A showdown of good, evil and common sense
At the risk of leg-dropping a guy when he’s down, I must confess: I never was much of a Hulk Hogan fan.
Oh, I suppose another confession is in order: I grew up loving professional wrestling. To my family’s certain dismay, it was all I wanted to watch, a cartoon, comic book and vaguely sportslike thing in one. I was all in, renting VHS tapes each weekend, suplexing pillows and begging my parents for such esoteric WWF (now WWE) paraphernalia as a mock microphone, Bret Hart wraparound sunglasses and a popcorn tin (which I recently found, filled with Pogs).
It wasn’t Hogan who sold me. Even to a 5-year-old, the Hulkster seemed preening, preachy and so predestined to win his every encounter that I instinctively rooted against him. So WrestleMania VI, at the SkyDome, was my Woodstock: Hogan faced the fluorescent alien superhero known as Ultimate Warrior and actually lost.
This was the spandex Star Wars of my childhood. Revisiting it now, the event feels less Rocky vs. Creed and more Rocky and Bullwinkle. The show opens with Hogan and Warrior’s silhouettes as stars in the night sky, while owner Vince McMahon froths nonsensically about “strange and powerful forces” in the “galaxies of space.
“Prepare to explode!” he implores and oh, how the announced crowd of 67,678 obeys.
“The atmosphere, man,” recalled Toronto’s Adam Copeland, who attended the show at 14 before becoming the Hall of Fame wrestler Edge. “It felt like you could see bolts of electricity.”
That was April 1, 1990, and a quarter-century later that kinetic energy has admittedly dimmed. The 14 (!) matches take three hours, 35 minutes (!!) to play out. Wrestling was then an exclusively kid-oriented spectacle, a disbelief-free zone with wholesome babyfaces, dastardly heels and fever-dream insane gimmicks.
Take, for instance: Rick (The Model) Martel, who spritzed himself with cologne called “Arrogance” from what looked like a modified bicycle pump; John (Earthquake) Tenta, a 400-pounder in baby blue who violently sat on opponents; or Brutus (The Barber) Beefcake, who brandished foot-long hedge clippers yet left his own frizzy mullet curiously untamed.
Beefcake’s finishing manoeuvre was the sleeper hold and, indeed, the plodding in-ring action did induce some drowsiness. The deliriously unhinged backstage interviews, however, were gold.
In one segment, a member of Demolition — a tag team in studded leather bondage gear — threatens to
“It’s very easy for people to become their characters. Throughout my career, I never introduced myself as Edge. I was always Adam.” ADAM COPELAND RETIRED WRESTLER
“throw (their opponents) in the back of a semitractor trailer . . . drive them straight off a cliff and watch them smash into smithereens!”
As usual, there was no outdoing Hogan, with tanned skin the colour and viscosity of chicken tikka masala, who rambled incoherently: “I’m going to ask you one question, brother . . . do you want to live forever? And if your answer is yes, Ultimate Warrior, then breathe your last breath into my body.”
Immortality was definitely a theme and it can take on a tragic tone now that so many of WrestleMania VI’s competitors have died.
In all,14 of the evening’s 34 competitors have passed, including: Andre (age 46, heart failure); “Macho Man” Randy Savage (58, cardiac arrhythmia); Tenta (42, cancer); “Mr. Perfect” Curt Hennig (44, cocaine overdose); “Sensational” Sherri Martel (49, overdose); Dino Bravo (44, murder); Big Boss Man (41, heart attack); and Rick Rude (40, heart failure). The glamorous Miss Elizabeth died from painkillers and vodka at 42.
Rowdy Roddy Piper once discussed the issue so candidly he was subsequently fired by the WWE. “Everybody’s dead,” he said. “They take them and they screw them up so much.
“I’m not going to make 65,” he predicted. He was right: he died at 61 of hypertension.
Piper also lamented wrestling’s lack of an “exit plan,” an idea that resonated with Copeland.
“It’s very easy for people to become their characters,” observed Copeland, who retired at 37 with neck injuries. “Throughout my career, I never introduced myself as Edge. I was always Adam. That was important to me.” Well, James Hellwig legally changed his name to Warrior in1993. He died in 2014, at 54.
I was surprised how clearly I remembered his main event with Hogan: the endless “test of strength”; the double-clothesline sold like a shotgun blast; and the bear-hug where the sweaty wrestlers violently, dramatically cuddled.
Warrior eventually wins and Hogan tearfully surrenders his title as commentator Jesse Ventura, in a bandana and feathered earring, vows, “Hulkamania will live forever.”
The fact that I’m frankly moved by this overblown display proves him, in a way, right. If life after wrestling is fleeting and fraught, at least these stars’ wrestling lives still carry some kind of strange and powerful force, one that not even adulthood can completely diminish.