Mozzarella

It was sometime in the latter half of 1999, that I saw my very first WWE (WWF then) match. The Undertaker vs Stone Cold Steve Austin. A ‘First Blood’ match which quite simply meant that the first person to bleed lost the match. I was rooting for the Undertaker, the 7-foot tall behemoth who seemed formidable indeed in front of the bald bearded Stone Cold. Moreover, here was the first time I was ever seeing the Undertaker on TV after years of calling out, “Height 7’2” clash!” from ‘trump’ cards.

After a long fight both in and out of the ring, the Undertaker lifted up Stone Cold by the neck and slammed him to the mat in an awesome move, which the commentators called a chokeslam. The Undertaker then exited the ring and rummaged around for a while before coming up with a video camera. By this time, Stone Cold had recovered and as the Undertaker turned around with the camera, he was bashed in the face with it. As Stone Cold flopped down, the Undertaker walked groggily and got hold of a chair. He then proceeded to bash Austin’s skull with it, only to realise that he had already lost because he was bleeding from the camera hit. A guy in a suit standing near the ring went pale with shock. A commentator wearing a hat, went nuts, screaming “Stone Cold! Stone Cold!” Stone Cold Steve Austin had won.

And so it started. Words like chokeslam, enziguiri, flying elbow, DDT, suplex, stunner and so on entered my vocabulary. Breaks between classes in school were filled with discussions of how Mankind gave the Rock the ‘socko’ and how Austin attacked Vince McMahon in a hospital. We tried chokeholds on each other and most debates were followed by the famous ‘suck it’ gesture, which even non-wrestling fans are aware of. Every edition of RAW was awaited with bated breath and every one of the Rock’s multitude of catchphrases was memorized to be used on several occasions. The harsh bleep used on TV to censor swear words became a swear word in itself as we all went around cursing each other with beeps.

I’m sure everyone here has seen a few WWF matches, mostly when they were young during the time when Bret Hart, Undertaker, Shawn Michaels and Diesel reigned. And at that young age, it all seems so real. For instance, many might have really believed that the Undertaker derived his power from that little urn and was ‘resurrected’ after being shut into a coffin by Yokozuna. Of course, as wisdom and better sense prevailed, some stopped watching it, though many still continued following the weekly tussles in the ‘squared circle’. I was a very different case though. I started watching it when I was in the 9^th standard and obviously knew that the fights couldn’t be real. And yet, it was so enticing that I had to watch it every week without fail.

Wrestling is very strange in some respects. For instance, amateur wrestling is an Olympic sport, which is very real and requires extremely sharp reflexes. It has strict rules and regulations and all the fighting is in the form of grapples and throws rather than body blows. Pro wrestling on the other hand, cannot even be called a sport. Sure, it has elements of sport like contestants, titles, winners and so on. At the same time, it’s like a movie, orchestrated from beginning to end and played out in front of millions of viewers every week. The combination of the suspense of the movies and the testosterone-fuelled visceral thrills of contact sports is what makes wrestling immensely popular all over the world. WWE owner Vince McMahon terms it as ‘sports entertainment’, which pretty much sums it all up.

Violence is a primal urge hidden inside every human being and wrestling is one way of satisfying it second hand. Now I am not saying that wrestling spawns violence. In fact, the Romans used to quench their urges by putting gladiators in life-or-death battles against each other or animals. Perhaps, we should be fortunate that we live in a more civilized era, where our ‘recreational violence’ is make-believe. But of course, there is more to pro wrestling than just physicality.

Each wrestler has a unique personality (known as a ‘gimmick’), entrance music and moves. Elaborate storylines are sketched out giving the viewers a chance to enjoy the fights at more than the physical level. In wrestling terminology, wrestlers are classified into ‘faces’ and ‘heels’. The faces being the ones, who enjoy crowd support and have the best catchphrases. The heels are of course, ‘the bad boys’ who badmouth the crowd on every possible occasion. It’s all in the way they are portrayed. A wrestler who was a heel for some time can become a face if projected properly and vice versa.

Vicious, violent matches such as ‘Hell in a Cell’ and ‘Buried Alive’ are set up for the culmination of feuds between wrestlers. Exhilarating athletic abilities are displayed in matches involving cages, ladders, tables and whatnot. And for the ‘red-blooded male’ there are always girls in skimpy outfits to provide all the eye candy necessary. With such a package, how many can resist pro wrestling?

So, the WWE occupied most of my TV time for about a year or so. In the winter of 2000, Star Sports stopped showing the WWF and started showing the rival WCW federation, which soon ended when Vince McMahon bought the WCW sealing the ‘Monday Night Wars’ forever. There was no wrestling on Indian television for more than a year. It was very disappointing and there was only one option left. The Internet. And in my weekly pursuits to stay updated with the action, I learnt quite a few things.

For starters, what they showed on TV was about 3 weeks behind of what actually happened in the US. There the people could watch the weekly events for free on TV, but had to pay specially for the monthly extravaganza called the ‘pay-per-view’. Wrestlers who were supposedly out of action because of being ‘run down by cars’ and the like were actually recuperating from real injuries. Backstage politics by veteran wrestlers often called the shots which decided who would hold the championships and when. The fighting in the ring was real in a way and wrestlers were supposed to be able to withstand quite some blows known as ‘bumps’. They actually underwent pretty rigorous training before stepping into the ring.

The ubiquitous chairs that were used to bash the opponent’s skull were specially made chairs that absorbed 95% of the impact. Wrestlers actually bled on stage (contrary to people who think that it is dilute tomato ketchup). But the bleeding was not due to knocks on the head by chairs or brass knuckles. Instead, the wrestler would go down and cover his face after suffering such a shot. While the camera was off him, he would surreptitiously make a cut in his forehead with a blade concealed in his wristband in an act known in wrestling jargon as ‘blading’.

These were not the only things I learnt of, course. I read up on a lot of wrestling history and inspite of not having watched wrestling from an early age, I had a sackload of information stored in my head (forgotten quite a bit now). From the first Wrestlemania (the holy grail of wrestling) to the way Vince McMahon cheated Bret Hart in what has come to be known as the Survivor Series ‘screwjob’, I read a helluva lot of stuff in those days.

Soon enough, the football World Cup 2002 arrived. And with it came this hitherto unknown channel called Ten Sports, which started showing the WWF (now the WWE) again. And this time I watched it again, from a more intellectual perspective (I flatter myself). Of course, I still loved nothing more than a bloody ‘Hell in a Cell’ match, but I started to see for myself how they were trying to hook the public into the action. Things had changed. My favourite, the Rock had become a breakaway movie star and stopped wrestling regularly. Stone Cold was practically retired with injuries. The Undertaker had adopted a lame ‘American badass’ gimmick and was squashing guys who were way more entertaining than him. Many of the big names from the ‘Attitude Era’ (1997-2000) were gone. With WCW gone and no real competition, Vince McMahon became complacent and the programmes became worse.

And of course, the silly stereotypes which the WWE nurtured were beginning to irritate me. Japanese wrestlers who are amongst the most talented wrestlers in the world were portrayed as dolts who couldn’t speak English and were basically fodder for the rest of the wrestlers. Canadian wrestlers were booed by the entire crowd after they very stupidly unfurled the Canadian flag and proclaimed that they were better than the USA. Englishmen were portrayed as uptight suit wearing royalists. This has been happening for years with people like Ludvig Borga, The Iron Sheikh, Yokozuna and so on. The crowds have been encouraged to boo at them just because they were foreigners and hence ‘evil’. If it was the Iraqis during the Gulf War period in 1991 it was the French in 2003 because of their refusal to participate in the war. If the WWE crowds are representative of America, then Americans are pretty chauvinistic indeed.

Any wrestler no matter how stale or useless suddenly becomes a star once he waves the ‘good ol’ red, white and blue’. The biggest example of this is obviously Hulk Hogan. For years, a generation of American kids looked up at him as a role model as he rose to fame with his famous message of ‘do your training, eat your vitamins and say your prayers’. And yet, nobody had an idea of the man behind the façade who injected himself with all sorts of illegal drugs and indulged in nasty backstage politics.

To cut a long story short, wrestling no longer did it for me and I stopped watching it. Sure there’ve been several classic matches which I’d watch again anyday, but I have no enthusiasm to see it regularly anymore. And as with any obsession that fades away, this one left a mark as well. Believe it or not, it was the entrance music of WWE wrestlers that actually got me to listen to music. I started with metal and then slowly branched out and away into several other genres. But that’s a topic for another post. Some other day, perhaps.

# posted by Ashish : 11:40 am