cooler. He always loved sticking it to the know-it-all wrestling fans who populated Internet message boards, and in Pillman he found his muse. It’s interesting that Pillman’s antiestablishment breakout occurred when he was made a part of a reunited Four Horsemen faction alongside old foes and icons of the old guard Ric Flair and Arn Anderson. There was something of Flair’s wild eyes in Pillman’s unruly glare, but in juxtaposition to the older generation, his eccentricity stood out as something wholly new.
During a match at SuperBrawl VI in 1996 against Kevin Sullivan—the storyline was that Sullivan thought Pillman wasn’t showing proper respect for the business, and let’s face it, he wasn’t—in which the loser had to formally announce his respect for the victor, Pillman came out and immediately the match went off the rails. The two men started fighting before the bell in an awkwardly realistic manner, and when Sullivan managed to separate himself, he recoiled with a stagger that seemed to belie the unscriptedness of what had just transpired. Pillman grabbed a mic and addressed Sullivan—who was then the head writer, or “booker,” of WCW—dismissively, half-sarcastically, almost crazily: “I respect you, booker man.” Most fans had no idea what was going on. Even the smart fans who Pillman was toying with—people who knew that Sullivan was the booker and knew that Pillman’s expiring contract was creating some backstage friction between the two—thought that it was off script. (Said Bischoff: “For a brief moment, that audience was watching Brian Pillman and said to themselves, ‘I know all the rest of that stuff is all make-believe, but Brian Pillman really hates Kevin Sullivan.’”)
In retrospect, it’s easy to let Pillman’s oddball act blur into the background of all the reality-altering stuff that came around after it, but the “booker man” bit was so unusual that it wasn’t even widely understood for what it was until years after the fact. After SuperBrawl, he got Bischoff to release him. According to Bischoff, his leaving was part of the plan, the next phase of their assault on reality and the wrestling intelligentsia—who, it should be said, loved every bit of this storyline once it became clear. The idea was that Pillman would go to ECW, fully form his “loose cannon” personality, and then return triumphantly to WCW as if uninvited. And in the information age, he had to be actually released for the shtick to be believable. If that was the plan, it didn’t go right. Pillman never returned to WCW. Either the script didn’t play along with reality, or Pillman didn’t play along with the script. Or, as Bischoff put it: “I’m not sure if he was working me or if we were working everybody else.”
He materialized on ECW’s C
yberSlam event in February 1996, appearing from out of nowhere in the ring, and started talking trash about Bischoff—he was “a coffee gofer”* and, since Pillman was now freed from the strictures of network TV, a “piece of fucking shit”—much to the delight of ECW fans, who largely were attuned to the wrestling rumor mill. But then, in a moment that seemed inexplicable, he turned his ire directly on those fans, calling them “motherfuckin’ smart marks”* and “sorry son of a motherfuckin’ bitches” for good measure. And then he threatened to piss in the ring—an act of disrespect too far even for the bloodthirsty ECW fans, one imagines—and called Heyman “booker man” just for giggles. The crowd that was so happy to see him just moments before turned on him. On the way out, he attacked a fan, dragged him into the ring, and started gouging him with a fork he pulled from his boot. This fan was a plant, the whole thing staged, but his metaphorical assault on the hardcore fanbase of wrestling was shocking because of how irresponsible it seemed. He could cuss out Bischoff, and that was fine. But to turn his back on the fans? It was self-destruction as performance art.
While he was working in ECW, he started negotiating a contract with the WWF, regardless of whatever handshake deal he had with Bischoff. Before he could ink the contract, though, Pillman shattered his ankle in a car accident, which many official accounts refer to as “an accident with a drunk driver,” but nobody outright denies the other prevailing story, which is that Pillman fell asleep at the wheel, wrecked his vehicle, and was thrown from the car in one of those he-wasn’t-wearing-a-seatbelt-but-if-he-had-been-he-would-have-actually-died kind of wrecks, and while it’s not impossible that both stories are partly the truth, it’s unclear how the drunk driver factors into that second account. He shattered his ankle, but the injury wouldn’t hold him back. Despite his inability to wrestle, Pillman got the first guaranteed contract that the WWF ever issued. McMahon had been signing wrestlers to contracts since his earliest days, but those deals placed the obligation in the lap of the talent, and WWF was largely free to cut ties with them at will; Pillman’s was the first in which the WWF was as obligated to employ the talent as the talent was to be employed.
The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling Page 29
