Wrestliana Read online

  If C&WW is unbranded sport, WWE is brand as sport.§ Much of the entertainment that hardcore fans derive from the week-to-week in-ring shenanigans of the wrestlers is, in fact, a blow-by-blow microanalysis of the franchise’s (as they see it) decline, corruption, or resurrection. Bloggers presume deep corporate motives behind the way this or that mano a mano encounter has been scripted.¶

  In The Wrestling, about the nearest equivalent kind of wrestling in the UK, Simon Garfield summarizes it once and for all – it’s not faked, it is fixed.

  Or, to put it another way, ‘The blood was real, but its production was often pre-planned’.||

  I needed to see some of this stuff for myself.

  Luckily for me, the biggest event of the year, WWE Smackdown, was taking place at the 02 Arena a couple of weeks after my visit to Bootle.

  I hadn’t been inside the 02 Arena since examining giant-sized reproduction pubic lice in the Body Zone, back when it was the Millennium Dome. Bootle Station Village Hall could fit in the foyer space between Five Guys and TGI Fridays. Smackdown was a sell-out, but still felt underwhelming – in an interesting way.

  Among the things I expected, before I got there, was intro music that sounds a bit like Metallica but isn’t and the high-calorie air of European and American sports venues and the arena to glow like a diamond encrusted tiara with raised phones and to feel isolated, grumpy, snobby, metropolitan, point-missing, swizzed, uninformed, bald. I wasn’t disappointed. WWE was a lot more predicable than C&WW.

  John Cena would be challenged; John Cena would – ultimately – triumph.

  Cena is WWE’s biggest current property, if you ignore frequent returns to combat by bona fide Hollywood film star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Cena represents, as one commentator said, ‘not only America, but everything that is good’. Cena is particularly popular among pre-teen boys, who wear T-shirts in his eye-pranging electric blue and banana yellow colours and chant his name. In appearance, he is a strange mix of US marine, skater-boy, the class of gay man known as a Muscle Mary, and shucks just your average 250lb guy.

  In the US, he is a straightforward hero. In the US, he does not – as happened when I saw him at the O2 – get booed as he walks on.

  To my surprise, there were a lot of mixed reactions, all evening long. Bad News Barrett, a cheating Brit to the American audience, is our biggest international star – and his long body and bristle-haired head was received with cheers, until he started doing really sneaky things to turn us against him.

  I had expected to be surrounded by hysterical grapple fans, but there was a lot of checking selfies and getting up to buy more Pepsi Max. Aggression was stirred when someone you were meant to hate made their bombastic entrance down the ramp towards the ring. The audience around me got particularly exercised over Sheamus, a redheaded, tattooed, Celtic-themed chap. ‘Get a sun-tan!’ they screamed. ‘Where’s your caravan?’ And ‘No-one likes the Irish!’**

  The only really electrifying moment came when the boringly named Daniel Bryan made his entrance. He’s smallish, long haired, and looks like a cross between a Status Quo fan circa 1975 and a brown rat. When he appeared, every single person in the audience – including me – jabbed their index finger up towards the lighting rig and chanted ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ I wanted this to go on for a lot longer than it did.

  WWE is a made-for-TV event, which led to lots of drops in tension. Wrestlers who had been snarling at one another a moment before stood around, inches apart, waiting for the director to make a decision. When one bit of business was fluffed, there was a retake. All of the overheated commentary that is so central to the on-screen experience is missing – it felt as if I was watching with the mute button pressed.

  About halfway through, I realized all the bodyslams that didn’t really hurt and arm-smacks that you could see missing by inches were making me yearn for something else. I was starting to yearn for real violence. I wanted to be in the front row for an amateur boxing match. I wanted to be where punches were punches, and a broken nose was a badge of honour for life.

  Then I realized I didn’t really want that at all. Where I wanted to be was away from all the branding, branding, branding, away from the hyped up emotions we Brits can’t quite bring ourselves to feel.

  Where I really wanted to be was back around the mats in Bootle Station Village Hall.

  As we were walking out of the vast stadium, a boy said to his father, ‘That was awesome!’

  ‘What?’ said Dad. ‘Men in pants?’

  * Roger Robson, Cumberland and Westmorland Wrestling, Bookcase, 1999.

  † You can find it at www.cumberland-westmorland-

  wrestling-association.com – the best source on C&WW there is.

  ‡ Simon Garfield, The Wrestling: The Hilarious True Story of Britain’s Last Great Superheroes, Faber, 2007.

  § I am not being naïve; I am aware that this is equally true of Manchester United.

  ¶ And they are scripted – when Bob Mould, former singer of the American band Hüsker Du, went on hiatus from music, his new day job was writing these scripts for a rival franchise, WCW (World Championship Wrestling). He’s happy to talk about it. Probably a lot happier than answering questions about why Hüsker Du broke up and will they ever reform? The scripting doesn’t always cover moment by moment moves, but it will let the wrestlers know in advance who wins, and how.

  || Simon Garfield, The Wrestling: The Hilarious True Story of Britain’s Last Great Superheroes, Faber, 2007, p. 95.

  ** Oh God. Such a stupid thing for any Englishman to think, let alone say. When travelling, I’ve often wished that I was O’Litt – the welcome I’d have received, everywhere in the world, would have been warmer.

  9

  ECKY THUMP

  People laughed.

  When I told them back in London that I was writing a book about wrestling, they found it funny. Part of this was the lack of fit between author and subject matter.

  You?

  Wrestling?

  You?

  The other part was that wrestling itself amuses a lot of people.

  Perhaps it’s because superhero movies have come along, and we expect a proper fight to involve the twisting of bridges, the pulverization of skyscrapers. The sight of two men attempting to grapple one another onto the grass is enough to send some people (particularly women) off into hysterics.

  Leigh thinks it’s funny because – to her – it’s so obviously not about what it’s about. ‘If they want to kiss, why can’t they just kiss?’

  I wanted to take my subject seriously, just as William had. But before I went any further, I needed to address the tricky issue of men looking very silly.

  Picture a muscular man dressed in white long johns. On top of these, he has on a pair of outsize underpants – they are home made, the material is black velvet. He isn’t wearing trainers, instead he wears an ordinary pair of mid-length black socks.

  All in all, your standard-issue Circus Strongman outfit.

  This is what a Cumberland and Westmorland wrestler will wear for one of the big shows. It’s ‘traditional’ costume, but doesn’t go back to William’s time.

  The black velvet underpants (known as the ‘centrepiece’) were a mid-Victorian innovation – at first plain, though later on it became the fashion to embroider them with brightly coloured flowers around the groin area.

  Much more recently, the wrestlers’ names and images of wrestlers, cows and tractors have also appeared down there. The white long johns haven’t changed much, though nowadays they are likely to be bought from the thermals section at Marks & Spencers.

  Figure 12. No one has any problem making eye contact during the line up for the costume competition judging, Grasmere 2015. Except the chap in the middle.

  William would have wrestled in his undergarments. They would have been plain and unremarkable undergarments. And, to us, they would have looked silly – but not as silly as the Victorian mock-traditional costume does.

  Bear in mind,
Cumberland wrestling in the 1810s was sport before mass produced sportswear. This is the knotted handkerchief worn as sun hat, because baseball caps had yet to invade, and because it’s not worth buying a hat you’re only going to wear one week of the year. Not just the holiday week, the sunny week.

  The film director Mel Brooks knew a great deal about men looking silly. He made a film called Robin Hood: Men in Tights. The title is probably the funniest thing about it. But the title is very funny, especially the colon.

  Men in tights, men in pants, men in socks – they’re funny, too. I can’t analyse this, to any depth. Perhaps it is something to do with a man simultaneously struggling to maintain his dignity at that same time he’s completely losing it, because of how ridiculously he’s dressed.

  Consider for a moment the difference between these two versions of a song from The Full Monty. The real, original version is ‘You can leave your hat on’. Sexy, yes? Raunchy. Now reimagine that as, ‘You can keep your socks on’.

  This makes me think of The Muppet Show, and Sam the Eagle’s appalled realization that underneath their clothing the entire population of the world was walking around completely naked.

  Visit any European beach, and look down. Oh! those English legs – so much less purposeful than the German, so much less svelte than the French.

  It may have something to do with the whiteness of the leg in juxtaposition to the blackness of the sock. There is just something wrong about the semi-undressed Englishman.

  (The socks left on when the trousers have been removed are particularly funny, but not as funny as socks put on prior to engagement with trousers.)

  The epitome of all this is John Cleese’s ‘sexy’ strip, anticipating a romp with Jamie Lee Curtis, in A Fish Called Wanda. The Cleese character, beautifully choreographed, dances around the designer pad removing first his tie, then his shirt, then his trousers. But, because this is a comedy, the last to go are his short black socks. It is all the failed raunch of chartered accountants from Macclesfield, the mojo-not-workingness of Sussex solicitors.

  But C&W wrestlers don’t wrestle bare-legged. No, they wear long-johns. If I were stretching things here, I would suggest this – via the circus strongman – was the origin of the Superman costume. A two-tone lyrca outfit, with illustrational pant-area, is somehow far less creepy than a one-colour unitard.

  Among the comments I’ve heard, around the ring, are, ‘Is there a shop where you can buy these outfits?’, ‘Don’t know how the mothers get the grass stains off the white’ and, most frequently, ‘Very fetching’.

  Former wrestler, and competition MC Alf Harrington, must have overheard some of this banter because later in the year, at Grasmere, I was to hear him offer (I wish he hadn’t) this apologia pro sua clobber, ‘I know it’s slightly old-fashioned and out-dated, but it’s part of who we are’.

  Also part of this, and likely to cause amusement, is the more precise technical language of C&WW – most of all, ‘the buttock’. Buttock is one of those English words, like sock, flange, wimple and prone, that reigns forever on a Golden Throne in the Eternal Halls of Silly. After a particularly good example, Alf Harrington may offer, ‘Tidy buttock’ or ‘She got the buttock in there’ – thus drawing attention, once again, to the traditional strips.

  There are two main types of buttock – the cross-buttock and the full buttock.

  In all of wrestling, there is no more magnificent example of masterful and controlled violence than a well executed buttock. The wrestler going down is inverted, his feet often flying higher than his head ever reaches.

  Figure 13. Jack Brown full buttocks a challenger with the ease of a World Champion.

  Sophisticated north-western crowds adore a buttock. This may be the reason that, for thirty-seven years, Bob Horsley, the wrestling correspondent of The Carlisle Journal, chose to write under the pseudonym of ‘Cross-Buttocker’. Researching old wrestling books, I often came across inadvertent snigger-triggers such as, ‘The number of famous buttockers in the present day could be counted on the fingers of one hand’.*

  C&WW is a serious but never a po-faced business. Every C&WW ring creates a halo of mirth. Most competitions begin with the youngest, smallest wrestlers, and their slab-faced seriousness, and the epic nature of their encounters, contrasted with their scale, makes everyone smile. This is especially the case when two physically mismatched opponents step into the arena – in the Under-12s, one sometimes seems twice the height and weight of the other. ‘I think we’ll call that “the Long and the Short of it”, Alf Harrington may say. The crowd laughs, but is also prepared to be delighted, and to laugh again and louder, if Goliath is felled by a well-timed full buttock from David.

  And often, during adult bouts, as well as shouts of encouragement and gasps at risky holds, there is laughter.

  To someone arriving who has never seen Cumberland Wrestling beforehand, two men who have just ‘taken hold’ can look silly.

  Theirs is an awkward embrace, as if both were keeping their genitals and buttocks as far away from the other as possible. Yet, also, it is a dance. Spontaneous choreography occurs when the wrestlers fall into a 1–2–3 1–2–3 waltz rhythm of sideways steps, or rhumba back and forth on camel’s legs. Their chins, each of them, rest upon their opponent’s right shoulder – like they were slow dancing at the school disco. The profile of one is fully visible behind the back of the other’s head. They could not be further from eye contact if they tried. The view each gets is what the back of the other’s head would see.

  Although they are struggling against one another, the two wrestlers can appear very much as if they had mutually agreed to do an impersonation of an exceedingly pissed crab. Sometimes, they spin faster and faster, gallivanting around, and start to look like the triskelion, the three-legged Isle of Man icon. When the skill level is low, they are just like any other pair of blokes, pawing at one another in hopes of gaining an advantage.

  There are other moments, when the wrestling comes (or seems to come) to a total stop. The most hilarious interlude, building and building the longer it goes on, is when the hank has gone in – when, that is, one wrestler has been lifted completely off the ground by the other (often larger) wrestler and, to prevent immediately being thrown, has succeeded in snaking one or both of their feet around their dominating opponent’s calves. This makes the clinger-on exceptionally difficult to throw – like trying to chuck into the laundry basket a pair of trousers the left leg of which one is still wearing.

  Roger Robson has a beautifully tender description of this impasse, and its purpose. The Wilf is Brocklebank; the Harrington is Tim:

  No-one could match Wilf’s strength, but Harrington used to find a haven from the power by angling his body into the big man and nuzzling in at his chest. From that haven in the storm, he could sometimes catch out the bigger man if he made a false move.†

  Has any other sports writer used the verb nuzzle with reference to heavyweights?

  Sometimes it looks as if a mouse has got into the ring and, for want of a chair, the phobic has climbed up on the other man.

  But it’s a very big mouse.

  Finding C&WW wrestlers funny isn’t a recent thing. Here is the report of an article from The Times of 11 August 1925.‡

  To an ignorant southerner wrestling is a peculiarly engaging spectacle… it can be exhaustingly comical… a clumsy imitation of modern dancing, the gentlemen in embroidered tights and pink flush trunks.

  Figure 14. Look, it’s right there – and it’s looking at me with its horrible pink eyes!

  The introduction of the words ‘ignorant southerner’ brings us to something important.

  I could have made this transition earlier, by comparing the comedy legs of John Cleese to the comedy legs of Tim Brooke-Taylor, one of the Goodies.

  The Goodie I want to write about is Bill Oddie, born 7 July 1941 in Rochdale.

  The Goodies, for those who don’t know, was a massively popular TV English comedy show of the 1970s. I was the per
fect age for it. I thought it was the best thing ever, or at least the best thing since The Monkees.

  Like The Monkees, and like The Beatles in Help!, The Goodies lived together rather than with wives and children. They travelled on a bicycle made for three. They didn’t have normal jobs. Instead, they spent a lot of time mucking around. To the 10-year-old me, this seemed ideal. I see them more clearly but less passionately now. Tim Brooke-Taylor looked like a pink-faced civil servant in a farce, always trying to re-establish his dignity, constantly humiliated, frequently stripped of his trousers. Graeme Garden, with muttonchop sideburns, might easily have been standing in front of a blackboard covered in physics equations. Bill Oddie, consisting of 10% brown beard and 90% mischief, was something far less conventional. If he belonged to the human race at all, it was as a time-transported caveman. Oddie was the most childlike, and the most loveable, of the three. He was also the most multitalented – writing and playing their songs, coming up with much of their weirdest material.

  The ‘I heart the 1970s’ shows, that were so popular about a decade ago, were wonderful shortcuts to nostalgia. Our memories, influenced by repeated viewings, work like this, too. For example, here’s an unfree association on sweet things: Wagon Wheels the size of your head, Space Dust, Blackjacks, Sweet Cigarettes. Here’s a riff on kung fu: Bruce Lee, Elvis Presley’s stage moves, David Carradine, glasshopper, hi-yah!, ‘Henry, the mild-mannered janitor?’, Monkey, The Water Margin, chubby beflared pre-teens trying to kick one another’s teeth out. All to the soundtrack of Carl Douglas’s novelty pop song ‘Kung Fu Fighting’.

  Playing off the martial arts craze, and more directly parodying the opening sequence of the TV series Kung Fu, Bill Oddie invented ‘t’ageold Lancastrian§ martial art of Ecky Thump’.