“Stone Cold” Steve Austin
1,413 words
I have mixed feelings about professional wrestling. Allow me to offer my history with pro wrestling before I get into that, however. The story begins in the early 1980s.
John Stossel made an exposé for 20/20 in 1984 aimed at proving that pro wrestling was fake. I remember watching it when it first aired. You might think it was a ridiculous premise for an exposé. Doesn’t everyone already know that it’s fake? Didn’t they always? You’d be surprised. As late as the 1980s, there were still a great number of people who believed that professional wrestling was real, and it was part of the wrestler’s code to never admit that it’s fake.
Stossel interviewed an ex-wrestler who explained all their tricks, however, including the fact that certain things which look as if they hurt don’t actually hurt at all. For example, one of the main arguments for pro wrestling’s authenticity was the blood. If no one is actually being hurt, then how do wrestlers end up as such bloody messes by the end of a match? The ex-wrestler explained that they keep hidden razor blades and cut themselves when necessary. The guy then proceeded to demonstrate on camera by cutting his forehead with a razor blade. 40 years later, I still remember it.
The most famous part of Stossel’s exposé was when he said to wrestler David Shultz that wrestling is fake. Schultz then smacked Stossel to the ground and asked, “Does that feel fake?”
For my part, I always knew that pro wrestling was fake. As I mentioned in a previous essay, future Hall of Fame wrestler Harley Race was a family friend when I was a kid. Harley’s son went to school with my brother, and they were on the same wrestling team. Harley would sometimes show up to practices, and everyone knew him. He was a big deal on the regional wrestling scene. On one occasion, he brought me and my brothers backstage before one of his cage matches with his arch-rival, Ric Flair. Everyone asked him all the time if pro wrestling is fake, and he would give a non-committal answer about how “it’s a technical sport” or something like that. I knew who Harley Race was before I knew what pro wrestling was, and because of that I knew that wrestlers are just regular folks doing a job.
A digression: I had one other experience with a famous professional wrestler. In the late 1990s, the Honkytonk Man came to a restaurant where I worked. Honkytonk Man had been a wrestler during the 1980s boom, and his gimmick was that he was a wrestling Elvis impersonator. He was working the independent circuit at that time. Honkytonk Man ordered the most expensive thing on the menu, ate the whole thing, and then complained to the manager that he shouldn’t have to pay for it — and our manager complied. Another one of the employees was a big wrestling fan, and he said that according to the Internet, Honkytonk Man does that everywhere he goes. End digression.
When I first saw that legendary smackdown by David Schultz, my interpretation was that he was a deceiver violently lashing out against a truth-teller who was trying to expose his con. With age and wisdom, I am more sympathetic. He wasn’t trying to protect a grift so much as he was trying to preserve a kind of magic, one that no longer exists in our cynical world. Wrestling was immensely popular among children. In the ‘80s, pro wrestling was certainly marketed to children. There was the Saturday morning cartoon Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling as well as an array of merchandise, from toys to lunchboxes. Telling those children that pro wrestling was fake was like telling them that there’s no Santa Claus. A kid has the rest of his life to be cynical. Let him believe in magic for a little while.
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When I was a child, this was what my understanding of what pro wrestling was supposed to be: something you watched when you were a kid. When you get older and realize that it’s all fake, you grow out of it. Thus, the idea that one will watch pro wrestling despite knowing that it’s fake, and simply appreciating it as performance art, is a relatively new phenomenon.
The ‘80s wrestling craze eventually died down, because once everyone knew that it’s fake, it looked faker every time you watched it — and by the end of the ‘80s, everyone knew.
Then, in the 1990s, two things happened. The first was that some viewers began to enjoy watching pro wrestling ironically. They knew it was fake, but watched it anyway because they thought it’s funny. They loved the smack talking, the larger-than-life personalities, and the campiness of it all. They found its lack of sophistication endearing and unpretentious. For some there may have been a nostalgia factor as well, and some may have found it to be a fun thing to watch while high. The second was that pro wrestling started marketing itself to an older audience and began including more mature themes. “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, when he first emerged in 1991, was a new kind of wrestler. He was an anti-hero, ostensibly a good guy but also a bad boy who would drink beer onstage and was generally impolite.
One of the most controversial things I have ever written was an essay where I made the case that cartoons for adults have been bad for civilization. I have many of the same criticisms of pro wrestling. I have an intuitive dislike for taking things that have traditionally been for children and then marketing them to adults, whether it is cartoons, superheroes, or pro wrestling.
Pro wrestling stands out somewhat, however, because there is also a cultural aspect to it. Aside from those who watched it ironically, the only other people I knew who watched it in the 1990s was poor and/or rural whites. In the early 2000s I was working at a call center for a satellite TV company, and there were people who, were it not for pro wrestling pay-per-views, would have never paid their bills. Every night there was a big pay-per-view wrestling event, rural whites would call in in droves to order it. But the policy at the time was that you could not order pay-per-view if you had a past due balance on your account. Thus, all those who were three months behind on their payments would call in and pay it off just so they could order Summer Slam.
This is why I don’t want to be too hard on pro wrestling. I don’t want to be a snob. It’s a big deal among lower-class whites, and I don’t begrudge simple folks their simple pleasures. Pro wrestling is also implicitly white and an “only in America” phenomenon. Love it or hate it, pro wrestling is authentic Americana. While it’s not as politically incorrect as it used to be, it has been admirably resistant to wokeness.
I don’t object to pro wrestling in principle, although it has become far more mainstream than it should have. I’m alarmed by the degree of middle-class respectability that it has attained. Now it’s being consumed by those who have the intelligence to appreciate better things but no longer feel the need to conceal their love of pro wrestling behind a veil of irony. It’s not just that too many people are watching pro wrestling, but that they are completely unashamed about doing so. Whatever happened to guilty pleasures? If you are going to follow anime, pro wrestling, comic books, or whatever, fine. If that brings you joy, knock yourself out — but at least have the decency to be embarrassed about it.
As for me, I’ve never really enjoyed pro wrestling. There’s a fine line between ultra-macho and homoerotic, and pro wrestling walks too close to that line. I understand that there is women’s wrestling now, and they actually find attractive women to do it sexy outfits. Women’s wrestlers are no longer the bull dykes and Gravel Gerties who they were in the past. I understand their appeal, but men’s wrestling is just too homoerotic for my tastes.
It may be a kind of “art,” but it is still lowbrow art. I don’t have the most highbrow tastes in the world, either, but I consider some things to be too “undignified” — and pro wrestling is one of them.
17 comments
Nice work. I too was a fan back in the 80’s. You’ve got to hand it to the writers, they came up with some funny scenarios. I had the pleasure of meeting the “King” Jerry Lawler a short time back. He was a super nice guy. His feud with Andy Kaufman was hilarious. I happen to own a copy of the entire series of events called “I’m from Hollywood .”
I recall on my visits to England wrestling had a huge following there as well. It’s big in Mexico too. Not strictly Americana. But you’re correct wrestling is definitely for the young.
When Jerry Lawler and Andy Kaufman had that physical altercation on David Letterman back in the eighties, they convinced a lot of people that it was real.
Something you watch when you are a kid. Exactly. When I was junior high age in the late 1950s, I and my friends used to love Saturday night wrestling on TV. As we lived down the street from Angelo Poffo, who was a pro wrestler (and I believe that his sons followed him into the business), there was a slight personal connection to the, um, sport. I’m not sure how I’d react to it now. I suppose that if the characters were good, I might get into it. Or perhaps the lack of enthusiasm that old age tends to bring would prevent me from enjoying it.
Just looked up Angelo Poffo. He is indeed the father of Randy “the Macho Man” Savage and one other wrestler I never heard of.
This was a creative thing to write an article about. Professional wrestling has never had an iota of appeal to me, ironic or ronic, but it adds to the variety of the world. People who like that are the same as like those big trucks that crush other cars in the stadiums. Pretty soon those are going to be standard out on the road.
One of the essays in Mythologies (1957) by Roland Barthes is “The World of Wrestling”. I enjoyed it, so you should get even more out of it.
“Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of Suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque . . . The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees.”
Late 1950’s live from the Capital Arena in Washington, D.C. every Saturday night. Bruno Sammartino, Haystacks Calhoun, Gorgeous George, Killer Kowalski.
My earliest memory of tv was watching the matches with my grandparents. They were literally peasants who stepped into the modern world from the Middle Ages and they never took it seriously. They laughed at the flamboyant antics. It’s difficult to believe there are those in more recent times who believe it isn’t staged.
I once happed upon Bam-Bam Bigelow feeding his large dog a sack of Double-R-Bar burgers in the back of his van People I worked with at the time couldn’t believe I never heard of Bam-Bam.
Gorgeous George was an interesting guy. Unless I’m mistaken, he was the earliest, best-known example of a wrestler who purposefully embraced the role of the “heel.”
He acted the part by dressing in an exaggeratedly outlandish way (hence his moniker), fighting “dirty” against his opponents, willfully disobeying the referees, and, most importantly of all, antagonizing or even expressly insulting the hometown crowd.
But through it all, Gorgeous George knew exactly what he was doing and why. His antics were practically guaranteed to sell tickets because spectators loved to come and see the bad guy lose — which he did quite often, and no doubt perfectly on cue.
For those who don’t know, according to wrestling industry slang, a “heel” is a bad guy, while a “face” is a good guy; although many wrestlers may actually go back and forth between the two roles over the course of their careers, based on whatever overarching storylines they’re adhering to.
Sadly my interest waned at age five so I don’t remember the details, only the great names.
G.G was a sort of a Liberace of the ring.
As a little kid I was very impressed by the wrestler Seaman Art Thomas. He had an amazing physique that inspired me to work at building up my scrawny little kid body. He was also black and seemed like a nice guy. Klondike Bill was another favorite. His great feat was eating two 72 ounce steaks in less than an hour at the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo. I think these wrestlers were a positive influence on America’s youth in the 1950’s. Fake or not.
Thinking back to that era and role models, I always wanted to be like Jack Lalanne and have the ability to swim across the harbor pulling a rowboat with a tow rope in my teeth. Although the thought of wearing that peg legged jump suit with those things under the instep embarrassed me. I did watch his show on tv and exercise with him as a pre-schooler.
Thanks for jogging my memory.
This article sums up my view of wrestling. I grew out of it by age 14. It was obvious that it is staged. I don’t have anything against it or anyone who watches it, though .Years ago when wrestling was big on pay-per-view, some of my coworkers would get together at someone’s house and split the cost. I never judged them for it, they were reliable coworkers. The wrestler who slapped John Stossel had his wrestling career ended because of that incident. He was immediately fired and he couldn’t get hired by another wrestling circuit. By the late eighties he had become a bounty hunter.
There are points made about marketing kid’s stuff to adults, or why would people watch this knowing it’s not real. But it’s more a ramble. Then the heterosexual-credentials signaling at the end seems like one of those things doomed to be read the opposite way that it’s inserted at all. It feels like attaching something to this.
But I get you don’t feel at home with pro wrestling. Ok.
I’ve never been crazy about American pro wrestling either I admit…especially the way it went, the bigger and brasher and more magnified it became, the more ‘fake’ it became, the more I felt a need to avoid this stupid nonsense. But I don’t know how people watch the real sports they do either. If you gave me a choice between watching pro wrestling or NBA I would pick pro wrestling.
But even 30 years ago, the world wasn’t quite as cynical and ironic and cringe hunting as it is now. Can’t deny those currents were there, but the internet has accelerated things to a point where everything prior is quaint and stupid, dated and the only thing that matters is the latest social media post dispensed by some post-irony influencer. The influencer is also engaging their own kayfabe to sell you a product usually. I think wrestling’s is less offensive.
I did so some training in pro wrestling years ago at wrestling school, it was a lot of fun. It is still athletic, and they are athletes, it’s a kind of performance. I got to meet to people in that world. I think it’s quite cool to do.
So my feelings are more neutral on the whole thing itself and there some wrestlers I have quite liked for different reasons.
Stossel was rude. What’s fake is the news.
His “standard question” was an insult.
”I think this is all fake,” he said.
So he got slapped around.
When Stone Cold started off in 1991 he was just like dozens of heels before him, far from a new kind of wrestler. When he developed the Stone Cold gimmick he wasn’t even the first anti-hero or tweener. That being said, there’s a large group of adult pro wrestling fans today who are gay communists.
Just a thought.
Did anyone ever consider the possibility that the John Stossel slap was in itself kayfabe?
I was never a big wrestling fan, but after watching some documentaries about it, it’s not ‘fake’ even if it’s not 100% what it appears to be. The closest analogy I can make is if ballet included tossing a suspended ballerina to the ground as regular part of the performance.
Back in the day, real wrestlers wrestled in wraslin’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verne_Gagne
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