I begin this column with a health warning. If you are revolted by the very idea of professional wrestling — yes, the stuff you see on TV — then, please read no further. You might get very bored. I’m not much of a fan of wrestling either these days. But there was a time when I was fascinated by it. In Bombay, in the ’60s and the ’70s, all of us thrilled to the wrestling tournaments organised at the V P Stadium where Dara Singh took on all comers. Because I spent part of my school holidays in London each year, I also became a fan of British professional wrestling (on which the Indian style was based), watching tournaments at such tony venues as the Royal Albert Hall.
I only got into American wrestling, briefly, in the ’80s, during the early days of the new WWF but found it a little too juvenile and contrived. Then, in the ’90s, with the satellite revolution and a young son to entertain, I finally became a fan of American wrestling (by then, the British and Indian versions were almost dead), enjoying matches organised by the WWF’s rival World Championship Wrestling or WCW.
Those of you love real sports may well be appalled by wrestling. Isn’t it all fixed, I hear you ask? Well, of course it is. That’s the whole point. People who see wrestling as a genuine sport like football or cricket don’t really get it. Wrestling is a bore when it is genuine or unstaged — just try watching an amateur match!
It’s only fun when it is scripted and pre-planned. The ethos of wrestling is not about sporting achievement. It’s about drama and entertainment. In wrestling, the story lines can be more important than the matches themselves. Wrestlers are treated as characters, rather than real people, and the idea is to create dramas in which they play pre-assigned roles.
To say “but it’s fixed” is like saying “but I know how Hamlet ends.” You have to see it as live-action fiction, as a genre of its own, like the comic book, the video game, the movie or the TV serial. When we go to see The Dark Knight, do we really believe that the outcome of the battle between Batman and the Joker has been left to chance? Some scriptwriter has planned it all and the actors have been told what to say. Does this make the movie less enjoyable? Of course not. So it is with wrestling.
There was a time, a few decades ago when the wrestling business tried to pretend that it was legitimate and unscripted. Few people bought that line and eventually, wrestling federations dropped the pretence. Now, nobody believes that it is a genuine sport and everybody knows that the outcomes of the bouts are pre-determined. Once the pretence ended, wrestling became even more popular than even before.
The world of wrestling has its own
language. “Kay fabe’ (a term borrowed from carnivals) means “Keeping up the pretence.” A “baby-face” is a good guy. A “heel” is a bad guy. In this world, people who come to
see wrestling even though they know it is scripted are called “the smarts.”
The big breakthrough for wrestling came in the ’90s when two rival federations — the WWF and WCW — decided to focus on “the smarts”. After all, “the smarts” were older (in the ’80s American wrestling appealed to a kiddie demographic), better educated and therefore, had more money to spend. The first federation to work out what “the smarts” wanted was WCW and it became a huge phenomenon on the back of that older, more knowing audience. WCW flamed out spectacularly after a few years at the top and was eventually bought by WWF. But now, there’s a renewed spurt of interest in its rise and demise.
I’ve just bought a new three-disc set called The Rise And Fall of WCW, which traces the federation’s history. The set is already a best seller in the US. So too is Hitman, the autobiography of Bret Hart, one of the most popular wrestlers of recent times. Like the documentary, Hart’s book adopts a tell-all style, revealing the inside stories of the sometimes sordid world of wrestling. Both the book and the documentary have helped answer what to me is the big question of wrestling: why did WCW throw it all away? How could the hottest federation in the world lose its way so quickly?
If you were a WCW fan, then you will
remember the company’s glory days. It had its own outstanding champions, men such as Sting and Ric Flair (who flitted between federations) but its moment came when
it was bought by Ted Turner who recognised that wrestling was a big ratings success on
satellite TV. Turner poured the kind of bucks that wrestling had never seen into WCW,
buying up the hottest stars in the business. The breakthrough came when he negotiated the hiring of Hulk Hogan, then the biggest star in wrestling, made Hogan fight his
own champion Ric Flair, and made him the WCW world champion.
After that, WCW’s successes kept coming. Hogan’s arrival was followed a steady stream of new stars. Some of them banded together to create something called the New World Order (NWO). This was portrayed as a rival organisation that was out to destroy WCW. When Hogan turned heel and became the head of the NWO, the ratings went through the roof.
There were other innovations too. WCW created its own champion, a man who should eventually have taken over from Hogan as the world’s top wrestler: Goldberg. Bill Goldberg had no previous wrestling experience. A former football player who had been sidelined by injury, he joined WCW and was quickly promoted as a larger-than life, totally unbeatable cross between Superman and Godzilla.
With all these stars pulling in the crowds, it was hard to see how WCW could go wrong. But of course, it did exactly that. Several reasons are now offered for WCW’s collapse.
The first is that after Turner sold his company to Time-Warner and especially after Time Warner merged with AOL, nobody at corporate headquarters had any interest in WCW. The AOL people were actually embarrassed by it. So WCW became the stepchild of a large diversified multi-national media company that appointed morons to handle its management and did not even care when they ran WCW to the ground.
Secondly, within WCW, the management made some huge errors. Chief among these was the decision to allow two wrestlers, Kevin Nash and Scott Hall, to write the scripts. Because both men only wanted to promote themselves, they destroyed the careers of WCW’s biggest stars: men like Goldberg and Sting.
And finally, there was the old battle between corporation and entrepreneur. Vince McMahon who owned WWF (now called WWE) found his very survival threatened. He fought back with every means at his disposal. On the WCW side, there was nobody who took any ownership. The turnover of WCW was too small for it to matter to AOL-Time-Warner. The executives who were appointed to run it didn’t really care what happened. By the time the company was deep in the hole, they had already moved on to other jobs.
I reckon that, in the final analysis, wrestling was the loser. These days, Vince McMahon owns nearly everything. And wrestling has never been more boring. It was the competition that made it exciting.