wrestling | The Daily Weirdness

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I used to tune in to Saturday Night’s Main Event on NBC. It came on right before Saturday Night Live. All the biggest stars were billed for those matches: Hulk Hogan, Randy “Macho Man” Savage, Jake “The Snake” Roberts, The Iron Sheik, Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat, Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka. There was also the tag team, The British Bulldogs.

The World Wrestling Federation CEO, Vince McMahon, would host the show with Jesse “The Body” Ventura, and on weeknights, on USA Network, Gorilla Monsoon would host WWF Primetime Wrestling with Bobby “The Brain” Heenan.

Most of those mentioned are dead now. It was close to forty years ago. George “The Animal” Steele was already in his fifties by the time I started watching him eat turnbuckles in the ring. Hard to believe he was a former science teacher.

My favorite was Rowdy Roddy Piper, a Scotsman who would enter the ring in a quilt and play his bagpipes. But he never wrestled enough. He eventually took Jesse Ventura’s spot as a color commentator on The Main Event before he became an action star in one of my favorite eighties films, John Carpenter’s They Live.

It was usually the Hulkster, America’s favorite, hogging my TV screen. His arch nemeses were The Iron Shiek from Iran and Nikolai Volkoff from the USSR. They formed a tag team duo that would face Hulk and his partner in WrestleMania.

One of the key memories was of Hulk Hogan, one Saturday night, being nearly crushed to death by all four hundred pounds of King Kong Bundy, who repeatedly bowled himself with all his weight into Hulk as Hulk was being held at one of the turnbuckles. After Hulk fell unconscious on the mat, paramedics had to pull him to a stretcher and drive him to a nearby hospital. I was legitimately concerned for his life after so many lethal blows to his body.

Another key memory was when Randy “Macho Man” Savage leaped from the top rope and crushed Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat’s larynx with the ringside bell, as Ricky was prostrate on the mat. Ricky also needed to be carted to the hospital. I seriously wondered if he would make it out alive. My mother kept reminding me it was fake, but I wasn’t too sure.

Some of my favorite toys were these foot-long rubber action figures of all my favorite wrestlers. I even used a wrestling ring the size of a checkerboard to face them off and imagine how the matches would end.

This went on until high school. I put the action figures away, but still tuned in to USA Network for Monday Night Raw after Saturday Night’s Main Event was pulled off the air. Newcomers such as the Honky Tonk Man, Millionaire Ted Dibiase, Ravishing Rick Rude, Koko B. Ware, Bret “The Hitman” Hart, and Goldust started wrestling. What was once a cast of characters who represented their nationalities and origins was replaced by those who represented professions, such as a brutal cop in Big Boss Man. I even vaguely remember a garbageman, only I forgot his name.

There was a tag team duo called the Killer Bees. They wore black and yellow trunks, and their special move was when they would both fall out of the ring and pull from under the ring these masks to put over their heads. This way, their opponents wouldn’t be able to tell who was who. But there was a hole in their logic, since both of them weighed about the same and practiced the same moves. What difference did it make?

Eventually, Hulk turned into a bad guy, no longer patriotic, under a new moniker, Hollywood Hogan. He even dyed his beard black, he was that evil.

Wrestlers such as The Undertaker arrived by the time I was graduating from high school. The names The Junkyard Dog or Hillbilly Jim were retired for the names “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, HHH, and The Rock. I wondered what happened to all the colorful characters. These new guys simply looked like bouncers you didn’t want to fuck with. My passion was lost.

When I was in college, I had a friend from high school who was still following it. It changed its name from the WWF to WWE. Not quite the same ring to it. Something about the F in the World Wrestling Federation sounded sweeter than the E. I guess they got in trouble with the World Wildlife Federation.

Hulk Hogan went on to bigger things such as a movie career. Don’t they all? He played a nanny, of all things, in one of them, and (who would’ve guessed?) a professional wrestler in another, in the touching, arguably semiautobiographical, No Holds Barred. As for Jesse “The Body” Ventura, who also had an acting career, he became the governor of Minnesota. At some point, we all have to grow up.

Sometimes I wonder how the league is doing now. WrestleMania is still around. Last I heard, the average ticket costs well over a thousand dollars. In the eighties, the same ticket probably cost around a hundred, and that was for a good seat. A hundred these days will probably get you Pay-Per-View.

As far as I know, pro wrestling is still among the highest-rated events in television, the Dark Side of the Moon of TV programming. It fascinates me that people still care.

Not an hour ago, I woke up. Now in the desert, I sat on the patio with gusts of wind hitting me and the sun rising. An oversized cockroach scurried under my table. I hoped it wouldn’t crawl onto my shoe. The thing was as hideous as all cockroaches are. They’re completely harmless but so ugly that people stomp on them with no sympathy, even when they’re living things. They don’t care. They would rather not see something so disgusting coexist on this planet. Why did God invent cockroaches?

I could understand an owl. Last night at the Dodgers game, one swooped down on the field of play. On the radio, the announcer mentioned it.

“Did I just hear that right?” I said. “An owl is at the Dodger game?”

“Rick Monday must be losing it in his old age,” my father said.

If there was, how was an owl able to feed himself at the game? Owls are nocturnal, but still, you would think one would keep away from a massive crowd, even if it landed on the field away from them. Owls hunt for mice, so there might’ve been mice in the stadium.

“There was a time when I was working for the county,” my mother said, “and we had to tear a building down, but we couldn’t because a barn owl was inside it. I went and chased it out anyway.”

My mother would’ve broken the law because of the World Wildlife Federation. I only know about it because the acronym is WWF, the same as the World Wrestling Federation before it became the WWE.

As a kid, I used to follow wrestling heavily. My favorite wrestler was Rowdy Roddy Piper, although I barely saw him wrestle. For whatever reason, NBC or USA Network never showed him wrestling. I loved his outfit. He was supposed to have hailed from Scotland, but when he was interviewed, he never spoke with a Scottish accent. It was always more of a New York accent. Either way, he always wore his white T-shirt with his plaid kilt and played the bagpipes through his entrance to the wrestling ring before he disrobed to his wrestling underwear, whatever they called it, along with his wrestling boots. His muscles glistened under the lights overhead. Wrestlers were always ripped with tanned skin as if they went to the tanning salon every week, and they were almost always hairless except for George “The Animal” Steele, an old man with pasty skin and hairy shoulders. He used to eat turnbuckles in the wrestling ring. Word got out that he used to teach high school science, I imagine not for too long. You never know. Some of us quit teaching and end up wrestling in front of millions of maniac fans. George and Rowdy Roddy Piper are both dead now. Hardly any wrestlers make it to old age.

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