“THE LAST WRESTLING PIECE” (1985)
by RICHARD MELTZER
EXTENDED CUT

Reprinted here for the first time online, by courtesy of Richard Meltzer.

In much the same way that existentialism is the metaphysics of pragmatism (or is it vice versa?), wrestling is the metaphysics of rockandroll. If it isn't, what is?

In the cultural chain of late-century being, if wrestling is in crisis, what isn't?

There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theatre.

—Roland Barthes, Mythologies

I threw the paper into the corner and turned on the TV set. After the society page dog vomit even the wrestlers looked good.

—Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

What is portrayed by wrestling is therefore an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before the panoramic view of a univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction.

—Barthes, Mythologies

I can beat anyone up. And I can walk and talk too.

—Hulk Hogan

Okay, get out your notebooks. This here is lecture time. Wrestling Goes Mainstream. An outcome that is vile, it's loathsome, it may even cause cancer—don't laugh, this is serious. Somebody help me wheel out the blackboard . . . where the hell's my chalk? Okay, pens and pencils ready: I HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT.

1. By plugging right smack into the Master Program, wrestling has gone from being something uniquely fake, archetypally fake, paradigmatically fake for real, to something nonironically fake per se, standardly fake like Everything is fake: movies, TV, "real" sports, fashion trends, heart transplants, national elections.

2. An all-too-willing conspirator in the Ruse Writ Large, it is no longer the needle-threading, universe-belching master of its own persona, ceding (in all ways crucial, for a mess of pottage) the Grand Generatrix of its own awesome face to the cloning yuck—for shame! For shame!—of demographics.

3. Where once upon a not so distant past wrestling proudly mucked and traded in all that was Low—as in geeks, carnies and bathos—its current sense of market is defined wholly and simply by that lowest of common Denoms: children, hipsters and morons (principally Caucasian).

4. Formerly (same time frame) the incarnation of Bombast/Pure/No Limit, it has reeled in its oompah, chiseled its swagger, to coalesce with the twin towers of topical cowpoop strut, Get!Down! and U!S!A!

5. Not in the wrestling lifetime of any of us under 50 have even the most impressive of good guys exhibited the consistently commanding Presence, or been ultimately as Interesting, as your average bad guy, 50th percentile and up. And while role play flexibility, including the option of 180° reversals on a dime, has always been a vital part of the trip, bad-to-good transitions have become an all-too-prevalent fact of life, as witnessed by the surrender-of-self of far too many Significant Malevolents in the last couple annums: Hulk Hogan, Sgt. Slaughter, Superfly Snuka and—saddest of all—Lou Albano. (Reagan Era culture death at its most chilling.)

6. With its own entertainment I.D. no longer that of the bad guy—or even a bad guy—wrestling hooks up with the perennial bastion of choreographed insincerity (a.k.a. telegraphed sincerity), itself once Quite Bad but recently born again Good ("We Are the World"; Cyndi Lauper for Cystic Fibrosis), the festering megacorpse of mainstream rock. Underlining even more than the preeminence of Product over Art, this alliance made in Suburban Hell officially certifies our current megadistance from a world in which, massively, minutely or otherwise, art (or daring) ever really, truly functioned.

7. A TV staple since virtually the medium's birthing, wrestling for 35 years had the firmness of mission to ignore the insidious beseechings of any and all cathode Style Sheets, serving up the rawest and (possibly) most steadfastly life-affirming of broadcast gestalts: seamed and seamy—but such (ah!) is Life. Today, TV-ized to the gills and snout, it is seamless, sanitized, canned-featured, digitally animated, color-commentated, slo-mo'ed and SLICK—as suffocatingly awful as Wide World of Sports (or the bloody Super Bowl).

8. With the WWF running, basically, the whole entire show, and the NWA, AWA, etc. reduced collectively to less than a sliver of the pie, wrestling's once mighty Pluralism—its infrastructural one-up on all-American athleto-monistic hooey—has been sent the way of the horse, the buggy, the Bill of Rights.

9. More a geo-conceptual problem than an econo-monopolistic one, today's centralized national setup all but banishes Geographic Mystery from the stew. To wit (for example), where in New York '73 it was announced that Stan "The Man" Stasiak had wrested from Pedro Morales the then-WWWF championship off camera in Philadelphia, and it was debated by bemused cognoscenti whether in fact Philadelphia existed (i.e.,as a WWWF outpost), it would be downright fruitless to any longer doubt your Phillies, your Boises, your Buzzard Creeks—the WWF blankets us all. To wit number two, "Parts Unknown," the hearth and home of Mr. Wrestling II, The Spoiler, Spot Moondog et al, is (as any kid up on the "new math" will tell you) finally inside the bubble!

10. As the breakdown/abandonment of regional promotion becomes more or less complete, local non-televised wrestling cards, once the quasi-lifeblood of the whole dang whatsis, tend to suffer most (proportionally) of all, especially with the goddam Hulk so unassailably entrenched as the Big Cheese-Designate and coast-to-coast hogger of hype. The Hulkster and his immediate foes can only fight so many nights a year, see, and with no local first units to draw from—such folk having either been absorbed nationally, shipped to jurisdictions unknown or locked out to rot—towns large and small are too often stuck with national second units that essentially stink, so great is the disparity of urgency (at Choreography Central) between Hulk-level horseshit and everything else. And without loser-leaves-town matches to occasionally fall back on (as there's no longer a “town” to leave) . . . gosh.

11. Okay. Here's one for laughs. Time was muscles, make that muscles without accompanying fat, were the exclusive domain of "narcissists," sissyboys—in any event, some kind of weirdos—and bullies. Muscle creeps were hideous monsters, good guys never had them, certainly not the swollen fibrous crap you'd see in muscle mags, and even strong good guys, those to whom strength was their thing, had about as much flab sticking out their trunks as your average beer slob.* Nor was there ever the faintest need for flabless abs, pecs or delts to even alternately serve as any sort of mat-tempered Fitness Metaphor, for what was fitness but the sick joke of joggers? Okay, fine, great, amazing: a wrestling iconographically fair to the natural slob in Everyman. So what happens but Fitness Chic erupts like a case of the hives, hundreds of ‘em, grab the national scrotum without subtlety or mercy, Schwarzenegger makes a couple pics with and without his shirt—so what's wrestling go do but ruthlessly pander-to-trend. Possibly the sickest hallmark of the New Wrestling is rippling goddam fibers across the board: from bad guys as always (Paul Orndorff, Brutus Beefcake) to principal good guys (Hogan, Snuka) to peripheral stiffs (Ricky Steamboat) to even—wouldja believe it?—announcers (Jesse "The Body" Ventura). Add to this all those hokey ersatz training tapes (". . . pumping iron with Dick Wazoo in his Gym") and what we're faced with is Slob Disenfranchisement of the most nefarious ilk. Pshaw!

12. By shilling for itself on priorly occupied turf (Letterman, Saturday Night Live, the sports sections of major metropolitan dailies), wrestling actually finds itself in a position to catalytically undermine an incredibly stupid and docile nation's belief structure re Everything, to effect the removal of the Master Program ring from a people's collective nose as it were. À NOUS LA LIBERTE—wrestling style!! But such is far, far from its bag of intentions—and it sure don't want snot on its hands.

Let's be fair. Not everything stinks about today’s wrestling, not even that practiced by the essentially repugnant World Wrestling Federation, formerly the World Wide Wrestling Federation, which according to a recent Village Voice cover story has penetration rights to a whopping 87 per cent of U.S. TV homes—and climbing—and is so Johnny-on-the-nosering it even puts out its own wrestling mag, kind of the equivalent of a hit sitcom marketing its own TV Guide; Freddie Blassie (for instance) does not stink at all. In fact he is coming up roses.

During the hype hoedown which preceded MTV's "Rock & Wrestling Connection" whizoff between Roddy Piper and Hulk Hogan, for inst, while everyone from Little Richard to Gloria Steinem was delivering cheesy well-rehearsed cliché in support (mostly) of Ms. Lauper's cultural sugardad Hogan, Classy Fred, non-partisan to a fault, went straight for the corporate jugular, bellowing a mothereffing gem of from-the-hip truth & concision: "WHAT GOOD IS MTV???!!! THEY NEVER PLAY 'STARDUST' OR THE RUSSIAN NATIONAL ANTHEM!!!" Indeed, indeed, and howzabout a couple months back when, prodded to explain how as a loyal American he could give succor to "Communists and Iranians," namely his tagteam charges Nikolai Volkoff and the Iron Sheik, this top-five all-time master interviewee (the others being the pre-sold-out Lou Albano, the late Grand Wizard, and the long-gone John Tolos and Killer Kowalski) exclaimed simply, "I support WINNERS!!!"—inspirational or what? (Up there, in the author's opinion, with Ron Dellums' voice-in-the-wilderness characterization of Jimmy Carter's '80 Olympic boycott, which he was one of only like maybe two-three members of Congress to refuse to endorse, as "hysterical"—Great Moments in Keeping the Faith.)

Then there's master interviewer Roddy Piper, he of WWF insert Piper's Pit, one talkshow host who really knows How. Former house villain at (L.A.'s own) Olympic Auditorium, a likable hack whose principal shtick never amounted to much more than aggressive cowardice, Roddy has finally graduated to a task that suits him, beating out-of-ring good guys (qua naive, unsuspecting talk show guests with chairs, smashing bananas in their face. "Sympathy,” he’s been quoted as saying, "comes after stupidity and suicide in the dictionary." Talkshow hostility carried to its logical, inevitable conclusion (and the only leap in either tenor or scale—from Old Wrestling to New, local dungeon to national slick—which seems to have been worth the effort, the gamble, whatever the hey).

Actually, though, to be really fair, Vince McMahon's macro-talkshow TNT, formerly Tuesday Night Titans, has also had its moments, including probably the big world-is-watching (hundreds of thousands? over USA Cable) moment of ‘em all: the Butcher Vachon wedding. While the WWF kingpin’s sense of Manifest Bombast has too often of late been that of a golfing banker or nonironic (barely even cynical) pesticide lobbyist, those rare occasions when he’s let the empire’s hair down, and trusted the thing to communal autopilot, have been purt near transcendent. The Wedding: collaborative improv/sequential pluralism on a par with some of your better Battle Royals, or Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz (for instance).

And Kamala, the three-hundred-some-odd-pound Ugandan Giant, he of few teeth and fewer traditional holds, a true innovator, he just kind of knocks 'em over, falls on 'em and eventually gets up, too pure for the WWF so now he's out in the boonies of something called the Mid-South—anyway he's okay.

And King Kong Bundy, 458 lbs. of monster metaphor/mixed (radiation-sick colossus meets shaved-head vampire meets world's largest amoeba meets lab animal that fucks-your-mom), wrestling's ultimate genetic accident (in the hands, no less, o f the mad, post-scientific WWF) and master of the 5-count pin (3 is for simps, wimps and earlier phases of the beast): as okay as it gets.

And someone I've never actually seen wrestle, just his photo in the "Mat Mania!" issue of Sports Illustrated, this guy (?) with stupid hair and face paint called the Missing Link, no idea where he wrestles but I'd bet he's alright. I would bet ten bucks.

Otherwise—suddenly I’m feeling generous, I don't know why, but let’s give some points to Big John Studd, Ken Patera and Bobby Heenan for clipping Andre the Giant’s healthy head o’ sheep hair—otherwise, and I've been watching this junk since 1956 (so I know), otherwise nada, 's an average lame era at best, the EMPEROR'S NEW YUPPIE THREADS—and I'm being fair. I am.

I've been watching the shit since 1956, actually earlier; have followed it since around ’56—more or less continuously. Some multi-year gaps here & there, sure, but also some great big hunks of uninterrupted focus, bigger than for 2/3 the things in my life. I've been to it live at least 200 times in various cities, or let’s say 175–180. I've seen 8 or 9 battle royals. Wrestling was the first sport (by any definition) that meant anything to me, like I’d catch the world series or a bowl game most every year but so what. Discovered and learned the whole sporting pot pourri in sequence to it, first bought The Ring 'cause they had maybe 2-3 pages of wrestling in back, eventually read the boxing up front and started watching, hadda then buy Sports Illustrated and Sport to widen my boxing horizon, in the process managing to additionally notice (in sequence) football, hockey, basketball, baseball, etc. [Where the author is “coming from.”]

Around '53 or '54 I remember my grandfather watching on a tiny black & white, sweat dripping, seegar jutting/jerking in his twisted mouth. In turn-of-the-20th Russia he himself had wrestled, or so he claimed, taking on smalltown bullies (Greco-Roman style) for a bottle of vodka. As half a century later wrestling could not help remaining a matter of honor, this almost-an-anarchist nobody's-fool would yell at the screen, "Use your hammerlock!"—affairs of honor can scarcely be faked. [Germplasmic source of a cultural postulate.]

Independent of gramps I hooked into the whatsis somewhere during my first semester of junior high—a couple months after hooking into rock & roll fifteen years before it was pan-corporate slime by catching Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show. Krazy music (from then on) I could always catch—the home radio'd all but been abandoned in the wake of TV—but krazy ringside hi-jinx I had to (appropriately) fight for. All they had on in New York back then was Thursday night wrestling from D.C., promoted, interestingly enough, by McMahon's old man Vince Sr., which since it shared the slot of bran'new goddam Playhouse 90 meant I hadda fight the folks to even catch five minutes. (A compromise was eventually reached: alternating weeks. Which meant, in one typical stretch, them missing part one of the Playhouse 90 "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and me missing Mark Lewin & Don Curtis losing the U.S. Tag Team Championship to the Graham Brothers, Eddie & Dr. Jerry, while they lucked into catching part two.) By the time I was in the 9th grade I was so gaga for wrestlin' I wormed my way into a car with ten or eleven relatives I couldn't stand 'cause they were headed down D.C. for Easter where they had this 6-man whoosis they weren't gonna televise—Lewin, Curtis and 601-lb. Haystacks Calhoun vs. the Grahams and Johnny Valentine—and jesus was it a lulu. In the second fall the Grahams refused Valentine's tag, he wasn't their brother so they let him get his ass beat. He got pinned and some stretcher guys carried him out but then midway through the third fall he came running back out with a bandage around his head swinging this long fucking pipe at all five of the rest of 'em, eventually pinning Haystacks (kayoed by a chair) while the others were busy swinging stuff at each other, the only time (though I could be wrong) the big fatso was actually counted out, shoulders to the mat 1-2-3—and I was there. And I was there, 1974, seventh row ringside, Madison Square Garden, when Freddie Blassie actually punched Bruno Sammartino in the balls—without (hey hey?) a script?—and I'm such a sap I’ve even gone to, and sat through, midgets in Texas. [Evidence of abiding affection.]

And I've seen Blassie, '71 at the Olympic Aud., biting John Tolos's head for must've been 10-15 minutes of just biting—nothing else! until he just kind of relinquished his grip and the bit-up Tolos fell over flat ‘n’ inert like so much dead meat, ONLY TO COME BACK STRONG AND COP THE THIRD AND DECIDING FALL—so I know comebacks. And this current whatever it is Wrestling Writ Large is supposed to be undergoing is not (not) a comeback. 'Cause, writ large, it's never been "away." Or particularly "down." I mean yeah, some regional promotions had dried up 'n' out from their own flaming ineptitude (the Olympic's LeBells for inst), and the mass consumption of Hulkamania t-shirts does represent some kind of "advance," but truly, writ Large, with or without the glitz, the thing has been superpopular for decades. Or some such duration.

Like I've got this page clipped from a mid-'73 Wrestling News. It says: "Professional Wrestling Is Our Number One Sport!—we have statistics to back this up!" And the stats have Pro Wrestling at 35,000,000, ahead of College Football at 33,000,000, Major League Baseball at 30,000,000, College Basketball at 25,000,000 and so on, down to Pro Boxing at a crummy 5,000,000. This is "1972 U.S. Sports Attendance" they're giving, not as profit-ledger significant as paid attendance maybe—and certainly no bottom-line plurality without concurrent sales of caps, headbands, bumper stickers and bobbing head dolls—but significant nonetheless. "Amazing But True!" exclaims author Norman H. Kietzer but I’m neither amazed nor incredulous: I wasn't then and I am not now.

'Cause what's the 35 million ultimately represent? Let's say you've got a hardcore of 10 million wrestling fans, or had one in '72, a low estimate either way but all you need to pack in 35 is each of 'em hauls ass and goes live 3.5 times a year—a reasonable assumption. I mean even marginal fans go at least once per average year (to a battle royal, for instance), more than has gotta be the case for baseball, football, tennis or whatever. Factor in all the occasionally gungho azzholes like myself (I went, for inst, to every Island Garden card in West Hempstead, N.Y., from ’57 to ’59, every Madison Sq. Garden show from '72 to '75, every weekly Olympic bash from late '75 to early '77, and though I currently watch maybe 80 football games a year I've attended but one since '78) and 3.5/per is a no-sweat cinch—and we're not even talkin' those hundreds of thousands of weird fucks who're so beyond cycles of interest they (and their families) go every time. And you want availability of product? These guys still rassle 300 times a year; draw a circle around any major burg and there's gotta be (even post-dryout) 5-10 shows a month within 100 miles; probably more. Multiply dah dah dum by dah dah dee . . . you get the picture. '72, '85, whenever: demonstrably superpopular.

All that's going on is Vince Jr. performing insidious thus-&-such with this legitimate mass popularity at its base, structurally redistributing the remaining world's access to its variables & whatnot 'til he gets to have it All and Then Some—conspicuously. VHF, UHF, cable, closed circuit. Ads for jeans and Valvoline. Headbands, sweatbands and posters that fit exactly on the bedroom doors of suburban New Age 12-year-olds. Aesthetically coequal competitors—many of whom his dad even played quasi-friendly ball with—cringing, sighing, crying in his New Age mega-capitalist wake. Which, apropos of comebacks, is akin to Columbia Records buying out WEA, MCA and Polygram (or undermining their promotion, distribution, etc. 'til they're down 'round the scale of India Navigation and SST), prodding Springsteen, Michael Jackson and whoever-the-fuck to record five albums/each a year and listing them at $22.50 (everything else, $18.95) . . . and hailing that as a glorious comeback for American Music.

Palm Sunday, guys! And gals and gimps and toddlers. The L.A. Sports Arena—hot outside, cool within. WrestleMania. You've seen the hype, now here's et cetera. On a big flicking SCREEN from Mad. Square Garden.

8,257 (announced attendance)—a sellout. Mean age: 14 (not a minute over). Whole gaggles of kiddies w/ daddies or guardians or uncles. More whiny, noisy, screamy, stand-in-your-way little bastards than at a baseball game; at least they're not dressed like cubscouts. You know how at baseball they think every fly ball is a home run and they scream and prance accordingly? Well this is worse—and the triggers are endless.

Clusters of hippies, punkers, yuppies, guppies, unaffiliated sports dodos, less than half of one percent blacks (even with Junk Yard Dog on the bill) and almost no Hispanics (even with Tito Santana). Blacks have always been too hip for this shit; Hispanics, who used to make up 99.999 percent of the local wrestlegoing public, and always seemed incredibly patient wading through all the Chavo Guerrero/RaulMata/El Azteca blandness the Olympic would sometimes feed 'em, are too hip—finally--for anyone even named Tito Santana. Especially at 12 bucks a pop.

Twelve here, and a whopping HUNDRED at the Garden. For ringside. Here it's 12 everywhere—all seats, all sections, up in the corners where the screen's this narrow slit at like 20 degrees, down behind the projector on this scaffold where the thing's straight on at 90, only 40 tons of metal are in the way—all marked at 12, all unnumbered for seating. As if a computer couldn’t just, y’know, number 'em and then everybody wouldn't hafta show up two hours ahead just to scramble (if the doors're even open) (they're not), otherwise line up in the frigging heat, stand stand stand for an hour, get the kids ready to scramble . . . then be happy with wherever you've got. EVERYBODY'S happy (so I am blue).

I'm sitting at 50° next to this guy from Orange County who keeps telling his boychild, 10, not to lean on him so much, to (even though it's his birthday) lay off the male-male affection. "Johnny!—we're NOT at home!" Nope, you, him, me and another million-point-two (WWF figure) 're out TV-ing in public at some 200 locations nationwide—minimum of a million (Associated Press). The sound stinks, the picture's none too bright, light streams in through a curtain every time a wee one runs out to buy a wiener or take a whiz, but, still, there really kind of sure/maybe/almost has never quite been ANYTHING—in the annals of wrestledom (as opposed to boxing) (or Evel Knievel)—quite like THIS. This big, this bigness-y, this pompous/ponderous, this TV-plays-itself-quite-so-BIG-ish, this definitively ONCE-and-probably-never-ever-AGAIN. Or something.

Back in '76, for inst, the Muhammad Ali-Antonio Inoki mixed boxing-wrestling hoop-dee-doo (for the World Martial Arts Something or Other) managed to get closed-circuited from Tokyo into venues like the Olympic as the first half of an all-nighter topped off locally with live (unmixed) wrestling, but it sold for shit, most of the customers were boxing fans anyway (so they split in a huff before wrestling even got started), and mainly the damn thing was just a big boring anticlimax, ‘cause for some reason they opted not to pre-orchestrate it, figuring the great Ali (who once claimed Gorgeous George as a major thematic influence) and this Asian superduperstar could wing it themselves—no such luck. So that don't count, and at the scale we're talkin' it's the only precursor.

TV—of any size screen—and wrestling have had a constant if herky-jerk relationship since the late '40s. Steve Allen’s first TV gig was announcing it; gameshow buzzard Dennis James did same, on the Dumont Network (one of the original Big Four), for something like six years. Also on Dumont was Jack Brickhouse, a "legit" sportscaster before, during & afterwards, play-by-playing it from Chicago's Marigold Garden; CBS and NBC both ran it—in PRIME TIME—as did ABC as late as September '54. Now you've got all this syndication and cable, and there's always been, whether live, tape or kinescope, plenty of you-name-it from mass- and multi-regional down to microdot in-studio local/nonexistent, but at ALL times the function of televised wrestling—other, of course, than (ad-inducing) entertainment now—has been the setting up and telegraphing of grudges between designated combatants so's to spur live gates (here, there, everywhere) at shows featuring untelevisied contests between 'em; no other sport has sold itself so well by means of the airwaves, or rather so exclusively via same. (The Dodgers and their greed-ilk, sure, but never with such synchronous wit or transparent downhome malfeasance.)

Anyway: the Payoff. Snake bites tail—untelevised is televised—heavens gape wider than pussy as one-million-plus prepare to bear witness. The Absolute unfolds Itself. The gift of fire (it's a drug, y'dig?) to Man. Which'd probably be as exciting as hell if you gave half a fuck.

The "Woodstock of Wrestling" is what our bigscreen guide Mean Gene Okerlund is instantly calling it. (Better they should pitch a ring on Yasgur's Farm.)

Anyway, underway. Some Wrestle to go with the Mania. Transmission's on time—roar roar ROAR—1 p.m. Pacific Standard. Like clockwork ticktock-work the prelims just go, whatsis following whoosis in an unbroken string of interview/pre . match . . . interview/post . bang bang bang bang bang. And the kids're just as relentless, hoopla-ing way out of proportion for so early on a card, any card, like it's an NBA championship (or something) with every basket, every rebound and dribble additively counting even in the first two minutes. What do these kids know that wrestling ain't additive?—the least additive (or numerically logical) of sports.

Only surprises before intermission—6 matches total—are the announced time of King Kong Bundy's demolition of Special Delivery Jones (9 seconds, when clearly it was anywhere from 45 to a minute-30, like why not call it 8 seconds or maybe a nice round 5?) and Nikolai Volkoff & the Iron Shiek's tagteam triumph over goody-goody champeens Barry Wyndham & Mike Rotundo (could it be Vince's plan to work these sickening purehearts—their theme song, "Born in the U.S.A."—as underdogs for a while?) with a vital assist from manager Blassie's rhinestoned cane. Two out of six is prob'ly okay—I’d be a dickbrain to expect more—so I get a beer to ease me through the Total Descent (down, y'know, the Toilet) which once they rewind the clock is sure as fuck to follow.

And does. First, Andre the Giant's body-slam outing with Big John Studd. For weeks or months or years Studd and manager Bobby "The Brain" Heenan have been waving this wad of lucre—a big wad—some or possibly all of the 15 thousand big ones to be given the man who is Man enough to body-slam the Big one. For weeks or possibly months one or the other of 'em has also been toting the famous bag-o-hair, Andre's hair, from the time they knocked him cold and snipped him, a somewhat necessary backup prop as what's a mere $15,000 anymore? Two weeks ago at the Sports Arena they had neither in hand for Studd & Ken Patera's Texas Tornado Match (two tagteams, no tagging, all four in the ring simultaneous) versus Andre & Junk Yard Dog, must've mislaid 'em at the hotel or on the plane or somewhere; this keeping track of details bicoastally is a bit above the bean of even whizzes like The Brain (apparently). With the very reputation of the WWF at stake, however, both sets of objects (or reasonable facsimiles) are this time on hand, in hand and waved at camera. After which: the anticlimax of the decade—if not the afternoon. Andre and Studd face off, make contact, puff, pant, retain grips, sweat, grunt, waddle slightly— an unmatched pair of vertical sofas—and after many minutes of no fanfare, no calling of shots, Andre finally just lifts his sofa and slams him . . . big fugging deal. Interviewed the victor (worst interview in the WWF—mumble mumble w/ a French accent) (but kids loooove him so promote him from Quasimodo to quasi-main-eventer) almost cries he is so sincerely touched and tickled that kids and grownups have gotten off on his sofa toss, gotten off dancing/dancing prancing and ‘scuse me while I puke.

Next: Wendi Richter-Leilani Kai. For the WWF—yawn, hum—women’s crown. Not an a priori bummer or any of that, wimmen’s wrestling is a perennial drag mainly 'cause there've never been enough of ‘em at any one time to make it halfway interesting. Right now there’s like three-four females on the whole entire WWF circuit. Kai’s manager, the recently (and perhaps only temporarily) retired Fabulous Moolah, was gender champ when I started watching in the '50s. By pre-Big Lie standards this is a match of minor import at best; even in earlier incarnations of wrestling a la Vince it would never have figured higher than a third or fourth prelim on some shithook off-month bill. Yet here it is semi-main on the Bill of Bills, and Cyndi is to blame. Granted you might not've had an actual concrete rock-wrestling Connection—so-called—at least not the official horror the thing is currently saddled with, had not Lou Albano made a guest appearance in one of Lauper's videos (and History proceeded from there), but to reward her by letting her "manage" a WRESTLER, any wrestler, is a bit flugging much. And since Vince's vision is still too, um, symmetrical to allow her a role in the ongoing career of some simpy unmanaged male like say Ricky Steamboat (let's see her tie her 1943-version "New York accent" around him!), we're stuck with the spectre of a WWF Women's Title that won't, despite severely limited battle drama (and even more limited personnel), GO AWAY. Women's wrestling at its try-hardest self-exceeding best is never really a whole lot more than dance (non-ironic choreography) per se, and these folks—present company—are basically ersatz models cum aerobics-class'ers anyway, so 'scuse me this time if I don't even WATCH as Lauper's Richter beats Moolah's Kai, though no way can I avoid HEARING, postfight, the voice of '43 (makeup of '78) sound off blah-blah whine-whine bluh-bluh/TRIUMPHANT.

Okay, one more.

Main is not the word for this event.

Which probably—easily—could have carried the whole doggone shebang by itself.

Which everyone's been adrenaline-rush WAITING FOR all day including myself—'cause (once complete) it just might put X months of sorry, weary bullcrap in the fridge.

Roddy Piper . . . and . . . Paul "Mr. Wonderful" Orndorff . . . versus . . . Hulk Hogan . . . and . . . Mr. T.

Which ... You Saw The Hype—bit the ballyhoo—read the reading—but in case not 'tis just the damndang OUTGROWTH of MTV's "War to Settle the Score" (during which T, a ringside bystander, rescued both Lauper and his old pal Hulk from Piper, Orndorff and their "bodyguard" Cowboy Bob Orton), itself a growth of when Piper kicked both ass & insult, during Dick Clark's presentation of some stupid AWARD to the raven-haired ditz, on not only Cyndi and her stooge Albano but her four-eyed music manager David Wolff. Wolff (if memory serves) wore a neck brace for awhile; Hulk met T on the set of Rocky III: collaboration in one acting milieu—and now another.

WILL SLY STALLONE COME CHARGING THE RING TO RESCUE T AND UP THE ANTE ANOTHER NOTCH??

Christopher Reeve as Superman?

Adam West as Batman?!

Lou Ferrigno as the Hulk per se?!!!

Fat chance—don't mind me dreamin'!—the thing's got anticlimax writ all over it. At least from a mixed-medium standpoint. Vince certainly hasn't scrimped on celebs (Billy Martin, ring announcer; Muhammad Ali, guest referee; Liberace, timekeeper—though not for King Kong Bundy), but delivering 'em so heavy, gummy, gooey up front pretty much forecloses the likelihood of additional onslaught by outsiders. All the better: simpler, easier for his designated insiders (plus one) to get their date w/ destiny quickly the f over with.

And quick it does in fact go. WrestleMania's already into its third hour—the things we've got to ENDURE to write the last wrestling piece—and kids by now're jumping so you gotta stand t' see, but truly it's quick and almost painless. Except for the sight of Ali swinging combos at not only air but air in WHOSE vicinity?—has he been coached?—he who not only paid wrestling its ultimate COMPLIMENT (Gorgeous George made me who/what I am), not only supplied it with 14 lifetimes of viable if misreadable INFLUENCE (creative integrity, absolute creative integrity, qua bombast—personal expression being screamed even when whispered, therefore SCREEEEEEAM!!!!) (read by Nouveau Wrestling as: "How to Use Television") (". . . and Count the Bucks"), not only belongs enstatued in any and all Wrestling Halls of Fame aside from being, all things considered, the least gratuitous cipher of all-things-wrestling (for Nick Tosches in his last wrestling piece), not only was Mr. T once HIS bejeweled bodyguard, not only not only . . . Ali should not be dealt with in such superficial non-thread-the-needle fashion. Otherwise no pain.

T has been taught some tricks—headlock, snapmare, airplane spin—other TV actors should be so lucky. Hulk and Roddy do their usual dance, hack/cornball and topically familiar Grenada/Nicaragua as fabulous accidents of me-you hostility (which Reagan the actor pick up some functional cues from: kick ass, eat shit—one & the SAME!) (so let’s fucking eat it). Standard wanton tagteam jollies—how to police four guys goin’ wild?—until finally Piper hireling Cowboy Bob Orton, cast on his forearm, bangs cast with full force on the head of whoops, ALMOST Hogan but not quite: Orndorff! The Hulkster, hammerlocked by Orndorff, MOVES, ever so slightly, as Orton bops his v. own man—ouch! out! party's over!—whom someone (or other) pins for the win, the V, the end of WrestleMania.

While Piper and Orton split—toot sweet—to let him regain "consh" in the presence (sole) of his ENEMIES. What a rude, modern awakening! What a beyond-the-scope stripmine of the trans-WWF subsconscious!

More to the point—consciousnesswise—NO! BLOOD! has been spilt the whole entire goshdamn day: a wrestle/rassle first. Never before so sanitary, so ultra-considerate of suburban rugs & linoleum.

And I may be a putz but I'd rather 've seen 2½ hours of great interviews.

THE FUTURE OF AN ILL 'LUSION—more of Same at least until winter. Saturday Night's Main Event, subbing monthly for Saturday Night Live reruns, spring/summer, NBC; a Hulk Hogan cartoon (isn't he one already?), Saturday mornings come fall, CBS.

But a backlash may be brewing. The entertainment-industrial complex is not, as a unit, all that firmly behind its new partner-in-schlock's center stage aspirations. David Letterman seemed ten times as snotty with Mr. T the "wrestler," guest-promoing WrestleMania, as he'd conceivably have been—at his existentially most ill-tempered—with T the "actor," promoing some shitty movie or a new season of A Team. Even on Saturday Night Live, guest hosts T and Hogan served as little more than token-trendy walk-ons, showing up in no skits except as themselves, even though Hogan in particular, in spite of all the bug-eyed grandiosity, is a far better comic actor than any current SNL regular. Like he well may be (from certain angles, in certain lights) an overinflated, hyperventilating Martin Mull doll, but he's still got it all over your Martin Shorts and Billy Crystals—therefore use him but subdue him.

And then, the topper so far, the belated foofaraw of Richard Belzer (rhymes with Meltzer) after Hogan, in the process of demonstrating a sleeper hold, dropped the fatuous comic, host of cable dogshit Hot Properties, on his head. Speaking by phone the following day over Stanley Siegel's America Talks Back, Belzer presumably stumped for All Entertainers when he said: "Our only weapons are our wit and our minds, and we never physically impose ourselves on others." Yeah, but didn't his ma ever teach him not to trust his person to monsters?

What soon may make for problems, however—Real Problems—is the glaring fact that in the ring, one-on-one with the biggest and baddest of professional opponents, the Hulkster is no less imposing. With the possible exception of King Kong Bundy, who's either being groomed as his Rival Apparent or merely being readied for a round of pattycake with Andre the Giant, he really hasn't got dick to square off with. Even Piper, as delightful a fuckface as one could demand in a foe, is just too puny-231 lbs. to the Hulk's official 305—to continue commanding Hulkoid credibility without the Orndorffs, Ortons, whoevers forever woven into the plot. And let's say, for argument sake, you take the search outside the cozy confines of the WWF to peruse, for a Hypothetical Contender of suitable dimension, the register of the nearest promotional rival, Verne Gagne and White Sox owner Eddie Einhorn's Pro Wrestling USA. Okay: WWF bailout Sgt. Slaughter, 310, physical enormity plus sado-military oompah—perfect. Only he’s a good guy now, and will be as long as soldiers of the red/white/blue are regarded by schooltots as he-ros. He'd never pull a First Strike on the Hulker, and how else could the thinning blond Come Back in all his bug-eyed, calorie-scorching awesomeness? Okay: Ric Flair, Jerry Lawler. Baaad guys, fine—at least the last time I looked—vainglorious muhfuhs to the frickin' gills . .. but not much bigger than Piper. 243 and 234, respectively. So I dunno, even on imaginary drawing boards it's a Problem. Bigger Lies will hafta be concocted. (Or maybe I’ve watched too much boxing.)

Which is why I prefer wrestling INTERVIEWS: all voice boxes are anatomically equal. Or close enough.

PHONY OR FAKE?—John Stossel still can't know the half of it. Goes up to David "Doctor D" D" Schultz in the waning moments of an embarrassingly coy deadpan wrestling-is-fake segment on ABC’s 20/20 and coyly solicits the 6-6, 270-lb. on-off switch (always locked on): "I have to ask you the conventional question . . .”—as if the guy reads Derrida or subscribes to the New Yorker—"is wrestling fake?" For which he claims “loud buses” make his head ring; Babwa Walters commiserates. Poor John.

JUST IMAGINE,on the other hand, if he’d slithered up instead to some windup stooge from Dynasty or Matt Houston, or some ABC movie of the week about teen pregnancy or white-collar alcohol abuse, and axed ‘em, right after they’d shot some typical maimer of the human fudnugget (on the income from which they could wine, dine and toot far, far better than the king & queen of Belgium), "Lemme just hit you [unintelligible—maybe nothing] this one: How do you um uh relate to the possibility that you have, just now, willingly participated in the complete, utter, wanton and systematic falsification of Reality as even a cactus would understand the term?” I mean not every recipient of the query would punch the dork's lights out (or even snarl menacingly), but automatons do have their pride, and after this one not even Babwa would be around to commiserate.

How role-playing robots behave under sudden fire is hardly the issue, though. Nor is the "veracity" of newsman Stossel's presentation (fixed! fixed!) before getting whapped. As umpteen-year wrestling partisan Bill Liebowitz puts it: "Why doesn't he do an exposé of Doug Henning? So it's done with wires and mirrors! So he's not really a sorcerer! I mean come on."

Come on, indeed; some targets are too fat even for a laugh. The nightly news, for instance—show me a more malignant forcible orchestration of metarealities. Wrestling's 200 worst Reality crimes are benignly pale in comparison. But fat is fat, and I won't touch it. What it does behoove me to touch, howev, and get all testy about is Letterman's treatment of T in sequence with the rest of that night's show. Right after T they had this newcomey actress person, some raving loon I have still not seen in her fucky-wucky film with Madonna so whoam I to comment, but she sure seemed like e-z fodder for Dave to mock the living fluid out of minutes after doing same to T, Rosanna Arquette. I mean maybe in fact she's a veritable bee's knee of the big wide silver screen—anything's poss—although nothing like that ever stopped him from lickety splitting for obvious jugulars, never stopped him before and here he had all these cues flying in his face and all he did was act POLITE, CHARMING and APOLOGETIC (for a joke he rescinded). Like maybe she was just his week's quota of gals to be nice to, but it seemed purt near obvious, what with her and T juxtaposed like that, that when the chips were down, with personal squaresville "image" on the line, Letterman the Not-So-Nihilistic can always be counted upon to ally himself—on a dime—with one convenient strain of showbiz sham, one fly-by-night manufactured reality, over a slightly more topically disposable other. Contempo cinema over ringside pus!

At which point T if he was any sort of real wrestler would’ve surged back onto the set & split massive hairs for the viewing world to see. Realer wrestler (and realer actor!) Andy Kaufman would've done it automatic.

ANDY KAUFMAN: the Rosebud in rassling's attic. Who, you may recall, once got himself a late-night "busted neck" (courtesy of Jerry Lawler) the so-called authenticity of which we may never truly know—'cause now he's dead. Everybody's got a theory; mine stems from when Allan Arkush set me up with the guy while directing him in Heart Beeps. I had this treatment I'd done years before with my pal Nick for a blaxploitation wrestling pic called Soul Stomper, and Arkush thought Andy'd be interested. Would've been—maybe—only the thing (7 sketchy pages) didn't stress, quite to his satisfaction, didn't underline enough that wrestling was f-fixed. A structural purist, he wanted things right-on correct from the gitgo, nothing a neophyte could read as ambiguous. So my own initial read on his getting piledrived by Lawler was he'd either (a) misread the extent to which Lawler's “knowing that he knew the code” would make things functionally palsywalsy (wrestling-as-dealt being to Andy the selfsame matter of Honor that wrestling as primal grope had been for my gramps), affable enough on a co-insiders' plane for his brother-in spirit not to betray him (a slight variation on Stossel/Belzer) or (he'd already opted to become wrestling.

When, in the last year or so of his life, he began appearing regularly as a wrestler on Memphis TV, occasionally as a sap bad guy who could not do zilch to save his pipsqueak butt, but more importantly as a great interview ("You're all rednecks! I'm from Beverly Hills!"—i.e., carpetbag archetype city), the half-guess of (a) became more and more a vanity of cranky Empiricism. With the neck-grudge again Lawler fully in context as a rite of wrestling passage, and King Kong Bundy's present manager Jimmy Hart as his squeaky-intense "advisor," Kaufman tossed off some all-time wonders of squared-circle shtick. Like I've seen this tape of what's gotta be his greatest public moment, something so amazing that Richard Foos at Rhino, who's already got distribution on the great-enough (despite crummy sound) My Breakfast with Blassie, oughta waste no time in securing home- cassette (if not theatrical) rights to, a testament to Hope—and Glory!— which our world of pain could surely use a dose of.

What happens is this. Kaufman, in street clothes and a silly rhinestoned crown, paces aimlessly outside the ring during a tagteam match involving Hart-managed bozos when suddenly Lawler emerges from the wings to hurl "fire" in the face of our carpetbag anti-hero. He writhes on the ground. Hart's boys leave the ring—and are instantly disqualified—to selflessly come to his assistance. He writhes some more, hands covering his face; (first rule of First Aid) they strategically restrain him. After much delay a stretcher arrives to bear him away. Hospital reports are flashed over subsequent matches. Finally at card’s end the hospital-treated Kaufman appears, “burn marks” on his never-exactly-handsome mug, conventionally bound "scripts" in his mitts. “DeNiro . . . Pacino . . . Robert Redford”—he bitterly lets 'em drop—"all of them wanted me in their movies”—gasp, pant—"but because of YOU, Lawler, I will never work in Hollywood again!!" Followed by an obligatory "I'm gonna GET YOU!" and who knows, maybe he did never get to make another pitcher.

Anyway the real Rosebud in this monkey farm is did he or did he not already know he had cancer? Because clearly, absolutely, Wrestling was hardly just another warmup for him, another cold-reading class, a craft-honing actperson workshop—or even a more radically advanced waiter gig at the Bagel Nosh. That sort of hooey might have had meaning for the Andy Kaufman of Breakfast with Blassie, a journeyman bloke (with a strong sense of irony) role-priming his licks as Stanislavskian setups for rants by the Great One. Taking the plunge, committing to Wrestling as IT, he became Blassie—or a screamingly brilliant facsimile. So what we need to know, vis-a-vis

possible death-knowledge, is was this (by choice) his literal Final Stand?

Someone must know.

HOLD THE PRESSES—Orndorff too. Has just fired Bobby Heenan & become a good guy. Abandon all hope—the show is over.

* Only exceptions: those rare bozos whose not-half-bad overall physiques were really no more than corny general echoes of acceptably overdeveloped anatomical trademarks—Antonio Rocca and his "educated" bare feet; Pepper Gomez and his stomach that could withstand Killer Kowalski 's claw hold; etc.