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April 03, 2006

Wrestlemania XXII

I held my second annual Wrestlemania party tonight, and it was again a blast. As was the case last year, the real highlights happened well before the two anticlimactic main events.

For those of you who don't follow wrestling, here's what you need to know: wrestling is scripted entertainment, not a real competition. The winners and losers have all been predetermined by WWE writers - everybody watching knows that - but that takes nothing away from the athleticism and showmanship of a great wrestler's performance. Pro wrestlers are more like stuntmen - or even dancers - than they are like boxers or football players. They're performers, not competitors.

The star of the evening was the great Mick Foley, coming out of retirement to face Edge for twenty crowd-pleasing minutes of barbed wire, baseball bats, barbed-wire-covered baseball bats, a bag of thumbtacks that ended up in Edge's back, and a finale that involved both wrestlers slamming into a flame-covered folding table. There was lots of blood, but as always with Foley (formerly known as Mankind, Cactus Jack, and Dude Love), it was all in good fun. If you read only one book about wrestling, check out Have a Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks, his hugely entertaining memoir. (If you read only two books about wrestling, follow it up with Thomas Hackett's smart, engaging Slaphappy: Pride Prejudice,and Professional Wrestling. Conflict alert: Hackett is a friend of a friend, interviewed me for the book, and thanked me in the acknowledgements. But I'd like the book anyway.)

Shawn Michaels vs. Vince McMahon was also a lot of fun. For those of you who haven't followed the recent career of McMahon, who has run World Wrestling Entertainment (formerly the World Wrestling Federation) for decades, in the last few years he's bulked up and taken to the ring himself, despite pushing 60. Sometimes the results are just testament to McMahon's vanity. But the Michaels match worked up some pretty crazy stuff. First a five-man "cheerleading squad" ambushes Michaels, and he has to take them all down, kung-fu-movie style. Then McMahon's adult son Shaun shows up and tried to force Michaels to literally kiss his boss's ass. But Michaels breaks free, turns the tables, and plants the son's lips on the dad's bare behind. As I told KT, the whole night was homoerotic - that's a given in wrestling - but this was the one moment that got clinically Freudian. KT agreed, but was disappointed that the moment wasn't followed by the son screaming, "my eyes, my eyes," then surreptitiously cutting his forehead (a standard wrestling practice) to bloody his face and make it look like he's been blinded by the horror he's just seen. Maybe the Sophocles reference wouldn't have played with the core WWE teen male demographic, but classics majors everywhere would've been tickled.

In any case, the capper for that match worked fine - Michaels sets up a faux-unconscious McMahon on a folding table, his head and upper body covered by metal garbage can. Michaels climbs up an extra-tall ladder, jumps off, and lands on the can, breaking the table and pinning McMahon. It was a showstopping move from Michaels, one of wrestling's greats.

The rest of the matches were mixed affairs. The women's match, featuring an ongoing lesbian-stalker storyline, was surprisingly fun - it looks like Trish Stratus, a real pro, finally has a worthy opponent in Mickie James. We'll pass over the "pillow fight" between Playboy models without comment, although I was amused to see a mattress (though not the boxspring) used as a weapon.

At least the matchup with The Boogeyman, who eats worms, was good for a laugh. The ladder match was OK, but a disappointment compared to last year's barn-burner. The Undertaker's yearly win (the announcers make a big deal out of him being undefeated on Wrestlemania) was plodding and predictable. And both of the main events were busts.

In the first, a three-way battle, Rey Mysterio, a former Mexican wrestler who still wears his mask, won the belt and dedicated his victory to Ed Guerrero, the WWE star who passed away last year. But the tribute to Guerrero, a victim of steroid abuse, was in extremely poor taste coming on the same card with McMahon, Booker T, Mr. Olympia, and other wrestlers with the telltale body shapes of heavy users. Even Mysterio himself, a lithe guy whose scintillating signature move is to acrobatically swing through the ropes, seemed oddly bulked up. Allegely, the WWE has instituted a new steroid policy following Guerrero's death, but I'm dubious. And it's a big shame, because 'roided-up wresters aren't even fun to watch. They lose the flexibility that makes greats like Michaels so quick and fluid. All they can do is stand in the ring and pretend to slug each other.

That was the final match in a nutshell - the hulking, clumsy Jon Cena fake-boxing the hulking, slightly-less-clumsy Triple H. At least HHH came out in a hilarious Conan-meets-Jesus getup, claiming he was now "The King of Kings." Compared to that, Cena's Eminem-of-wrestling shtick, tired a year ago, hardly registered. In the end, Cena won with a completely unconvincing submission hold. Apparently he sells a lot of t-shirts.

If you haven't had your fill of wrestling commentary, check out this exploration of the hermeneutics of wrestling fandom, along with this classic post by guest-blogger BMN, "Wrestling Lingo Applied to Life and Academia".

Posted by tedf at April 3, 2006 12:04 PM

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