February 22, 1995|By Kevin Cowherd | Kevin Cowherd,Sun Staff Writer
There are certain basic truths about the human existence, and one is this: Unless you count cartoons, pro wrestling is the only place on Earth where you can smash a metal folding chair over a man's head, crush his windpipe with your elbow and drive a knee into his groin, only to watch him jump up as if he had just received a brisk massage.
That is exactly what's taking place on this steamy night at the Baltimore Arena. A roaring, sell-out crowd of 12,000 is watching Hulk Hogan mop the ring with Vader in the feature match of World Championship Wrestling's Super Brawl V, with the whole ugly business being beamed across the nation on pay-per-view.
I am sitting 14 rows from the ring, which is not a bad seat, except that there is an enormous man behind me screaming "Rip his head off, Hulkster!" in my ear.
The man's wife is getting equally worked up at Vader, who wears black tights and a mask and goes 450 pounds, with a face that looks like a cantaloupe left out in the sun too long.
I came here to answer one question: What do wrestling fans see in this stuff? And after three hours of watching Bunkhouse Buck club Hacksaw Jim Duggan with an American flag, the cyberpunk Nasty Boys lose to the Harlem Heat, and Sting and "Macho Man" Randy Savage beating the tar out of the Avalanche and Big Bubba, maybe it's time to ask the fun couple behind me for insight.
The man smiles as I approach and the smile stays in place until I
mention that I'm with the newspaper, at which point he looks at me the way you would at a hair in your soup.
"Ain't got time for no reporters," the man says.
The missus says that pretty well speaks for her, too, so I slink away like a guy who just got turned down at the sophomore dance.
At this point in the match, Vader has Hulk Hogan in a headlock and is trying to extract his corneas without the benefit of anesthesia, which is when it occurs to me that there is much about pro wrestling that hasn't changed:
* The closer you get to the action, the more fake this stuff looks, like bad Kabuki.
* The good guy usually wins, but not always, and it's more interesting when he doesn't. They never left the Lone Ranger whimpering and scratching for his life in the bottom of a well as the credits rolled, but maybe they should have. It works in wrestling.
* A lot of the bad guys have weight problems.
* A lot of the bad guys also look vaguely foreign -- you suit up a fat guy from a Middle Eastern country who knows his way around the ring, he'll be pulling in the big dough ("name" wrestlers make as much as $500,000 a year) in no time.
* The referee is always an incredible dunce who will be distracted the moment anything illegal occurs in the ring. A wrestler could pull a bazooka from his trunks and blow away his opponent, and the referee would no doubt be on the other side of the ring, arguing with the bazooka wielder's manager.
But this isn't telling me why people love this stuff, so it's time to take the scientific approach.
At the Arena on this Sunday night, the crowd is predominantly male and predominantly white and predominantly young, in the 9- to 25-year-old range.
So I pick out a youngish-looking white guy and ask him to speak for everyone in the joint. That's fair, isn't it? The white guy turns out to be Joe Sturgill, 22, a truck driver from Baltimore who's been watching wrestling for 14 years.
It turns out Joe Sturgill used to live five minutes from Hulk Hogan outside Clearwater, Fla. He used to see the Hulkster along the waterfront fooling with his boat, which was the size of a missile cruiser with twin Evinrude engines, to hear tell.
The two men never spoke, although if they had, it wouldn't have been much of a conversation. Joe would have been doing a lot of bowing and chanting "I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy."
"Yeah, Hulk Hogan's my man," Joe is saying now.
So you ask Joe Sturgill what it is about wrestling that fascinates him so, that causes 11,000 other like him to shoehorn into the Arena on a winter evening and scream their lungs out for three hours.
"Man, that's a tough question," Joe says.
Pause.
"I'm not sure I really know."
Another pause.
"Well, it's exciting," he says at last. "These guys are great actors. And great athletes. Sure, it's all fake. But it takes talent to do all that stuff without getting hurt."
Thank you, Joe. Now we're getting somewhere.
Numbers, please
Pro wrestling is not big on numbers, which is fine, since a lot of numbers will put you to sleep faster than a chloroform-soaked handkerchief.
Still, even getting something as simple as attendance figures from wrestling officials proves to be impossible. During a phone conversation with WCW spokeswoman Lynn Brent in Atlanta, the paranoia on her end of the line seems palpable when I ask how many fans attended matches last year.
"I don't have any figures," she says.
"You don't have attendance figures?"
"No, I don't."
"How about pay-per-view figures?"
"You'd have to speak to our pay-per-view director."
"Fine, can I speak to him?"
"I'm sorry. He's out of town."
