Wrestlemania Miami: The ultimate clash of good and evil, in tights
 
The gaudiest, glitziest show in all of sports entertainment — with the emphasis on entertainment — is coming to South Florida.

By Glenn Garvin
ggarvin@MiamiHerald.com

When wrestling superstar and best-selling author Mick Foley comes to South Florida later this week to chat with fans, he may get some questions about how his schizophrenia is going or whether he still lives in basements and boiler rooms. Or about his best friends and frequent conversationalists, a rat and a sock puppet. But he doesn’t expect any questions using the F-word. You know, fake. As in, isn’t pro wrestling fake?

“If this was 1985, yeah, I used to get that a lot,” says Foley, whose derangement, unusual confidantes and sketchy living arrangements were all the products of the imaginations of pro wrestling’s burgeoning corps of scriptwriters. “All our fans in this country are way past that. They use the E-word, entertaining.

“Overseas, though, we still hear it some. At that match in Munich” — an infamous 1994 encounter in which Foley’s head got tangled in the ropes of the wrestling ring, and unscriptedly came away without an ear — “even the nurse in the hospital asked me if pro wrestling was all gefälscht, fake. You’d think the one time you should get the benefit of the doubt would be when the nurse is standing there holding your ear.”

Foley’s meet-and-greet with fans is one of dozens of events here next week in connection with Wrestlemania, the sport’s garish, gaudy and gargantuan Super Bowl, which is expected to draw 70,000 fans to Miami Gardens’ Sun Life Stadium next Sunday and another million-plus on pay-per-view television.

Americans have always loved pro wrestling, going back to its origins in Civil War-era saloons, but the love is no longer one that dare not speak its name. Marrying itself to television and gloriously proclaiming its dissimulations as Hollywood entertainment rather than athletic fraud, wrestling has become a big and beloved business.

For WWE, the corporate Leviathan that controls much of the sport, Wrestlemania may be its annual highlight — “the signature event, the capstone event of the company, its most hyped, ballyhooed and elaborately produced event,” as wrestling historian Steven Johnson describes it — but financially, it’s just a drop in a very big bucket.

With half a billion dollars in annual revenue, a pair of hit weekly television shows (one, Monday Night Raw, is closing in on its 1,000th episode, more than Lassie or Gunsmoke) that pull in 12 million viewers a week, three magazines, a movie studio, a music company and a merchandising empire that partners with everybody from Walmart to Target, WWE’s corporate ledgers are even more epic than the operatic story lines it concocts for its wrestlers.

And wrestling has gotten into not just America’s pockets but its head and heart as well. Hyperventilating celebrities from Aretha Franklin to Donald Trump line up to appear at WWE events. Minnesotans chose a former wrestler for their governor and George Clooney has taken one for a girlfriend. Mickey Rourke’s movie The Wrestler was nominated for three dozen film awards, including two Oscars, and impressed Bruce Springsteen enough that he wrote and recorded its theme song.

If you’ve ever used the words smackdown, body slam or tag team you’ve sipped wrestling’s cultural Kool-Aid. But don’t worry, you’re not alone at the party. The French semiotician and literary theorist Roland Barthes once wrote a lengthy essay on the philosophical and artistic merits of pro wrestling and its “spectacle of excess... a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient theatres.”

THE DARK SIDE

Not to be outdone, Washington Post editor Jeff Leen wrote an entire book. “It’s a cauldron of emotion and symbolism where people vicariously act out their feelings through these contestants in the ring,” says Leen, whose book The Queen of the Ring followed the career of 1940s and ’50s female wrestling champ Millie Burke.

“People do the same thing through soap operas and reality TV shows. You could psychoanalyze until the cows come home. But essentially, for some people it works like a drama. People know Shakespeare is not real, either.”

If you think Leen is speaking figuratively about psychoanalyzing wrestling audiences, just read Passion Work: The Joint Production of Emotional Labor in Professional Wrestling in the Social Psychology Quarterly. Or chat with Dr. David Reiss, a San Diego psychiatrist who has led seminars on the possibility that wrestling fans view the matches as symbolic reenactments of childhood trauma. Though, he quickly adds, a flying forearm smash — even when you’re just watching it — is not widely regarded as an effective treatment among mental health professionals.

“Watching wrestling is not the most healthy way of dealing with childhood trauma,” he says. “Sometimes it’s really pretty dysfunctional....There’s surely a dark side to it, and it ain’t therapy. But in a way, it can be useful.”

Wrestlers (a word that makes WWE publicists, who prefer that they be called “entertainers,” frown in icy displeasure) themselves generally see the appeal of their sport in simpler terms.

“Americans are drawn to struggles between good and evil,” says Adam Pearce, who will be competing here this week in an event sponsored by the National Wrestling Alliance, a much smaller rival of the WWE. “And we love our sports. Pro wrestling has married the two.”

Pearce usually works as a villain, or “heel” in wrestling parlance. (A good guy is a “babyface.”) He doesn’t go for subtle Freudian undertones. “I have the gift of gab, so I can get on the microphone and antagonize people pretty easily,” he says. “All I try to do is get people to hate me to the point where they want the good guy to beat my ass. It’s that simple.”

Pearce has also been a wrestling scriptwriter, penning almost everything that was said or done on cable-TV network HDNET’s Ring of Honor Wrestling between 2009 and 2011. He created characters and their dialogue, crafted story lines and choreographed the matches. “Wrestling is like any other kind of a show, it’s gotta be written,” he says. “But if the wrestler was someone I knew understood the concept of what we were trying to do, I’d give them as much leeway as I could to work their own personality into the character. That comes across as more organic, and wrestling fans respond to that.”

Boy, do they. WWE’s vast collection of characters and story lines — which often purport to take a backstage peek at life within the company — blurs the line between show and reality so frequently and so thoroughly that fans (even though they understand the outcomes of the matches themselves are pre-determined) are often confused about which is which. That can be tricky when you’re dealing with themes like corporate corruption, extortion, violent crime and sexual infidelity.

The latter has not always been with living human beings. A 2007 WWE story line on necrophilia — Google the name “Katie Vick” if you must know the details, but expect a visit from your local vice squad afterward — freaked out not only fans but the wrestlers who had to perform it. As Dr. Reiss notes: “Even wrestlers thought it crossed the line, and when wrestlers think you’ve crossed the line, well....”

“We’re a unique business,” agrees Paul Levesque, who’s WWE’s vice president in charge of talent as well as a popular wrestler performing under the name Triple H. “If I go on the Jay Leno show, I stay in character. He wants to interview Triple H, not Paul Levesque who plays Triple H. There’s a weird line of reality that isn’t crossed.”

INSULTS, SWINDLES

Other times it is, but not from the direction you might expect. In 1999, Levesque’s Triple H character was cast in a fictional on-stage feud with WWE Chairman and CEO Vince McMahon, who often plays himself as a treacherous corporate heel. As part of the supposed feud, Triple H “married” McMahon’s daughter Stephanie. Four years later he did it again, this time with no quotation marks.

“I know it’s confusing to the fans sometimes,” says Levesque. “Guys get fired or quit on-stage, and people aren’t sure whether it’s real or not. The best example of that, I think, was when we had Vince McMahon killed in a car bomb. Donald Trump, who’s a big WWE fan and a friend of Vince, called and said, ‘I know it’s probably just part of the story... but could you just tell me if Vince is OK?’ We’re like the last magicians: Is it real? Or Unreal? Nobody knows.”

The frequent story lines in which McMahon insults, swindles, brutalizes and otherwise tyrannizes company employees (for a while he forced malcontents to come on-camera and press their lips to his derriere, a bit known as the “Vince McMahon Kiss My Ass Club”) are a good example, nearly everybody agrees, of why pro wrestling resonates with its fans.

“When you look at the real world, a lot of people feel that way about their jobs,” says Levesque. “They’re thinking, ‘this is a terrible place to work, my boss is an idiot, I don’t want to work there anymore.’ But they can’t go into the office and hit their boss over the head with a GPS, which is what [WWE wrestler] Stone Cold Steve Austin did to McMahon. For blue-collar people disgruntled with their lives, it’s a great fantasy.”

Yet even if fans are sometimes confused about whether an on-camera feud or firing is real, wrestling historians say it’s nothing like the old days, when the sport insisted everything was genuine and a startling number of spectators accepted that. Johnson, who has written three books on the sport, recalls interviewing a couple of well-known heels of the wrestling world of the 1960s.

“They were a tag team known as the Masked Medics, and they were supposed to be these doctors who had gone horribly, horribly wrong,” he says. “They would drug their opponents or make them pass out with secret holds. And when they wrestled at the old Jackie Gleason Auditorium on Miami Beach, they said, they were so hated that they had to arrive and leave with a police escort. The cops would bring out the dogs to keep the fans from killing or maiming them. Now that’s a heel.”

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