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Colette Arrand

Hulk Hogan

Shoot Fight: Hulk Hogan vs. Roddy Piper (10/26/1997)

August 8, 2017 by Colette Arrand Leave a Comment

This is a column about kayfabe. By this, I mean that I’m writing about magic, a very specific, working class, queer, dirty magic that has worked its way into the roots of my being since my first exposure to it. A kind of magic that feels like a curse sometimes, especially when it tries to deny that grit, which it should be proud of but so often isn’t. When wrestling fans talk about kayfabe, they’re usually talking a magic that does not exist beyond childhood (if it ever did at all): The distorted world that wrestlers and promoters create to give the illusion that the contests in the ring are real and for real things: Money, championships, respect. Cue the YouTube clip of a man in the bleachers in a high school gym, sobbing as he tells his heroes that wrestling is still real to him. Realize that he’s saying this because it isn’t, and that when people say things like this they mean it was better when they were younger, which either is or isn’t true of everything depending on how much nostalgia rules your perception of culture.

The fact is this: We have always known that wrestling is fixed, and to pretend otherwise is to do an entire art form an injustice. Kayfabe, then, isn’t so much about how the world of wrestling is so much as how it is seen by those observing it. There’s no strict definition because every fan and performer has their own, a thing that works for them and nobody else. For me, kayfabe is a vibe. For me, kayfabe is less the feeling that wrestling is or can be real than it is about the struggle to tell a good story or craft a good poem despite the limitations of form, which are the limitations of the human body, which is the struggle. That is what this column is about, but I’m calling it Shoot Fight as a reference to another way of talking about wrestling in terms of its realness or fakeness. A work is something that’s planned, part of the show. A shoot is anything that isn’t, whether that be an injury, an angry wrestler saying something he shouldn’t into a live microphone, or any strike that isn’t pulled. But that kind of realness is too literal for me and is often contrived to draw attention to the product. Shoots, then, are often works. Here, a shoot is something that makes it impossible for me to turn away from a wrestling match. A fight is a struggle. This is a column about kayfabe. This is a column about magic.

***

In 1997, Hulk Hogan is evil. He wears black and leads a gang that uses spray paint to tag what’s theirs: title belts, the ring, the flesh of their fallen opponents. It’s a hot storyline, drawing record numbers of viewers to pro wrestling, and every broadcast they appear on ends in their so-called New World Order standing in the ring while the crowd pelts them with garbage. The genius of the “Hollywood” Hulk Hogan character was in his portrayal of a shredded demi-god, a man who had felled communism, natural disasters, and otherwise dark nights of the soul, as a sniveling coward. Once, an old woman took a swing at him. In World Championship Wrestling, the Hogan/Piper feud that launched Hulkamania for the rival WWF in the 1980s was flipped, Hogan becoming the heel to Piper’s roguish hero. Halloween Havoc was the temporary end of a feud that began on MTV with Cyndi Lauper. That night, it ended with Hulk Hogan beating up a fan.

Between those two points, twelve years elapsed. Mr. T got involved, Roddy Piper spoke in tongues and swam in the ocean off of Alcatraz Island, and Piper managed to beat Hogan clean on several occasions, which was not something that happened often. It’s easy to think of Roddy Piper now as this macho relic of the 1980s, sunglasses-clad and murdering aliens in a bank because he’s all out of bubblegum to chew, but he possessed of a kind of magnetism that’s hard to describe, everyman… but not. In 1997 he was appearing as a born-again Christian wrestler in reruns of Walker Texas Ranger and on WCW Monday Nitro talking about his knee replacement in interviews designed to build to his matches against Hollywood Hogan, but when he said that what WCW needed was a real man, fans responded to that loudly. When he beat Hogan, putting him down with a sleeper hold, the fans responded to that, too. Folks with a long view of wrestling history often claim it was a fatal mistake for WCW to rely so heavily on men like Piper and Hogan to sell tickets, but that’s a hindsight thing. The cage match at Halloween Havoc drew terrible reviews, but it worked. Listen to that crowd when the referee counts Hogan out. They’re eating it up.

Hogan playing the role of coward is essential context because, despite his lawsuit against Gawker over a sex tape, despite his racism and effort to mitigate that on morning television, the image of Hulk Hogan that persists in culture is that of the hero. But in 1997 fans wanted to fight him. Or they wanted someone who could fight him for them. You’d think that might be Piper, given his superhuman ability to defeat Hulk Hogan, but in reality that man was Sting, a dejected WCW icon who had taken to painting his face like Brandon Lee in The Crow and rappelling to the ring from the rafters, where he would fight eight, nine men at a time with his baseball bat. He wanted to fight Hogan, the dark image of 90s heroism against the dark image of 90s villainy, but Hogan was running scared. At Halloween Havoc 1997, the story was that Hogan refused to wrestle Piper in a cage unless WCW could guarantee that the mercurial man in the rafters wouldn’t be in the arena at all. Hogan got his wish, but was psychologically tested (really stretch your ability to believe this) by the presence of a bunch of people who kind of looked like Sting because they were wearing trenchcoats and Sting merchandise and, well, it was Halloween Havoc. One of these lookalikes enters the cage and is attacked by Randy Savage, who interferes on Hogan’s behalf, but all of this is, as we say, a work. The shoot, if that’s what it was, is this: A fan jumps the guardrail, climbs the steel cage, and tries to rescue Roddy Piper. He’s painted like Sting, the hero, because of course he is. He is beaten mercilessly by Hogan and Savage, two of the biggest names in wrestling, because of course he is.

I think of this moment frequently. It sticks out to me more than most matches I really enjoy. I thought of it recently, sought it out, because something I saw from the fourth row of a local wrestling show shook it loose from my memory. A drunk dude jumped a guardrail. This happens all the time, maybe once every three or four weeks. A person in the audience is bored or hammered or trying to impress their friends, so they jump the rail. At a World Wrestling Entertainment show, this person is usually tackled immediately by security and taken to jail without anybody noticing. This is indie wrestling, though, and there’s no security. In the ring, there’s a wrestler—some sweaty straight-edge type with a green-tipped Mohawk, a man who had earlier done a no-look backwards leap from the top of a basketball hoop—and he’s snarling about something the drunk dude had said, spitting at him, egging him on. The fan thinks it’s all a joke—the wrestler’s anger, wrestling itself. He’s smiling as he slides into the ring, maybe thinking about a photo op, but before he can stand, the wrestler crushes his head with one black leather wrestling boot.

The fan at Halloween Havoc 1997, he’s someone whose name I don’t know, someone whose story is unknown to me. After the match, with Roddy Piper victorious but handcuffed to the steel cage, the producers cut away from the action where a camera catches him leaping the guardrail to climb the cage structure. There is nobody there to stop him. Nobody has mentioned him since. It takes another act of wrestler-on-fan violence to kick up his ghost, or the ghost of his ghost. He exists as an afterimage now, a footnote. “We are desperately out of time,” one of the announcers says as security pulls Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage off of a person for whom time is frozen, but what does it mean to live forever in a minute the world has forgotten?

I’m stretching a bit here, but wrestler-on-spectator violence dates back to the origins of the sport. Matches were first held at carnivals and fair, exhibition bouts featuring a traveling “hooker,” a legitimate toughman who could torture joints and break bones with an array of simple submission holds. Laymen would pay admission to fight this grappler, hoping to last three minutes to win a cash prize. There were regular Joes who could give the hooker a run for that money, but usually even the best audience member could be grappled over to a side of the ring that was curtained off from the crowd. There, someone else would club the challenger secretly with a blackjack or a billy club, preserving the hooker’s reputation and ensuring that the house always won. As wrestling moved out of traveling tent shows and into major sports arenas, this kind of fan interaction evolved. Newspapers made a big deal about wrestling being phony. Fans were passionate about the subject of wrestling’s legitimacy, and promoters, passionate about the money those fans brought to the show, encouraged their men to play their characters outside the ring at all times. Wrestlers would start and win fights at the bars. Journalists, when they were interested in wrestling, often encountered the surliest looking man on the roster, someone who’d slap the shit out of them for presuming that wrestling was “fake.” You can look them up: Dr. D. David Schultz slapping John Stossel, Big Van Vader menacing the host of Good Morning Kuwait while on tour in that country. Hulk Hogan even made Richard Belzer pass out in a sleeper hold once. All in the interest of “protecting the business.”

But fans that stick around for a while don’t care if wrestling is fake or if the moves hurt. They can be riled up or made to cry or, at the very least, made to buy a ticket, which is all any promoter worth his salt cares about. Still, listening to some wrestlers talk, listening to some wrestling fans talk, there’s no end of nostalgia for certain time periods or territories, the 1970s in Memphis or Louisiana or Texas, the National Wrestling Alliance of the mid 1980s. A lot of wrestlers talk about the scars they picked up from their encounters with fans who were carrying chains or knives or worse, run-ins with old women who’d stick them with their hatpins and cackle with glee while high-fiving everybody around her. If you were a member of the Fabulous Freebirds and you used hair cream to blind the Junkyard Dog, preventing him from seeing the birth of his first daughter, well, the Louisiana Superdome was probably the least safe place on earth to be. But they went there, brother, and they survived the spit and the epithets and the broken bottles. They laugh about it now, evidence that they did their jobs well.

Having a fan jump the rail in 2017, or in 1997, or, really, in any era, seems proof of a masterwork, ring artistry that is unparalleled and mostly impossible, given that we’re all in on the act. There are idiots who look at professional wrestlers—muscle-bound, scarred, missing teeth—from their seat way up in the upper bowl of an NBA arena and think Man, I could take that guy, but those people are almost never the ones who jump the rail. Sometimes the people jumping the rail are just seeking attention. Sometimes they are brave and deluded. Sometimes, they actually make it into the ring before security can touch them. They have a special destiny, these people who are drawn to the choreographed illusion before them, and what happens next is beyond their control.

The thing of is, Halloween Havoc 1997 is actually a really good wrestling show; boredom isn’t an excuse. One of the matches, a mask vs. title match between Rey Mysterio, Jr. and Eddie Guerrero, is one of the most influential matches of the past twenty years. Randy Savage and Diamond Dallas Page put on a good show in a “Sudden Death Match” where nobody died. The main event, if nothing else, contains the spectacular visual of Savage leaping from the top of the cage into the ring to interfere on Hogan’s behalf. WCW cards were structured like this so that fans felt like they got something for their money, even if the big payoff—the vanquishing of Hogan—was never going to happen. Most times, watching a fan get in the ring, there’s a certain amount of satisfaction in seeing security or a referee tackle them before they touch a wrestler, in knowing that he’ll be spending a night in jail for rupturing the liminal space between the ring and the stands. But it’d been a year since Hogan went sour and started calling himself “Hollywood” because he’d been the star of such films as Mr. Nanny and Santa with Muscles. They’d teased and teased and teased that somebody—anybody—from World Championship Wrestling would be able to cut the head from the snake that was the New World Order, and, finally, Roddy Piper had managed to do it. He won clean, despite Randy Savage and despite the chaos and turmoil that surrounded the cage, and for his trouble he found himself handcuffed and whipped and otherwise punished. Somebody had to do something, and somebody did.

The key narrative element of the match being the presence of a gaggle of fake Stings, it’s understandable how security lets a fan wearing Sting face paint jump the barricade. It’s easy to understand why “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes, from his place at the announcer’s table, loses sight of what is happening. “YES! YES! YES!” he cheers, watching that fan scale the cage. What the fan hopes to accomplish here is clear. After his moment of triumph, Hogan and Savage handcuff Piper and beat him mercilessly. Sting, the only man capable of saving him, is true to his word and is not in the building. Nobody else is coming to help. The camera follows that fan’s every move because even the people in charge can’t tell what’s real and what’s fake here. Everything is real and nothing is fake. Everything is fake and nothing is real.

I’ve thought about this scene was planned or not a lot since I was nine years old, but I’ve never wanted to ruin the illusion, if that’s what it is, that this fan was acting purely out of passion. World Championship Wrestling played ringside security a little looser than World Wrestling Entertainment ever did, constantly testing the boundary between the ring and the fans. Beyond the Stings in the audience tonight, there’s a stable of alt-rock rejects-cum-wrestlers who sit at ringside during matches. Diamond Dallas Page celebrates his victories by going out into the crowd. Clip after clip of interviews from this time feature perfectly aimed beverages flying from the stands into the faces of those who would abuse our heroes. Here, there’s a camera in position to catch the fan jumping. The live editing almost makes the whole thing seem like a set-up. Hogan puts on a Sting mask and laughs, preparing to whip Piper. We cut to ringside, where a cameraman is out of position for everything except the fan in his face paint. If he’s a plant, why is he dressed differently from the other plants? If he’s a fan, why is the camera on him?

It doesn’t matter, I suppose. I love this kid, this fan who hasn’t aged a day since 1997, this boy who is wedged forever in this moment that is his and not his, who tried to do something on behalf of all of us, who tried to help we who were helpless. I love that there is no hesitation in his motion. He begins climbing the cage. He slips. He continues to climb. He reaches the floor and is tackled by the planned fake Sting, pinned against the cage for his own safety. Hogan and Savage take notice of the situation and begin to beat up the fan. Watch any punch Hulk Hogan throws in his career. Watch the one he levels this child with. There’s no cartoon exaggeration here, just a 24-inch python striking some nobody armed with greasepaint and his courage. Security gets involved, but Savage won’t let go. Hogan kicks the fan in the ribs while the announcers remark upon the situation, trying to keep some balance between the storyline that’s happening with Hogan, Savage, and Piper and this scene with the fan, something that will never go commented upon again.

Real? Fake? I don’t care. I feel for this kid the same way Neko Case feels for the child at the bus stop in “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu.” His situation is so unbelievable, so fucked up, that I just want to say that it happened. If you’re out there and you’re telling the story of how you got your ass kicked by Hulk Hogan and the Macho Man, I believe you because it happened. And if you’re wondering, nearly twenty years later, how differently things may have played out had Roddy Piper not been handcuffed to the cage, know that he would have punched you, too. You can’t play the hero for your heroes.


This essay was originally published by Entropy in 2015 and has since been edited. Entropy is an incredible website bringing together a wide variety of writing from the broader literary community. Support them! Also, while you’re at it, support me via Patreon.

Filed Under: Featured, Wrestling Tagged With: Dusty Rhodes, Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, Roddy Piper, Shoot Fight, Sting, WCW

Wrestling Review: WWE Raw (10/22/14)

August 12, 2014 by Colette Arrand Leave a Comment

 

Hulk Hogan Brock Lesnar

Last night, I watched wrestling. This is admittedly nothing new. Since the advent of the WWE Network, I watch wrestling every day, sometimes for hours. I’m writing a book of poetry about wrestling, I run a few Tumblrs about wrestling—it all comes with the territory. But last night I watched Raw, which I haven’t gotten a chance to do much this summer because the work that I’ve done this summer and the reason I do it often leaves me scrambling to bask in the warm glow of nostalgia. Though I can’t imagine a scenario where my friends and I don’t gather in my new house to watch the WWE Network’s less-than-stellar stream of Summerslam this Sunday, anything going on right now serves as a less-than-welcome reminder that soon enough I’ll be sitting down in front of a computer to listen to the rich talk about the problems inherent with having only a million dollars put away in an IRA. But it’s Hulk Hogan’s birthday, and even though The Hulkster now exists largely to talk about the virtues of the WWE Network (which, at 700,000 subscribers paying $9.99 a month to watch video footage Vince McMahon acquired for pennies on the dollar, is somehow considered a failure because the world of business has rules as made up, impenetrable, stupid, and fake as professional wrestling), I love the big orange bastard and always will. True fact: I went to WrestleMania XXX this year mostly because I wanted to see a 60 year old man rip his shirt off and flex his ancient muscles. When he messed up and called the Superdome the Silverdome (where he body slammed Andre the Giant some 27 WretleManias earlier), I was the only person in the arena not booing, because that was my WrestleMania, brother. The one in Detroit. The one that set the records. The Greatest Night In the History of Our Sport.

I had to get through three hours of Raw for Hulk Hogan’s birthday celebration, which, frankly, is insane. Exactly zero things on television this side of a holiday marathon of The Twilight Zone should last three hours, but that’s exactly what Raw does: It lasts. It staggers. It lurches. It finishes, out of breath and somehow overtime, maneuvering its various pieces around in an effort to hide the fact that nothing is happening. The recurring theme of an episode of Raw these days is the price point of the WWE Network, where, oddly, you can’t watch Raw, because even though Vince McMahon has cast his lot with the future, he still finds his business shackled to the mediums of the past. 700,000 is, to me, an impressive number of human beings who are willing to pay for access to a staggering number of frankly mediocre wrestling shows, but the last I checked, the average episode of Raw manages to pull in 3,000,000, and they sit through ads for things like Juicy Drop Pops and Sonic Chili Cheese Dogs. They’ll sit through the not-infrequent advertisements that air during an episode of Raw, too, where the comedic wrestlers on the show shill food or beverage in a way that makes me wish I couldn’t ingest things. But I can, and I do. Often during wrestling. Tonight, it was curry. Sunday, when my $9.99 will allow me to watch Summerslam? Who knows? Summerslam was the focus of tonight’s episode of Raw, as all of the men and women who will have matches on the show did their bit to advance their storyline to the point where that match would take on some semblance of meaning. Some of the matches on Summerslam, you can tell, are just there to eat the clock. While I know a lot of people are looking forward to Dean Ambrose vs. Seth Rollins, and while I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense that a feud based on one man’s quest to hunt down another who keeps running away would come to a head in a lumberjack match—that’s a match where the ring is surrounded by the wrestlers who will not be wrestling that evening—Ambrose and Rollins work much better when they have the arena as their playground. Similarly, an old-school Russia vs. USA Flag Match—the winner is the man who retrieves his flag from a pole that rises high above the ring—seems like a fun idea, but the WWE writer’s room stopped having interesting-if-poorly-informed things to say about the current political situation in Russia a few months ago, and Tea Party Patriot cum hirsute manager Zeb Coulter (picture Yosemite Sam on a fly fishing trip) constantly making reference to Rocky and Bullwinkle isn’t going to make Rocky IV feel any fresher in 2014.

Paul Heyman Brock Lesnar

But WWE can do a remarkable job of promoting a big match, and that is the axis upon which Summerslam revolves, the WWE World Heavyweight Championship clash between 15-time champion John Cena and unleashed Kraken Brock Lesnar. I like John Cena. I really like John Cena. I think the first John Cena match I saw was against Rob Van Dam at a WWE-produced revival of Extreme Championship Wrestling, a 90s entity that is responsible for revolutionizing wrestling in a number of ways large and small, one of which was to turn every professional wrestling fan over the age of 25 into an overly-entitled rage monster. I wasn’t watching wrestling much in 2006, but I remembered and liked ECW, so I went to a Buffalo Wild Wings in Taylor, Michigan to watch the somewhat local ECW legend Van Dam (from Battle Creek, MI) finally ascend to the WWE Championship (something I’d “borrowed” my mom’s credit card a few times to see in 2001, though Van Dam never clinched the title). ECW One Night Stand took place in the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City, which was a major hotbed for the organization when it was a real thing and not a marketing tool, and which remains a magnet for large independent wrestling events to this day. When John Cena’s music hit, 2,460 adult human beings really got on John Cena’s case for daring to be a professional wrester. He wore jean shorts, sneakers, and useless sweatbands, sure, but watching Cena go to work in that environment, 2,460 human adults chanting things like “Cena swallows” (a “hardcore” addendum to the time-tested chant of “Cena sucks”), I was won over by him immediately. By the time the people in the Buffalo Wild Wings, several thousand miles from New York City, started joining in on the chants emanating from the Hammerstein Ballroom, I knew I had a new favorite wrestler.

John Cena ECW One Night Stand

And so it’s been for me since then, which is a decision that’s treated me well. I’m into wrestling for the wrestling matches these days, and more often than not, on big shows, against big opponents, John Cena has one hell of a match. My favorite John Cena match in the past few years was the one that he had against Brock Lesnar at Extreme Rules in 2012, a stupidly named and often poorly booked show of “hardcore” matches that exists as a way to get a few thousand extra orders on a show that isn’t WrestleMania or Summerslam and that should go away post-haste, since the WWE Network exists, and, for $9.99, I’d watch WWE Singles Match if that’s what they wanted to call the damn thing. Cena vs. Lesnar had happened before, when John Cena was new and Brock Lesnar was thinking about quitting wrestling to try out for the National Football League, but I wasn’t watching and neither man was the symbol they’d become by the time 2012 brought Lesnar back to the world of fake fighting. Cena was the face of the WWE. Lesnar had gone legit, capturing the UFC Heavyweight Championship and maneuvering that sport towards an atmosphere that looked and sounded a lot like WWE, just without the benefit of goosed narratives. Diverticulitis took Lesnar out of the UFC, and a gigantic contract brought him back to a limited schedule of dates for the WWE. Now he functions much like Godzilla: When a major event comes around, he surfaces, wrecks a bunch of stuff, and leaves. He is the closest thing we have on this planet to a legitimate movie monster, and he is a glorious thing to behold. I love John Cena, but I want to see Brock Lesnar break him in half. I want him to make it look easy, like he’s hanging out on his ranch, shooting rifles with his brother, and eating a pile of terrible submarine sandwiches. Because John Cena is at his absolute best against guys like Lesnar, who are so good at the work they’ve been put here to do that they hate that work and the people who’d pay to witness it. Cena is great when he has to work for something, and ridding the WWE of the guy who crushed The Undertaker at WrestleMania, whose 21-0 streak going into WrestleMania XXX was the only thing in wrestling that could be said to mean more than any given title, is the only something left.

This episode of Raw presented something of a debate between Lesnar—represented by his advocate, Paul Heyman—and Cena; two extended interview segments that were both quite good. Heyman rapped, which, when you’re a 48-year-old man who was once prominently billed as “The Psycho Yuppie,” sounds more like Dr. Seuss than N.W.A., and Cena spoke largely about passion, how he has it, and how Lesnar’s lack of it means that he doesn’t deserve the WWE World Heavyweight Championship. Heyman hit his peak a few weeks ago when he brought Lesnar out as the man who would conquer John Cena’s 15th reign as champion and has been coasting a bit since—making fun of Cena’s origins as the horrible white rapper from the mean streets of West Newbury has been a thing since Cena was that character—but that’s kind of the point. He’s the dude standing behind King Kong. He doesn’t need to try very hard, because even a subpar effort from Paul Heyman on the microphone is museum quality compared to anybody else in the game.

This was made painfully obvious by the evening’s other large piece of non-physical storytelling, the ongoing saga of Brie Bella and Stephanie McMahon. An offshoot of last summer’s program that saw the rise of bearded populist hero Daniel Bryan in the face of a heartless corporate power structure that didn’t get why arenas across the country were making a big deal out of a guy they’d branded “goat face,” Bryan’s triumph at WrestleMania XXX (he beat Triple H, the head of the Authority, and then defeated Randy Orton and Batista to become the WWE World Heavyweight Champion) quickly turned sour, as his father died and he suffered a severe neck injury. This has caused him to relinquish the championship and largely disappear from television as he rehabs en route to an eventual return. Since, they’ve shunted the Bryan vs. Authority storyline to Brie Bella and Stephanie McMahon, the wives (in reality and in wrestling) of Bryan and Triple H.

Stephanie McMahon Brie Bella

Sometimes, when Stephanie McMahon is leading Brie through segments, everything is fine. Stephanie McMahon has grown considerably as a character over the past 15 years of her being in the spotlight, and is perhaps the second best Evil Boss character in the history of the medium, behind only her father. Brie Bella…is not good at talking. That’d be fine in a reality television show, where she actually thrives, but in a storyline that requires her to garner sympathy from an arena full of angry dudes, it’s going to take more than blackmailing the boss and calling her a bitch every week to get people invested. So this week, Stephanie brought out Daniel Bryan’s personal trainer, who awkwardly admitted to having an affair with the former champion, Brie’s husband, etc. This was, I guess, supposed to embarrass Brie Bella, but the segment was mostly terrible because, for starters, the woman playing the physical therapist was an atrocious actor even by wrestling standards. McMahon intimating Bryan’s cries “Yes! Yes! Yes!” in a tone suggesting the fake pornographic moans of an Herbal Essences commercial was funny, and I guess it makes sense that a heel would resort to slutshaming (the poor physical therapist is there in the corner watching McMahon imitate her during sex) in an effort to make the live fans cheer for Brie, but I checked out on this angle around the time McMahon was thrown into a gigantic kiddie pool of human waste, and whatever loyalty I have to Daniel Bryan doesn’t automatically transfer over to his spouse, because that isn’t how well-developed characters are created. Still, McMahon vs. Bella is the second most important match on the second most important show on the WWE calendar, and the crowd absolutely eats it up whenever the two get into a physical confrontation. There’s probably something to be said about the fact that these confrontations have been built around the signature moves of their husbands, but I’m not swimming through the kiddie pool of human waste to retrieve it. Therein you’ll probably also find a salient point about the biggest insult hurled by McMahon or Bella, beyond “bitch,” is the insinuation that Brie Bella is not good at sexually satisfying Daniel Bryan, which is, I guess, the job you sign up for when you get married.

Finally, Brock Lesnar crashed Hulk Hogan’s birthday party, because of course he did. “Party’s over, grandpa,” he said, leering like the villain of an 80s film. Brock Lesnar is there to beat up the collective childhoods of everybody in that arena—beyond Hogan, the ring had filled with Roddy Piper, Ric Flair, the nWo of Scott Hall and Kevin Nash, “Mean” Gene Okerlund, Jimmy Hart, and “Mr. Wonderful” Paul Orndorff. John Cena saved the day, because of course he did, but that doesn’t matter much. Nothing happened between he and Lesnar, because that can wait until Sunday, until Summerslam, until you’ve given up $9.99 for it and the rest of the card. Before those two had their final confrontation, and before all of the old-timers came out and Scott Hall had a bit of fun running through his old nWo catchphrases and Hogan ripped off his red and yellow Hulkamania shirt to reveal the black and white New World Order shirt beneath, Gene Okerlund directed Hogan’s attention to the video screen, where a legitimately touching tribute to Hogan played. It was set to Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young.” Hulk Hogan is 61 now, and while he can come out and run through the catchphrases and rip his shirt off and do the same bodybuilding poses I saw as a four-year old, he’s never going to wrestle again. Time has officially caught up to Hulk Hogan, and seeing clips of him dropping leg after leg to Dylan was strange at first, somehow dissonant to what Hogan was, until it hit me that, well, it kind of fit. The Ultimate Warrior died this year. Randy Savage died in 2011.”When you turn 61-years-young,” Hogan said, bringing down the energy after mustering a bit of that vintage Hogan hype, “you start to reflect back on a few things.”

Hulk Hogan nWo

Nothing Hogan could say on a night that ended with him cutting into a birthday cake festooned with candles spelling out “9.99” was going to reach the zenith of what turned out to be the final public appearance of The Ultimate Warrior, but last night, The Immortal Hulk Hogan pondered his mortality. And while the footage of his staring down Brock Lesnar will likely be replayed over and over for the next year, if not longer, the fact that there was no physical altercation between the two—not even Lesnar shoving Hogan to the mat, which would have blown the roof off of the building—speaks volumes about what Hulk Hogan is capable of in 2014. Hulkamania may be willing, brother, but all the training, prayers, and vitamins in the world can’t stop time. Beyond a paycheck, this is why someone like Hulk Hogan might be interested in forking over $9.99 for the WWE Network. Not for Summerslam, which will be there regardless, but because he’ll be dropping legs and shredding t-shirts on it forever, immortal, as promised. For a wrestler—for the wrestler—that’s not a bad legacy.

Results:

  • Paul Heyman addressed Brock Lesnar’s upcoming match against John Cena by “rapping.” Since he did so without a beat, one could even say he freestyled.
  • Roman Reigns def. RybAxel (Ryback and Curtis Axel) via disqualification.
  • Bray Wyatt and Chris Jericho had a face-to-face confrontation that was lifted entirely from The Silence of the Lambs.
  • Seth Rollins def. Rob Van Dam via pinfall. After the match, Dean Ambrose emerged from a giant gift box to attack Rollins, who ran away through the crowd.
  • Stephanie McMahon interviewed Daniel Bryan’s physical therapist, who admitted to having an affair with Bryan. This led Bryan’s wife, Brie Bella, to slap the therapist and attack McMahon, putting her in Bryan’s signature finishing maneuver, the Yes! Lock.
  • Jack Swagger def. Cesaro via submission. He then stared down Rusev, their inactivity a metaphor for the Cold War.
  • Eva Marie def. WWE Diva’s Champion AJ Lee by pinfall due to a distraction by Paige, who then read a terrible poem to mock her “frienemy,” which is an awful word to hear a trio of middle-aged men repeat seven or eight times in six minutes.
  • John Cena called out Brock Lesnar, who did not respond.
  • Brie Bella vs. Stephanie McMahon did not occur, as Brie Bella was arrested for assaulting Daniel Bryan’s physical therapist.
  • Heath Slater def. Dolph Ziggler via count-out, as The Miz was distracting Ziggler from the announce table.
  • Randy Orton def. WWE United States Champion Sheamus by pinball.
  • Hulk Hogan’s birthday party was interrupted by Brock Lesnar. The assembled old folks there to celebrate Hogan’s 61 years of Hulkamania running wild were saved from a beating by John Cena. Rather than fight, Lesnar ditched the ring, saving the inevitable clash for this Sunday’s Summerslam.

Rating: far out

For no reason other than that they played him down to the ring to it last night, be sure to listen to Paul Orndorff’s brilliant theme song:

Filed Under: Reviews, Wrestling Tagged With: AJ Lee, Bray Wyatt, Brie Bella, Brock Lesnar, Cesaro, Chris Jericho, Curtis Axel, Daniel Bryan, Dolph Ziggler, Eva Marie, Heath Slater, Hulk Hogan, Jack Swagger, John Cena, Paige, Paul Heyman, Paul Orndorff, Randy Orton, Raw, Rob Van Dam, Roman Reigns, Rusev, Ryback, Seth Rollins, Sheamus, Stephanie McMahon, The Miz, Triple H, Wrestling Reviews, WWE

Hulk Hogan vs. Stan Hansen (4/13/90)

September 26, 2012 by Colette Arrand Leave a Comment

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQZwqNiTN1E]

Almost without question the best match Hulk Hogan had after losing the WWF Championship to the Ultimate Warrior at WrestleMania VI a mere 12 days earlier, this encounter between Hogan and Stan “The Lariat” Hansen has a major advantage over most Hulk Hogan matches—from that era or otherwise—in that it takes place in Japan. I’ve written a little bit about the curious effect Japan had on Hulkamania, but this goes deeper than the Japanese expecting more than routine, about their wanting to see the Axe Bomber lariat and not the Atomic Leg Drop. See, in Japan, Stan Hansen was the living, breathing embodiment of America at its meanest, at its toughest, at its worst. Stan Hansen was worse than any ol’ monster Hulk Hogan had chopped down in America. He was a tobacco chewing, bullrope twirling bully, an American Godzilla.

That’s important, because in any other country but Japan, Stan Hansen in a WWF ring is a cartoon cowboy. Oh, maybe not when he broke Bruno Sammartino’s neck in 1976, but plenty had changed in the intervening 15 years. Heck, 10 years after Hansen and Bruno’s feud, Terry Funk came to the WWF as fodder for Hogan’s budding WWF Championship reign and was portrayed as a cartoon cowboy. A middle-aged and crazy cartoon cowboy, which was actually a good contrast for Hogan, but not quite the Terry Funk 1985 needed. In Japan, Terry Funk is Terry Funk. Stan Hansen is Stan Hansen. He’s a bully. The bad man from Borger. And everything about his ring entrance tells you just that.

Here he is whipping a fan with his bullrope.
Here he is checking the ring announcer to the canvas.
And here’s Hulk Hogan, presumably terrified.

The pre-match segment, with Hogan standing around in his locker room stretching, ignoring the Japanese interviewer, and watching Hansen make his way to the ring, is one of my favorite parts of this match. There’s something to be said for WWE-style ring entrances and what they accomplish, but nobody knew how to create an atmosphere for a wrestling match quite like the Japanese. With Hansen out in the ring whipping every thing in sight and Hogan in the back, silently watching, it was pretty obvious that something special, something living up to the “SPECIAL DREAM MATCH” bulling was about to go down. Hogan and Hansen were two bombs, set to explode.

What’s amazing, at least to me, is that Hansen was a last-minute replacement for Terry Gordy, the All Japan Pro Wrestling Triple Crown champion. A loss to Hogan, Gordy figured, would do him more harm than good. The resulting match, however, has a sense of destiny to it. Hogan teamed with Hansen during Hogan’s time in Japan. He’d grown to be this big, shouty, American teddy bear, a nice enough dude, but somebody Hansen would be deeply ashamed to associate with. Instead of one of those cutesy American matches between former tag team partners—you know, where one man knows the other’s move “almost before it happens!”—things escalate very quickly from Hogan’s mat wrestling display (those who’ve long bemoaned Hogan’s five moves of doom should pay attention to his STF, his cravate, his drop toe-hold, and so-on) to a Hansen-style brawl. Both men throw punches. Both men shed blood.  Hogan, in a decidedly anti-Hogan twist, bodyslams Stan Hansen onto an unbreakable Japanese table. Beyond Hogan’s yellow trunks and his willingness to cheat, he’s almost unrecognizable.

That’s what I appreciate the most about Hogan’s one-off appearances in Japan, that they represent something utterly different from what I’m used to. I recently listened to Colt Cabana’s interview of William Regal (one of my top five favorite wrestlers), and Regal said something that reminded me to look up this match. He said that, too often, wrestlers (and people involved elsewhere in the industry) get too caught up in the finer details of their craft and forget what interested them as children. For me, it was Hulk Hogan. Sure, I also loved Randy Savage, Bret Hart, Ultimate Warrior, and Jake Roberts, but it was Hogan who got me in the door and, later, Hogan who I most bitterly complained about.

It’s not my place to talk about Hulk Hogan the person or Hulk Hogan the backstage politician, but Hulk Hogan the wrestler existed, and was not just a figment of my imagination. Beneath his routines, beneath his catch phrases, and beneath his pre- and post-match posedowns there existed a Hulk Hogan who could really go in the ring, but wasn’t called upon to except on the rarest of circumstances. When I watch a Hogan match like this, I think of all the good-to-great John Cena matches I’ve seen, all of the Randy Orton matches I’ve enjoyed despite not really liking Randy Orton, and the divide that exists between people who love those two wrestlers and those who hate them. It’s a wide gulf, one unlikely to be bridged, but take a look at this match and realize that, for 13-minutes, Hogan and Stan Hansen are equals. Then watch John Cena vs. C.M. Punk or Randy Orton vs. Christian and tell me, with a straight face, that one carried the other. I don’t think I’m revealing anything when I say that wrestling, at its core, is a partnership. If the two partners aren’t somehow equal, the match fails. There’s a wealth of Hulk Hogan matches following this one that only proves this point. Wonderfully, none of them take place in Japan.

Filed Under: Wrestling Tagged With: AJPW, Hulk Hogan, Stan Hansen, wrestling matches, WWE

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