The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling

by Shoemaker, David

  While he was rehabbing, Pillman debuted on WWF television holding the microphone once again, interviewing other wrestlers in the ring. In one segment with his old partner Austin (the announcers avoided specifically naming WCW or the Hollywood Blonds but ominously referred to their “shared history”), who had morphed by then into a mercenary, mold-breaking, vest-wearing loudmouth—sound familiar?—Pillman seemed perhaps a little too biased in favor of Bret Hart, Austin’s upcoming opponent. Austin attacked Pillman, folding a metal chair around his injured ankle and stomping on it, graphically “reinjuring” it. I use those quotes tentatively; doctors had already determined that Pillman’s ankle needed another surgery,* so the injury was in some sense real, but Austin’s attack was show. Nonetheless, that folding-chair-aided technique is to this day referred to as “Pillmanizing” someone.

  The concept of reality would only be further abused in what followed. In a remote shoot from Pillman’s home, an enraged Austin showed up to further his beatdown, and Pillman, who was laid up on the couch with his leg in an enormous wrap, pulled a gun on Austin. The camera initially cut away, leaving the audience with the impression that he may have used it. On the web there’s a reel of the real-time footage from that night, the part where they’re waiting to go live in Brian’s living room, which shows Pillman and his wife going over the staging with the interviewer and the segment producer. “My cue on the gun is ‘Hostage in your own home’?” Pillman plaintively confirms. His wife joins in: “And I don’t start screaming till that window is broken?” The WWF shared the segment live on TV for whatever reason, and their demeanors reflect a certain anxiety about it, but looking at the video now, one is struck with an odd solemnity, like they could foresee the outcry that the angle would bring about. As former WWF producer Tom Prichard soberly put it: “I think [the network] would have preferred that a gun had not been pointed at someone on television.”

  Pillman segued back into an on-screen role as the cohost of a new late-night show called Shotgun Saturday Night, where he called matches alongside announcer Jim Ross, who had taken a fatherly interest in Pillman. That stint ended—in storyline—when Pillman again attacked a (fake) fan on camera. It wasn’t so much a replay of his ECW stunt as it was a statement: Pillman wasn’t done yet. He wasn’t content to be a color commentator, and that was his way out.

  He acted out his dissatisfaction in real life too. He wrecked three rental cars in a month. He appeared out of it backstage. Ross ordered him to take a drug test. Pillman was offended. Ross insisted he was looking out for Pillman’s health. “Goddammit, I’m not going to die,” Pillman said.

  Pillman had long lived out his character in life; nobody could tell where his character ended and the real Pillman began, but for some reason everyone seemed confident enough that there was a difference. His last few storylines—revisiting his relationship with Austin, joining up with the Hart Foundation, around whom he’d begun his career, and feuding with Goldust* over the “services” of his on-screen valet and real-life wife whom Pillman had real-life dated back in their WCW days—certainly serve as a metaphor for the closing gap between the real and the imaginary.

  On October 5, 1997, hours before a WWF pay-per-view show, Pillman died in a Minnesota hotel room. There was an ESPN story about Pillman’s death, and it starts right in with the ten-bell salute that WWF gave him on the show the night after he died. The wrestlers all gathered on stage to stand in tribute, and it feels like one big black shadow; in the first shot, as the first bell rings out, the camera lands squarely on Owen Hart; second bell, there’s Rick Rude. The ESPN reporter, Kelly Neal, jumps to the coroner’s report, about how it was heart failure but that cocaine was involved, about how that’s a lot like what happened with another wrestler named Eddie Gilbert. And how another one, Louie Spicolli, mixed booze and painkillers. She misses the part where his dad died of the same heart condition right after Pillman was born, but you can hardly fault her for going for the drama. This was dramatic stuff, and Pillman almost certainly helped his death along. His widow, Melanie, for one, sure thought the culture of pro wrestling was to blame: “It was just a matter of time before it happened to someone and unfortunately it was my husband.” She said he went from pharmacy to pharmacy, shy about his painkiller intake, though it was nominally legal; he probably filled scrips at thirty or forty pharmacies in the Cincinnati area. And then there was the human growth hormone: Neal says that Melanie fingered Hulk Hogan for telling Brian “he could obtain HGH from Dr. Edmund Chein at the Life Extension Institute, and a former wrestler who wished to remain anonymous says Hogan recommended Chein to many wrestlers.” Which was followed by this shockingly bald-faced denial: “Through a spokesman, Hogan says he’s never heard of Chein, and Chein says he does not prescribe the hormone to athletes, and has never knowingly treated any wrestler.” The report ends, and they cut back to the SportsCenter desk, where that same image of Rude from earlier, standing on the stage, is there framed like a headshot in the upper left of the screen, and the anchor says that Rude just died too.

  It’s too easy to say that just as Pillman was a trailblazer in the integration of uncertainty into the wrestling world, he initiated a spate of deaths that would forever rock the wrestling world. The two things are true, but they’re separate.

  We say all the time about these wrestlers that they died too soon, and most of them did, but somehow there’s not a case as truly disheartening as Pillman’s: He hadn’t accomplished the heights that so many others had, but in hindsight, he was knocking on the door. He would have been WWF champion, and probably would have been mentioned right alongside his old partner Austin when people talk about era-changing wrestlers; hell, he might have replaced Austin. He was destined for greatness in a way that that old canard doesn’t do justice.

  We know his leg injury wouldn’t have held him back, anyway. We know he was growing increasingly unhinged at a moment when the crowd was finally clamoring for it. And we know that he went before his time. “We knew that he was hurting, but when you asked him, he would lie to you,” says Ross. He was forever working the fans, and working the boys backstage, and, in the end, working himself. He was living the lie more fully than anyone else, and that’s what made him amazing, and that’s what killed him.

  CHRIS KANYON

  One could hardly get past the headline of any of the multitude of Chris Kanyon obits in the days following his death in early 2010 without being confronted with Kanyon’s “idiosyncrasy”—which is to say, his apparent homosexuality. The irony of this is that Kanyon was never a particularly eccentric on-screen personality. He was the prototypical performer of his era in all the wrong ways: He was a midcarder with constantly mutating gimmicks and schizophrenic allegiances, simultaneously afforded television time by the bloat of late-’90s wrestling television yet perceived as criminally underused by the “smarks” of the wrestling message boards—an upwardly mobile jobber with nowhere to go. That his personal life belied his public persona—and defied the strictures of the two-dimensional character wrestling had created for him—seems to have eventually spelled his end, both in career and, sadly, in life. The wrestling world has always had a hard time handling idiosyncrasy in three dimensions.

  Born and raised in New York, Chris Klucsarits was a physical therapist before he jumped into the wrestling biz. He worked a few weekend shows before he committed to the craft full-time, and he, like so many others, worked initially as “enhancement talent” in the WWF—which means that he existed to be demolished by the established stars of the day. His full-time career functionally began in WCW in 1997, when he debuted as “Mortis,” a cartoonish Grim Reaper, in the painful-to-watch “Blood Runs Cold” story. WCW was attempting, blatantly, to rip off the video game Mortal Kombat and its burgeoning popularity, and the story saw Mortis and his partner “Wrath” feud with a babyface named “Glacier” in a sort of alternate WCW universe. Despite coming to fruition after the nWo appeared, “Blood Runs Cold” was plainly a prod
uct of a cartoonish pre-nWo era, and its debut was pushed back by the sudden arrival of Scott Hall and Kevin Nash at the promotion. (What is too often overlooked about the innovation of the nWo is how unbearably bad some of the dreck it replaced on WCW TV actually was.)

  Post-Mortis, Chris Kanyon (as he was now called) embarked upon a fairly lengthy feud-cum-partnership with Raven and his Flock.* Subsequent to that was a protracted partnership-cum-feud with Diamond Dallas Page that began with their teaming up (along with Bam Bam Bigelow) as the Jersey Triad. Their affiliation continued for months as the two exchanged punches right up until WCW was yanked off the air in 2001.

  A noteworthy sidebar to his WCW tenure: Kanyon worked as a sort of in-house trainer, teaching the basics of the wrestling trade to the procession of celebrities that climbed inside the ring for WCW during its ongoing endeavor to gain mainstream attention. Kanyon was a true student of the craft—he had studied at the legendary (now defunct) Lower East Side Wrestling Gym and under both the Fabulous Moolah and Afa, the Wild Samoan—and he was known at times as the “Innovator of Offense” for his imaginative moveset. It must have been something of an honor to mentor the likes of Dennis Rodman, Jay Leno, Karl Malone, and (sigh) David Arquette in their entrées into the sport. Surely he brought out the best in them. But it also saddles his career with some of the disgrace of those ill-fated ventures—unquestionably among the worst matches in wrestling history. When Arquette* actually won the WCW championship on April 26, 2000, WCW had somehow found a new way to make a mockery of an enterprise that had, in recent years, almost become a self-parody.

  Kanyon transitioned to the WWF roster as a part of the WCW Invasion angle after Vince McMahon purchased his rival in 2001. The two factions were portrayed as being bitter coinhabitants of the new, bigger WWF, like AOL and Time Warner but with swinging steel chairs. It was a disappointing time for fans, as the real WWF-WCW feud had considerably more angst and enmity than this fake one, but Kanyon was something of a standout of the Invasion/Alliance era. He was bequeathed the WCW U.S. Championship, and he had a decent little run as the “Alliance MVP,” playing a bristly loudmouth who would come into the ring and, in his thick Queens accent, ask the audience, “Who betta than Kanyon?”

  The question wasn’t rhetorical. That period of wrestling television was fat with call-and-response catchphrases, and this one was no different. The “desired” reply from the audience in this case was, of course, “Nobody!” The real answer, obviously, was lots of people. When the crowd wised up and started shouting “Everybody!” back at Kanyon, he cunningly changed the question to “Who’s not betta than Kanyon?” and reveled in the perceived endorsement bestowed by the double negative.

  Mortis aside, all of his gimmicks over the years seemed oddly self-conscious, or at least bizarrely referential. He was a ring technician as the “Innovator of Offense”; he was a ladies’ man as “Champagne” Kanyon; he was an egocentric poseur as “Positively” Kanyon. He was whatever he thought he should be, without ever really bothering to change who he was. “Who betta than Kanyon?” begged an answer that was probably too obvious.

  The implicit self-deprecation in his catchphrase probably didn’t suit him in the long run, though. His WWE career fizzled, and he was released in February 2004. It wasn’t a unique or unexpected fate for a grappler of his level and vintage. He later claimed to have been improperly fired and subsequently blacklisted from the WWF, but what is being blacklisted in the world of pro wrestling, when any transgression can be forgiven in the name of making a splash or a dollar? Kanyon’s sin was that he never made either.

  At an indie show in 2006, Kanyon outed himself as gay. There’s some dispute as to his authenticity—he eventually backtracked, saying it was part of the character he was playing, and he later went on to recant that disavowal. More likely the waffling was evidence of an increasingly unsettled emotional state. He appeared a couple of times on The Howard Stern Show, where they played up his homosexuality and the seeming incongruity—or, to be honest, the incredible obviousness—of a gay man in the pro wrestling business. Despite Stern’s fascination, this was not exactly wrestling’s Stonewall moment. Many of his WWE coworkers have since said that they didn’t know Kanyon was gay but that it wouldn’t have bothered them.* That’s beside the point: However accepted he might have been within wrestling, it’s worth wondering if he did irreparable damage to his career by bringing his personal life into his storyline. The era of kayfabe may have been over, but when the spotlight is on, we expect our fighters to keep their reality to themselves. All successful wrestlers are closeted in one way or another.

  In any case, if Chris Kanyon was gay—and he almost certainly was—it’s easy to see how being closeted in an overly agro locker room could lead to powerful feelings of alienation and disenfranchisement. And small wonder that such feelings ballooned after his release, when the WWE was the only major wrestling outfit left, and as his increasingly erratic public profile cemented his estrangement from the company.

  This rift was fortified in early 2009, when Kanyon, alongside Raven (Kanyon’s old in-ring foe, whose real name is Scott Levy) and Mike Sanders, sued the WWE. The pro wrestling industry is built on a profitable but morally suspect framework that designates all the wrestlers as “independent contractors,” meaning that power rests lopsidedly in the hands of the wrestling company. Wrestlers can be fired at will, are denied health insurance, and are burdened with innumerable other inconveniences like having to provide their own travel and having to file tax returns in every state in which they perform.

  Various calls over the years for wrestling talent to unionize have largely gone nowhere, for obvious reasons. It would be a sorry system even if the industry weren’t centered on its “independent contractors” risking life and limb on a nightly basis. But with the WWE as a monolithic near-monopoly, the workers’ power is almost entirely diminished—as was the WWE’s argument, first broached in the Territorial Era, that it couldn’t afford to make concessions that its major competitors weren’t making. A suit like Kanyon’s was a long time coming. But the status quo makes it dangerous for any current or potential employees to sue—if they lose, the resultant hostility will render them unemployable. So the threesome who lodged the complaint were minor players—in WWE terms, anyway—and they hadn’t been under WWE employ for years.* The statute of limitations took precedence over the legitimacy of the claim, and the lawsuit fizzled.

  So, sadly, did Kanyon’s career. He did a short stint in TNA and wrestled in a number of the “major” independent shows, more or less fading into wrestling oblivion. He had gone up against the greatest villain in all of wrestling—the all-powerful Corporation, the WWE—and he had lost. Insofar as the average wrestling fan was aware of the lawsuit, it was seen not only as an assault on tradition but as another betrayal of wrestling’s immutable code of secrecy: It doesn’t do much for the idea of wrestling as a self-contained universe to point out that all these oiled musclemen in singlets are actually contract laborers.

  In a metaphorical sense, Kanyon’s professional career had a reverse life trajectory. As Mortis, he started off as death in caricature, a one-dimensional villain who later evolved into a regular guy and, as he outed himself, into a fully formed, multilayered human. Human frailty is an all-too-real thing, however. Kanyon was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and in early 2010 he threatened suicide. On April 2 of that year, he was found by his brother, having lethally overdosed on pills. He was forty years old.

  Supposedly he had been making plans to put his craftsmanship to good use and open his own wrestling school; the potential for a strong second act seemed real. But after his dreams of wrestling stardom dissipated, his self-perpetuated segregation from the wrestling mainstream left him ever more despondent. His death was a sad end to an imperfect career.

  UNIONS IN WRESTLING

  In October 2011, at the close of an episode of Raw, on-screen chief operating officer (and wrestler) Triple H stood i
n the center of the ring to address his employees and, in a comically formal proceeding, request their vote of confidence. The preceding months had been more than a little unruly. And despite Triple H’s insistence that he was working with the audience’s best interests in mind, each nominal faction of on-screen talent—the good guys, the bad guys, the female wrestlers, the referees—explained that they felt their workplace had become unsafe under Triple H’s leadership. After erstwhile announcer Jerry “The King” Lawler (who had been pancaked through a table by Mark Henry a couple of weeks before) said his piece, he formally walked out on his “boss” and was followed by the wrestlers, the announcers, and the ringside cameramen. Triple H was even abandoned, in the end, by announcer Jim Ross, whom the COO had reinstated only weeks before. (Ross later explained his decision on Twitter by saying, “When a coach loses his locker room, something has 2 b done.”)