Connecticut's Roided Future

Linda McMahon, GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate and wife of WWE founder Vince freaking McMahon disputes that steroids lead to long-term health problems.

When I asked Linda McMahon about the issue, however, she said she shared her husband's doubts. "There's some evidence sometimes of muscle disease, or cardiac disease, but it's really hard to know because you didn't know the condition of the performer's heart, or whatever, prior to," she told me. "So I still don't think we know the long-term effects of steroids. They are continuing to study it more and more, but I don't believe there are a lot of studies out there today that are conclusive."

Q: If McMahon actually wins, will Connecticut go on a statewide roid rage and finally conquer Rhode Island?

Film Review--The Wrestler (2008)

When I first heard that Darren Aronofsky, one of my favorite young directors, was making a movie about wrestling, one of my great loves, starring Mickey Rourke and Marissa Tomei, two of my favorite actors, I know there was no way I would miss it. Yet, The Wrestler came and went from the theater and I sat at home. Really, I have a hard time justifying an hour drive to see a movie, but this was one I really was looking forward to seeing. For a long time, the only person I knew who actually had seen it was Erik, decidedly not a wrestling fan. He described it as a solid film, yet it took me until very recently to watch it.

I loved it almost entirely. The simplicity of the story allows the characters to breathe and take shape on their own without too much influence from plot contrivances. With only three essential characters, there is time to burn and I think two of these three are over-the-top good with the third standing out as my sole complaint about the film. Rourke is phenomenal, but the surprise at this was ridiculous. Not only had he already "come back" with his role as Marv in Sin City, his performances through the years, at least in those years that he cared, have been consistently solid. I'm not going to sit here and claim that Wild Orchid is great cinema, but he's still good at what he does. Tomei is equally good and possibly better that Rourke. She is given considerably less to work with, but the strength of her performance gives her character much more depth than the script allows. And then there's Evan Rachel Wood, who has even less to do than Tomei, but can't even rise to the level of the character skeleton handed to her, adding absolutely nothing to the role. She doesn't bring the film down too much simply because she doesn't have much screen time, but what time she does spend with Rourke makes for the worst moments of the film.

I don't want to get into a breakdown of the story. There's no point in equating wrestling and sex work; saying that both professionals sell their bodies for an industry that will spit them out as soon as their bodies break is like telling me that water is wet. Unlike Aronofsky's other work, I barely find this story worth discussing. Instead, what makes this film such a great experience is its realism and not its sometimes ham-fisted plotting. After he saw the film, Erik asked me about the really violent stuff, the staple guns and barbed wire, etc., and whether that was the norm in independent wrestling or a marginalized extreme. My response was to describe a match from Sacramento's SPW (Supreme Pro Wrestling) show that I attended in around 2001. The contest was billed as a "death match" and, for wrestling fans, this one's a big seller. At the finale of the match, one of the wrestlers set up a contraption that could only exist in wrestling. A plywood plank covered in barbed wire and attached by small dowels to a sheet of glass was placed on the floor of the theater. The losing wrestler was then laid across this brutal little table while the winning wrestler climbed a ladder inside the ring. He jumped from the ladder to finish the guy off, but his opponent moved, leaving this poor bastard to land face-first through the glass and into the barbed wire. He lost the match, but watching this guy wallow in the wire and glass is one of the truly disturbing things I've seen. The answer to Erik's question, of course, is yes, this kind of hardcore style is extremely common on the independent circuit and thousands of "Randy-the-Rams" are wrestling on cards this week across the country for likely little more than gas money and some dinner.

The real reason, however, that I like The Wrestler so damn much isn't for anything I said above. I laughed during much of the film, a reaction I doubt many non-wrestling fans had. I didn't laugh because it was funny; I laughed because it was correct and I reacted very much as I would to a quality wrestling match. The fact is that The Wrestler is a spectacularly sad film, but not for the performances or the script or the style. It's sadness comes from its truth. I have devoted many hundreds of hours to professional wrestling during my life and you don't have to tell me how the story of Randy the Ram ends. The Wrestler is an elegy for all those dead wrestlers who made the same choices the Ram did. So many of my favorite wrestlers growing up: Brian Pillman, Chris Benoit, Eddie Guerrero, Rick Rude, Owen Hart, and I could go on forever. I love wrestling as much or more than any form of entertainment and this love is what makes me sad.

Mike Huckabee - Now Ready for a Tag-Team Match

The circus of celebrities supporting Mike Huckabee's candidacy took surreality to a whole new level today. Huckabee already had the support of Chuck Norris and Ted Nugent. Just when you thought this couldn't get stranger, he gets the support of....Ric Flair. (I believe Huckabee's initial reaction was "WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"). While I suspect his campaign will go nowhere (despite what his staunchest supporters may say), I would pay decent money ($20 or less) to see a campaign stop that included Norris, the Nuge, and "the Nature Boy" (or just "the Nat" if you're tight with him) on the same stage. The only thing I want to know is, would they come on stage to the tune of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" or "Wango Tango"? I mean, these are the REAL issues Mike Huckabee now has to face.

Nonetheless, given this bastion of masculity, how can anybody stop him?

RIP--The Fabulous Moolah

Sadly, there has been another death in wrestling. This time, fortunately however, there were no steroids, no double murder/suicides, no overdoses. Natural causes is the exception, not the rule, in this industry and, on Friday, legendary female wrestler Lillian Ellison, aka The Fabulous Moolah, died at 84 years old. Her career in the ring was groundbreaking, practically unmatched by anybody of either gender. Her career began sometime in the '50s as "Slave Girl" Moolah (classy, I know) seconding "Nature Boy" Buddy Rogers, where she was almost instantly popular as a cheating bad girl. There had been female wrestlers as long as males, but rarely was there somebody with the combination of charisma and athleticism, especially at the time. She beat Judy Grable for her first championship in 1956 and, while she was beaten for the belt time and again, she continued to hold it periodically until she lost it for the last time in 1987. There is only one other wrestler who could legitimately claim to have been in the picture for so long: Lou Thesz. While Moolah's title reigns ceased, her involvement in the business did not, and she made regular comedic appearances, some funny, some strange, and some downright disgusting, and wrestled a few matches against some of the younger women in the industry as late as last year.

Very few can claim to have been viable in their respective industries for half a century. Even fewer can claim this in an industry based around athletics and look. Fewer than that can claim this in an industry that has treated her gender with such blatant disrespect. In fact, only one can claim that. Moolah was an inspiration for generations of women who wanted to be wrestlers, and almost single-handedly legitimized what is otherwise a misogynist entertainment. Every female wrestler who has cared more about her performance than her breasts owe Moolah a debt of gratitude for blazing the path, and if there was one person who would never let them forget that, it was Moolah herself.

And wrestling isn't sensationalist?

I recently wrote about the bizarre (and accurate) historical analogy in the patently faked story of the death of WWE's Vincent McMahon. However, given the double-murder-and-suicide of Chris Benoit, the story has been justifiably buried, as apparently (I go on reports here, as I'm in Brazil), Vince McMahon introduced Raw last night as a tribute to Benoit (before it was clear it was a double-murder-suicide). The burial of the storyline of McMahon's "death" is without question the tasteful thing to do here.

What's a little less tasteful is WWE's condemnation of the media for being "sensationalist" for reporting that steroids and roid rage were behind the incident (though at 6:20 PM Eastern time, the discovery of steroids at his house was breaking news, but we cannot fault WWE for writing a statement earlier in the day before this discovery was announced in the last 10 minutes as I write). No doubt, the media is sensationalist, and they are certainly trying to both try to explain why one of their most popular stars did this, and perhaps trying to deflect the (now inevitable) look towards the use of steroids in wrestling. However, it is more than a little ironic that the WWE, who just buried a storyline about its owner being "dead" and played it up (complete with a "federal investigator" reporting to the webpage), is now criticizing the news media for its sensationalism.

...UPDATE: Just to add to Lyrad's point on the exploitation of wrestlers' bodies with little concern for their health, see this scary list of wrestlers who have died before turning 50 since 1997, many from drugs or heart attacks (and the list doesn't even include recently-passed-away "Sensational" Sherri.)

The Most Incongruous Latin American History Lesson of the Year

While cruising around on the internets today, I checked out what's been going on recently in professional wrestling. Apparently, in what is unquestionably a new storyline (were it real news, you could find it on websites that host, well, real news), owner/CEO/heel Vince McMahon was killed last night in a car bomb. This is, as I said, obviously not true, and is being used to push some new storyline in the near future.

However, what's particularly odd about this story is the history they actually include. Towards the bottom of the story, there is the following paragraph: "This incident [the "carbombing"] is the first of its kind in the U.S. since the assassination of political figure Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C. in 1976. Sources say that given the nature of the apparent car bombing, under law federal authorities will be called in for a more thorough investigation that would supersede local Pennsylvania authorities."

To my knowledge, that's actually completely true (if we accept the silliness of the McMahon carbombing). Orlando Letelier died in Washington, D.C. in 1976 when Augusto Pinochet's government had Letelier (who was a vocal critic of Pinochet) blown up, along with his assistant, Ronni Moffitt (her husband was severely wounded but survived).

I could chastise WWE for being offensive in tying together a political victim of an authoritarian state and Vince McMahon, but offensiveness is nothing new for WWE. So instead, I'll actually begrudgingly congratulate them. While McMahon will pop up again soon, the WWE actually not only brought in an actual history lesson to their wrestling audience (that of Letelier); they even got the basic fact of the car-bombing right.