Dead Wrestler of the Week

If, like me, you spent much of your childhood glued to WWF broadcasts on television–or (also like me) if you spend much of your adulthood geeking out at well-crafted, incisive articles about the careful organization and marketing of commercial entertainment, then Deadspin’s “Dead Wrestler of the Week” feature is right up your alley.  It’s the oasis on that site from snarky jabs at ESPN, or pictures of boobs behind home plate, sure, but it’s also the sort of journalism that makes you wonder why this author would choose to publish this work anonymously.  The WWF was a once-in-a-lifetime confluence of entertainment hype, extreme athleticism, soap opera, cartoon, and of course, wildly stereotypical caricatures of an ever-more-variegated American population, put on display. 

There’s this piece on Junkyard Dog, for example.  It was hard for me to decide which snippet to pull from it, it’s that good.  Elsewhere in the piece, for example, there’s a bit on JYD’s early incarnation as a character called “Stagger Lee” during which the author cites Mystery Train. Throughout, there are several moments at which JYD allowed his race to be exploited for the entertainment of millions that astonishes me–seriously, some Amos & Andy level stuff.  The ending is incredibly sad, somewhat poignant, certainly sudden.  The part I selected comes in the middle, and describes the WWF’s successful strategy solely from the perspective of racial and ethnic identity.  Read the whole thing, though–this doesn’t do it justice:

In 1984 JYD was hired away by the WWF, which was then making itself into the first national wrestling promotion and was poaching the top stars from around the country to build its stable and its audience. They were also rather blatantly assembling a roster of multi-ethnic and multinational characters that traded on stereotypes to differentiate each wrestler in the broadest strokes possible. JYD was, in no uncertain terms, the Black Guy — just as Tito Santana was the Mexican Guy, Mr. Fuji was the (ambiguously) Asian Guy, the Iron Sheik was the Middle Eastern Guy, Nikolai Volkoff was the Russian Guy, Jimmy Snuka was the Pacific Island Guy, Andre the Giant and “Big” John Studd were the Big Guys (though Andre was demonstrably French), and Wendy Richter and the Fabulous Moolah were the women. Rowdy Roddy Piper and Hulk Hogan were, as their names suggest, originally cast as the Scottish and Irish Guys, respectively, though their celebrity grew (particularly in Hogan’s case) to demolish those parameters.

Filed under: Deadspin  Greil Marcus  Junkyard Dog  Mystery Train  selling culture  sports  WWF