“Go on without me,” I say faintly. It’s 2015, and outside the car windows, the parking lot shimmers with late-summer Florida heat. “Just…go on without me.” “I did not win a charity auction and get us a tour of the Performance Center just to leave you to die of heatstroke in the car,” Dan says. He has a point, I have to admit. Still… “What if I trip over something? What if I say…
Month: September 2017
Who are we, as wrestling fans, and what have we lost? It’s March 28, 1962, in Los Angeles, California. It’s a Wednesday night at the Grand Olympic Auditorium, just south of Downtown, the famous arena about which Charles Bukowski once wrote, “the gallery boys went ape and the fighters fought like fighters and the place was blue with cigar smoke, and how we screamed, baby baby, and threw money and drank our whiskey.” That night…
The great Bobby “The Brain” Heenan has died, and as such I’m reflecting deeply on his life and exceptional professional wrestling career far earlier than I had ever wanted. As I type, I’m watching an astonishing amount of universally glowing tributes pour in across social media in Heenan’s honor—each one equally sincere and well-deserved—from a range of fans, friends, and former colleagues, past and present. In one sense, I feel sanguine in knowing The Brain’s…
The ancient Greeks used a specific word–kairos– to mean roughly “the ability to choose the perfect moment to act.” They used it, for example, to describe the gift of knowing exactly when to loose an arrow in order to hit the target perfectly. Wrestling is a constant struggle to achieve kairos, because any wrestling promotion is basically an intricate ecosystem of interconnected parts: feuds and wrestlers and venues and dates. It’s like finding the right moment to…