Wrestlers’ Court: Bad times don’t last, but bad guys do

As a lifelong pro wrestling fan, I have a confession to make.

I cheer for the heels.

I’ve always found heels more interesting than babyfaces. More relatable.

In wrestling and much of popular culture bad guys seem to have more fun.

They also often seem much, much smarter than good guys. It takes a lot of work to be a criminal mastermind while heroes coast on bland blind faith that they serve a greater good. In wrestling an alpha villain can string a duped hero along for months before stabbing him in the back, as as Adam Cole did with MJF before the latter’s hiatus and re-emergence as the baddie we all know and hate.

I’ve never understood the pro wrestling trope that equates good with stupid: how many times does a heel turn face, only to be cost matches due to the same tight-pulling, rope-grabbing, eye-gouging, low-blowing, outside interference shenanigans they gleefully employed?

The phenomenon is particularly strange when a heel character captures the audience’s imagination and turns babyface. Smart promoters recognize the opportunity to boost sales and the danger of booking a popular heel — once the crowds start cheering these heels undermine their babyface opponents. So we get face turns like Roddy Piper leading up to WrestleMania III, Jake ‘The Snake’ Roberts early in his WWF run, or later turns with talent as varied as The Undertaker, ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin, The Rock and John Cena. Roman Reigns spent years on top of WWE as their ultimate heel champion. He just returned from a post-WrestleMania hiatus as a babyface. It can be difficult to reconcile successful heel characters with the expected dumb babyface behaviors promoters assume the audience wants. So we have The Undertaker preventing Jake Roberts from attacking Randy Savage or Steve Austin saving Stephanie McMahon from an abduction — even when those actions are at odds with the behaviors that made them popular in the first place. Austin was a uniquely sociopathic heel in his day, running in to save the good guys (or his much loathed boss’ daughter) just rang hollow. I’m surprised his face turn didn’t kill his momentum entirely.

Eddie Guerrero was an exception to this rule; his character was committed to breaking the rules no matter what. MJF has done the same throughout his AEW run. Both wrestlers incorporated breaking the fourth wall into their shticks, cheating so flagrantly that the audience falls into the joke. Basically, they’re wrestling’s version of the Marvel Comics character Deadpool.

Wrestlers like Ric Flair, The Miz or MJF (or even Triple H and Shawn Michaels) who spent the heel portions of their careers running in packs and having others do their dirty work should be the last to walk into an ambush or lose a match following a run-in. And yet it happens all the time, with the mostly career heel looking off into the audience wondering what happened. No wonder those face runs are usually short. If I’m The Miz (or let’s face it, I am more likely MJF) I’d much rather keep my precious IQ points than get suckered into a loss using my own tactics.

An awful lot of what passes for evil in pro wrestling is rooted in perceived differences between the heel and the audience.

A basic version is the wrestler who exploits gaps in socioeconomic status or athletic prowess. The easiest way to get heat is to just tell everyone that you’re better than they are: Wealthier; better-bred; bigger; smarter; more famous; handsomer; more athletic or just plain extra. Some occupations are coded as inherently evil — often those that involve a measure of authority. Executives and bosses most generally are at the top of the list, although drill sergeants, accountants, lawyers, doctors, professors and repo men are also prime examples. Clowns, too … but they’re just scary.

Pro wrestling’s idea of class warfare is odd. Babyfaces seem to occupy the middle class, though like Dusty Rhodes or ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin, they may start on lower rungs and strive for better. Wealthy, privileged wrestling characters like Ric Flair, Ted DiBiase, JBL or Alberto Del Rio are universal heels. Logan Paul, walking to the ring with a million-dollar Pokemon card of dubious provenance around his neck, is probably the best example today. In AEW, MJF plays up his upper-middle class background and calls fans out as “poors.” Vince McMahon once sought to turn WCW owner Ted Turner heel by calling him “Billionaire Ted.” When McMahon himself became an onscreen heel (and made his own billions), he put his wealth at the center of his gimmick. He did the same for son Shane (whose theme music was “Here Comes the Money”) and daughter Stephanie, who was labelled the “Billion Dollar Princess.”

At the same time, wrestlers from the lowest socio-economic backgrounds are often portrayed as being from the wrong side of the tracks, morally and intellectually deficient and often just plain filthy. The Moondogs took their name from American musician Louis T. Hardin, who used the nickname from the 1940s. Moondog lived in New York City and cut an eccentric figure. He was a polymath with a particular interest in music, who earned money in part by busking, standing on Sixth Avenue between 52nd and 55th Streets, selling records, composing, and performing poetry. He sometimes appeared in a cloak and Viking-style helmet during the 1960s and was hence recognized as “The Viking of Sixth Avenue” by passersby and residents who were not aware of his musical career. The wrestling Moondogs played up the eccentricity and under-housed appearance of the musician; appearing unkempt in frayed cut-off jeans and wild hair and beards and chewing on bones.

During the Attitude Era the Godwinns tag team went from heel pig farmers to jovial hillbillies (complete with Hillbilly Jim as manager) to overall-wearing, unwashed, violent extras from the movie Deliverance. Singles competitor “Dr. D” David Schultz was one of the Rock and Wrestling Connection’s first antagonists. He was introduced to wrestling’s new national audience in part through a vignette that captured his “life at home.” He was portrayed as a shack dwelling, gun-toting, verbally abusive redneck (although Steve Austin would incorporate much of this into his later babyface character, inside and outside the ring). As Bad News Brown Allen Coage did his own version of this gimmick, swapping Schultz’s Southern Man for his own, legitimate Harlem background. Coage was an Olympic Bronze medallist in Judo, but this fact rarely made TV. Instead, Brown’s character was steeped in anger and resentment over his disadvantaged upbringing, to the point that he alienated faces and heels alike. A few boroughs over, Steve Lombardi played a similar role as the Brooklyn Brawler for years, with way fewer victories.

There are other sources of cheap but effective villainy. Consider the army of foreigners, often poor-taste pastiches of whatever countries may be at war with the USA. Wrestling harbored its share of fugitive Nazis and Imperial Japanese and Soviets well past those regimes’ demise. Wrestling still plays on stereotypes including British aristocrats, French snobs and legitimate Italian businessmen. I think most foreign heels suffer from lazy booking and ignorant characterizations. Bulgarian Rusev (now Miro in AEW, if you can find him), Croatian Nikolai Volkoff and Ivan Koloff, from the Ottawa Valley, all played Russians. The Iron Sheik was legitimately Iranian, but he and Volkoff fled danger in their respective homelands to seek better lives in the US. Gunther just defended his World championship in Berlin, Germany, against Randy Orton. In a promo leading up to their match, Orton repeatedly referred to Gunther as German. Gunther didn’t bother correcting him, even though he is from Austria. Close enough for the marks at home, I guess.

Overtly racist stereotypes may be less prevalent, but they are well within living memory. Before Bill Watts created the Junkyard Dog, Sylvester Ritter played a heel named “Big Daddy” in Stampede Wrestling. His main heel attribute was his fondness for white female audience members. Variations on this gimmick were likely more common when pro wrestling was regional: popular stars based in the Southern US could play invading heels when they travelled up North. New Yorkers or Californians could garner heat throughout the Mid-West. Mexican or Canadian talent needed only cross the border to find hostile crowds, and vice versa.

I wouldn’t venture a hierarchy of offensive heel gimmicks but note that plenty of characters portrayed by people of color were reduced to exotic, Orientalist or ‘savage’ caricatures. These characters were often portrayed as sub-verbal, requiring ‘handlers’ and defined by Victorian ideas of racial identity.

Similar stereotypes fueled a series of gay-coded wrestlers (whether or not the wrestler himself was openly gay). Homophobia has been an ingrained part of pro wrestling heeldom since its earliest days on TV. One can trace a line from Gorgeous George to Chris Colt to Pat Patterson (who was ‘out’ privately but never overtly as part of his gimmick), the Adrians (Street more successfully, Adonis less so), to ‘The Genius’ Lanny Poffo, Goldust and the tag team of Billy and Chuck. I would have liked to say that wrestling seems to be moving away from this trope; there are several openly gay wrestlers in WWE and AEW. Their sexual identities are acknowledged but don’t inform their status as babyfaces or heels. But then I think about recent NXT acts like the Velveteen Dream, Maximum Male Models (who just turned up on AEW’s Ring of Honor show working the same suggestive gimmick) or current SmackDown tag team Pretty Deadly, which seems lifted from a camp fever dream by way of the British TV series Queer as Folk. I think there is still a measure of discomfort that informs the treatment of transgender wrestlers like TNA’s Gisele Shaw or AEW’s Nyla Rose — or wrestlers who find different places for their identities like Sonny Kiss, who identifies as gender-fluid. Considering how far the LGBTQ2S+ community has come in my own lifetime, I hope things will get better.

I think there’s a key difference between ‘evil’ wrestlers and those who are agents of chaos. In the latter group I include ‘madmen’ like the Original Sheik, Abdullah the Butcher, the late Wild Samoans, George Steele, Mad Dog Vachon, Pampero Firpo, Tiger Jeet Singh, King Curtis Iaukea and Kamala (not the presidential candidate). These wrestlers often get heat partly because of their supposed exoticism (again, difference as a proxy for evil) and partly for their refusal (or perhaps inability) to adhere to wrestling’s rules. These heels didn’t brawl. They assaulted their opponents, using weapons like flash paper or silverware. These acts are more difficult to get over today given the death of kayfabe and the rise of social media. Many old-school wildmen camouflaged their limited promo skills (Abdullah the Butcher, for example, had a disconcertingly high and reedy voice for a giant) by playing mute and leaving their bloviating managers to do their talking for them. They got the crowd’s attention for their shocking displays of violence directed at local fan favorites but were often shown to be in someone’s (or some thing’s) thrall. Like Frankenstein’s monster they were plenty destructive, but without agency or motive not as evil as others.

The ‘mad man’ trope evolved into the ‘Intelligent Monster’. Killer Kowalski is a likely precursor. He was a vile heel who cheated his way through matches despite his imposing size, and a scary voice on the microphone. Kowalski turned an in-ring accident in which he sheared off another wrestler’s cauliflowered ear into a legacy of hyper-violence. When he was caught visiting his opponent in hospital he collaborated with the local press to kayfabe a potentially damaging event into his laughing at the damage he’d caused. Kowalski was a mainstay in the old Montreal territory. Family legend has it that my grandfather once took my great aunt (a quiet, polite, person) to the matches. Kowalski was so good at his job that by the end of the match she was standing on her chair, screaming for the babyface to kill Kowalski.

The best modern version is Bruiser Brody, who spawned a legion of imitators from Nord the Barbarian/the Berzerker to Cactus Jack. Sid Vicious/Justice played to the type as well, as a big, aggressive heel with a penchant for overkill in his matches (you can keep your snakes and body bags, for my money there’s no better post-match theatrics than Sid destroying an enhancement talent — especially when Sid would power bomb his opponent to the point that he would be transferred to a stretcher for removal, only for Sid to resume his attack outside the ring and dump him to the ground. Good times).

The Undertaker acknowledges Brody as an influence, and Taker beget Kane and a host of other deranged but lucid big men. While Bray Wyatt and the rest of his Family members (Luke Harper, Erick Rowan and Braun Strowman) borrowed liberally from other acts including Kevin Sullivan’s Satanic Panic Florida persona and Dan Spivey’s Waylon Mercy, Bruiser Brody’s wild physical presence combined with insightful promos shouldn’t be ignored. Veering away from the physical type current stars like Dexter Lumis and Joe Gacy fit loosely into this category before they joined the Wyattverse. Any of these men could deliver blistering, eloquent, unhinged promos then kick into a brutal gear in ring. I love this kind of heel even though, like Brody they seem best suited for shorter runs than current contracts allow — I suggest because they don’t fit in easily to wrestling’s mock-sporting conventions. Sid and Bray and Foley all won world championships, but in their madness titles were peripheral to the havoc they could wreak. Unlike the mindless brutes above, these wrestlers have the agency to play by the rules of pro wrestling. They just choose not to.

I appreciate doing the right thing and would like to think that in most cases I do just that. I’m teaching my children to be honorable, upstanding, productive citizens because that’s what one does as a parent, and because I think in most cases virtue trumps vice.

But really, thank goodness for pro wrestling evil.

TOP PHOTO: Vince McMahon interviews Bruiser Brody and The Grand Wizard in the WWWF. Photo by John Arezzi

RELATED LINK

• Previous Wrestlers’ Court columns by Jonathan Schwartz