The Value System of Pro Wrestling

* Follow me on: Facebook - Twitter - Instagram *

There are very few topics I can address with almost any male between thirty-five to forty-five years old (I’m thirty-eight) that I know will elicit an immediate positive response. Memories that predate the commercialisation of internet like landlines, old school video games or 301 shoes might earn you a nostalgic nod of approval. For some reason, name dropping old school baseball players is really fun too if your interlocutor was once a card collector. The recollection Ken Oberkfell and Hensley Meulens will pry a smile out of any stranger with a beating heart.

No topic will turn middle aged men into friends quicker than pro wrestling, though. That works like a charm every fucking time. 

This phenomenon is very specific to my generation, though. I was born 1982 and religiously followed pro wrestling from 1988 to 2002, age where I left for college and stopped having access to cable television. In my formative years, wrestling went from a local attraction to a worldwide cultural phenomenon mostly because of Vince McMahon’s nefarious plans for world wrestling domination. As a result, millions of young boys (self-inclued) grew up watching angry, oversized oiled up men having pretend arguments with one another every Monday evening. 

My mom hated that I loved pro wrestling so much. She thought it was a violent and unsophisticated thing to expose my gullible little brain to. She did NOT understand the appeal, although it was obvious. It was like a real life cartoon: oversized men, colorful costumes, clear cut good guys, clear cut bad guys (who sometimes turned good guys) and clear resolution week after week. The WWE (and the WCW, which we won’t discuss in this piece) would either send you to bed elated or miserable. There was no in between. Of course, children loved pro wrestling. It spoke their language.

I believe pro wrestling of this era was even more important to people of my age than we’d like to admit. I believe it raised us in its own way. At least it raised me. I spent hundreds of my formative years watching (and sometimes rewatching) pro wrestling and I believe it inadvertently taught values to an entire generation of young men. Here are some examples of what I mean. Two from my own upbringing and one happening right now.

Razor Ramon - Integrity

1: firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values : INCORRUPTIBILITY

2: an unimpaired condition : SOUNDNESS

3: the quality or state of being complete or undivided : COMPLETENESS

Razor Ramon was basically wrestler Scott Hall cosplaying a very relaxed spin off fictional Cuban drug lord Tony Montana between 1992 and 1996. He was cocky, sneaky and arrogant. He called himself The Bad Guy for fuck’s sake. Although bigger than most wrestlers and equipped with the coolest finishing move in the game, he’d often cut corners and take shortcuts to win if given the opportunity. Razor Ramon was a street smart hustler who thought very highly of himself and delivered exactly what he promised, more often than not. He was a four times Intercontinental Champion and fought in some of the most memorable matches of his era, including two iconic ladder matches against Shawn Michaels.

What made Razor Ramon so memorable is that he was the first heel with absolutely no redeemable qualities to turn babyface, which he did after a feud with the 1-2-3 Kid. Because the character fundamentally didn’t change, the babyface turn was important because it gave you a sense of what he valued. Razor Ramon liked and trusted people who could hold their own. He was suddenly not just a roughly drawn parody. The babyface turn filled the gap between who he was and how he acted.

Scott Hall taught me you could be cocky and have principles. That you could act however you wanted to act, for as long as your decisions were guided by core values. That you didn’t fucking need to be nice to anyone. Instead, you could choose who you were being nice to based on what is important to you. This is a really complicated piece of wisdom that Razor Ramon communicated effortlessly through his own brand of muscular vaudeville. His entire tenure with the WWE would be colored by that babyface turn. Razor Ramon was confident, but he could back it up. He felt comfortable in the ring. That’s where he belonged. People understood that about the character based on what he chose to respect. 

This value is called integrity. Although Merriam-Webster’s definition states that integrity is moral, I think that Razor Ramon shows it can be based on experience if you didn’t come from an inherently moral environment. There is a righteousness to having principles to live by. Whatever these principles may be. 

My ten years old self became quite the rabid fan of Razor Ramon. Because his matches were rad and his philosophy ran contrary to everything I’d been previously told by adults about human nature. You could kick some ass and be a good person. You were entitled not like certain people if their principles can contrary to yours. That was self-respect. You didn’t have to like everybody. You didn’t have to be like everybody. The important thing was to be someone you were comfortable with. It was communicated to me in a schoolyard bravado language I could understand.

That, my parents didn’t teach me. It’s a giant man with gold chains and oily hair who did.

Triple H - Ambition

1a: an ardent desire for rank, fame, or power

b: desire to achieve a particular end

When Triple H signed with the WWE, no one liked him. Then named Hunter Hearst Helmsley to make him sound like a rich New England snob, his aristocrat gimmick felt contrived and unoriginal. But Paul Levesque had two things going for him: 1) he was an absolute beast of a worker and 2) he was even more of a beast of a networker and quickly made friends with important wrestlers backstage like the aforementioned Scott Hall, Shawn Michaels and Kevin Nash. Those would prove crucial to propel him over a shoddy early run and the first ever known public betrayal of kayfabe by him and his aforementioned friends.

His friendship to Michaels would end up granting him a fresh start as part of Degeneration X, a stable of juvenile, anti authority pranksters that would seduce an entire generation of teenagers with phrases like “suck it” and by undermining their boss’ authority with weird pranks like kidnapping her daughter and marrying her at a Las Vegas drive-thru chapel while she was unconscious, but once again it was weird angle that would prove to be instrumental in Triple H’s career and life’s in general. He ended up marrying the boss’ daughter very much with her consent. 

Triple H never really interested me growing up. He was one hell of an in-ring worker, but he was the sidekick to my favorite wrestler of then Shawn Michaels (who might even be my favorite wrestler of now. The older you get, the harder is it to have a favorite anything). He became interesting a little later, when kayfabe and real life started blending in his storylines.

 When he earned the nickname The Game.

This is a weird one because no one knows how much of it was scripted. When Triple H married Stephanie McMahon, he was suddenly thrusted into the world title picture. His gimmick also shifted from juvenile prankster to cold-blooded, legacy-obsessed, calculating monster and I loved him for it. He started behaving like a fucking maniac in order to get title shots. Political engineering, backstabbing allies, using his trademark sledgehammer to neutralize other wrestlers. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to succeed. That was supposed to make him a super heel, but usually the worse the got, the better I loved them. Triple H was no different

That storyline came into my life just when the training wheels had come off and I was starting to fend for myself in college. What Triple H has taught me from 2000 onwards is that if you behave like everyone else, you’re going to be treated like everyone else. That if you want to go up, you need to act accordingly. No one will do it for you. Not only Triple H married into the royal family of wrestling (which I’m sure was not 100% a career move), but he’s kind of taken control of the narrative around his character too. 

That part of Triple H’s career was always hotly debated among fans. Some love it to death like me. Others feel it was contrived and undermined the overall quality of the show. I thought it was the whole point of it: bending both reality and kayfabe into a comfortable in-between. If that isn’t a testament to this man’s ambition and determination, I don’t know what is. It’s OK to want things for yourself. But you have to get them yourself. You cannot remain driven and dreamy-eyed for your entire life. You have to sacrifice for it. 

My parents didn’t teach me that. A bulky, long-haired maniac from New Hampshire did.

Bray Wyatt - Resilience

1: the capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compressive stress

2: an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change

Obsessing over Bray Wyatt’s WWE career is my new favorite thing. It isn’t nearly where it should be and none of it is his fault. He is a brilliant, brilliant storyteller and his latest creation The Fiend might be his best. One of the best I’ve even seen in wrestling, too. 

Wyatt had a brief early run with the WWE as Husky Harris, a background character for The Nexus in the early 2010s. There wasn’t much to him apart that he was young and athletic. He was forgettable and promptly forgotten when he left the big leagues for another developmental run. In 2012, he reemerged with a much cooler gimmick: backwoods cult-leader Bray Wyatt, leader of the Wyatt Family.

Bray Wyatt was such a bold and original horror movie-inspired gimmick that tried all sorts of weird, creative things in the ring while fostering an aura of unpredictability in the WWE. From psychological control over other wrestlers to embodying his dead sister, Wyatt did every creepy thing imaginable and it worked. The gimmick might’ve been too much on the Rated R side for the WWE, but it was impeccable for what it was. Unfortunately, his ideas came at an awkward time in the company’s history where Vince McMahon was ridiculously obsessed with pushing John Cena and Roman Reigns, so Bray Wyatt never really got the time of day from the promotion. Randy Orton burned the Wyatt family compound (in what was perhaps Wyatt’s best feud), he turned baby face for a weird, short run and disappeared.

Only to reemerge a couple months later with an even cooler concept. Wyatt would host weird, surreal kid show vignettes called “Firefly Funhouse”. He looked leaner, more clean and yet there seemed to be something deeply wrong with him. He ended the vignetted by inviting the kids to “let him in” without ever explaining what it meant. There are maybe ten of these vignettes, which meant to introduce Wyatt’s new character The Fiend, a physical manifestation of inner demons that sometimes take control of him. 

I will nor go further into in-ring developments because the WWE is once again dropping the ball with one of the best characters of the last twenty years, but the very idea of the fiend is based on an important value that is often misinterpreted and misunderstood by most people: resilience. The art of learning from your failures and letting them change you into something that you could’ve never been if they never happened. By definition, resilience is the art of recovering after being dealt a physical or psychological blow. Narratively speaking, The Friend is not exactly a feat of resilience. It’s a psychological coping mechanism. But outside of kayfabe it’s Windham Rotunda (Wyatt’s real name) changing a negative into a positive. Inside and outside kayfabe, The Friend is the story of a man accepting his demons and making the most out of them.

Of course, I had learned the meaning of resilience before I learned about Bray Wyatt’s existence. But I’ve never seen it put that creatively in a story. For the character Bray Wyatt who lived a rough existence on the edge of society, The Fiend is the best thing that could’ve happened. His inner, unbreakable self is assuming control of his reality. He’s finally tapped into a power he’s been trying to find for years. 

Life WILL deal you some blows, whether it uses Randy Orton as a vessel or not. It’s up to you to decide what to do with them. They can become either fuel or demons. 

In Wyatt’s case, they became both and it was great.

*

So, what is the main takeaway from all this? Why did you just read two thousand words about how pro wrestlers helped shape my identity as a somewhat well-adjusted adult?

Glad you asked.

These three case studies have one thing in common: none of them meant to be didactic. The values that transpired from them are the fortunate result of a simple, but well-told narrative. In its very earnest, straightforward way, pro wrestling tried to make a generation of young men experience something week after week. I believe this is why we all remember it so fondly. They were characters with an emotional maturity low enough for everyone to understand, but who made clear, empowering choices.

American thinker Mark Manson was saying in his latest book Everything is F*cked : A Book About Hope that reason and knowledge have never and will never shape a set of values. Never in the way experience will. I believe that’s why we identified with the giant, colorful, cartoonish men who were having simple enough adventures for us to appreciate.

Razor Ramon was the cool kid in the schoolyard because he didn’t need you to think he was cool. He needed to think YOU were cool in regard to his set of principles. Triple H was your friend in college who had great ambition and his life together enough to make something of himself when you would’ve thought it was impossible. Bray Wyatt is your weird friend who overcame a disgusting personal tragedy and emerged on the other side as an even weirder and more interesting person.

They each were part of our experience of growing up because television was a part of our experience and shaped our way to understand the world. There’s a reason why public theater has been around for two thousand years. It’s because we’re a part of it. It' is designed for the crowd to be a part of the story and for us to experience physically.

We loved these characters because they clearly expressed simple, basic things we were striving for or should’ve been striving for. Or should be striving for still.