There’s a notorious moment in wrestling history called the “Finger Poke of Doom.” It’s the culmination of months’ worth of feud between two warring factions of the WCW, led by Kevin Nash and Hulk Hogan respectively. At the climax of the conflict, Nash and Hogan finally face each other, glowering, in the ring. There’s a long, tense moment.
And then Hogan reaches out and pokes Nash in the chest with one finger, lightly, and Nash flops theatrically to the ground and allows Hogan to pin him.
It turns out they were working together all along! It wasn’t a real competition at all! They all laugh together, but you can tell that the crowd is mostly horrified: more than angry, they’re deeply, personally affronted. It’s not just a heel move, of course; it’s a meta-heel move, it makes a mockery of the entire spectacle, it strips away the facade of narrative to say All that dramatic effort on our part is noblesse oblige, you know. We don’t need to work at this, and we’ll prove it. You don’t get the sweat of our effort today. You don’t get the blood of our pain, you don’t get the tears of our emotion. It violates the deepest promise of wrestling between the wrestlers and the audience: a promise to mutually care about the story, and to display that caring as clearly and loudly as possible.
The very first New Japan show I attend, high in the mountains, ends with a victory for Hiroshi Tanahashi, the rockstar ace of New Japan. He gives a speech to rapturous applause, and then he gets out of the ring and starts to go around to greet the fans that are pressing up against the barricade. He keeps taking small towels from people in the audience, wiping his face and handing them back, and for a while I’m confused by this, until suddenly I realize that that’s what the fans are there for; they’re handing him towels in the hopes that they will receive some of his sweat. Proof that they were there, breathing the same air. That he was real, and he really touched them. Maybe even more importantly, that they helped him after his win in some way, that they were there for him. And so he keeps patiently wiping the sweat away, over and over.
One of Tanahashi’s mottoes is the charmingly fractured English Burn my all energy! And that’s in part what his sweat and the sweat of other wrestlers means, that they have burned their all energy for us. There’s the proof, on their brow for all to see.
I first saw wrestling as a timid child and found it terrifying: large shouty men covered in blood, so much blood! Everything seemed to be angry eyes glaring from scarlet masks beneath hair stiff and spiky with gore, and I changed the channel and refused to watch it again or even learn about it, and thus managed to get to my mid-twenties believing that what happened in a wrestling ring was legit violent combat. One night shortly after our wedding, flipping through channels, Dan and I come across a tableau with a man in black, face painted white, waving a baseball bat at a man in a bandanna.
“Oh my God,” says Dan. “Sting confronting Randy Savage? We have to watch this.”
I watch, blinking and mystified, and have to admit that the scene is a compelling one: the man in black handing the other man his bat and turning his back, making himself vulnerable in a silent dare or challenge.
Still–I explain to Dan that watching people hurt each other is not my idea of a good time: it’s why I don’t watch boxing or MMA, for example. He gives me a narrow look, as if I might be teasing him. When it becomes clear that I’m entirely serious, he very kindly does not laugh at me, but instead explains certain facts about professional wrestling (a key one being “actually assaulting your co-workers with a baseball bat would generally land you in jail,” which I have to admit is a persuasive point).
“Oh,” I say. And then: “Oh,” as I process the implications of this information. I get it, it’s theater, it’s melodrama, it’s all the macho trappings of sport with a hidden heart of pure narrative emotion. It’s enchanting. And most importantly:
“Thank goodness!” I say with immense relief. “I’m so glad to know all that blood is fake. They’re not really bleeding, of course they’re not, how silly of me to think so! I get it now.”
There is an awkward pause. Then Dan gently explains to me the most portable, inexpensive, and replenishable source of blood-like liquid, and the means to access it.
“Oh, fuck that,” I exclaim in horror, and I refuse to watch wrestling again for a decade.
Sam Roberts and Katie Linendoll are wrapping up an interview with NXT champion Kevin Owens in 2015. “One last question,” Linendoll says, clearly planning to end on a flippant note. “Do you ever cry in the shower?”
“I don’t cry in the shower,” Kevin says. “I do cry in the car a lot, though,” he adds thoughtfully. As Linendoll stares, he explains that that since his children were born, he cries very easily at things like news stories about soldiers coming home to their kids, or emotional animal videos. He specifically mentions a video where a tornado victim is mourning the loss of her dog on live TV when the dog emerges unhurt from the rubble:
(Side note: let’s be real, I think we all know stories about brave dogs probably made Kevin cry even before he had kids, right?)
“I didn’t think I’d get a legit answer,” says Linendoll, clearly flabbergasted.
He shrugs. “If there’s one thing about me that I think is an advantage, it’s that I’m very genuine, as much as I can,” he says.
Watching this in 2015, I am charmed into incoherence at Kevin’s matter-of-fact undermining of the Stoic Badass trope in wrestling. Because of course most wrestlers, no matter how tough as nails and devoid of emotion they may seem, have quick access to a wellspring of tears—of joy, of pain, of frustration. Wrestlers wear their hearts just a tiny bit covered by their sleeves, so that the impassive veneer can crack and give us a glimpse of the vulnerable emotions within—and it cracks over and over on cue, to our endless delight.
Another New Japan show, in the sleepy rice-field-filled gap between the big cities of Tokyo and Nagoya that the bullet train usually whips through without a pause. I’m sitting up against the barricade at the wrestler’s exit, behind four Japanese women in their thirties who have come here together and are unabashedly admiring the physiques of the wrestlers. One of them is a particular fan of Ricochet’s, and when he’s done putting on a high-flying showcase the others let her take the seat next to the barricade to be as close as possible when he passes by. She holds out a shaking hand as he walks past, dripping with sweat, and he reaches out and slaps his against hers. As he walks away, she stares down at the knuckles of her hand and then touches the tip of her tongue to the moisture there. Her friends laugh affectionately. She grins at them, a little embarrassed but unashamed.
On the Kevin Steen Show in 2013, Kevin is interviewing Nigel McGuinness, and they get talking about how weird wrestling is “from the outside.” Kevin tells a story of one of his wife’s friends, who had only a vague knowledge of professional wrestling and looked up Kevin on Youtube only to find video after video of him covered in blood–especially one where it was edited to make everything black and white except the blood, for maximum impact.
“I saw your husband got really hurt!” she said to Karina the next time they met. “I hope he’s okay!”
Karina responded with a rather blithe “Oh, no no” (Kevin’s voice when he mimics her perfectly captures the weird tension of the moment: the casual “Yeah, my husband gets covered in blood at work on the regular, it’s just part of the job.”) Kevin explains ruefully that after Karina explained, “now she thinks I’m really weird, and that my wife is also weird by proxy,” because she’s not freaked out by it anymore. On other shows, Kevin sometimes mentioned that he prefers not to tell his children’s teachers what he does for a living: “Oh, I travel a lot for my work” was his way of explaining his job when he was on the indies, allowing people to fill in whatever they thought made sense. When you take a step sideways and look at the world of pro wrestling as an outsider, it can be… hard to explain.
(I had a good friend who didn’t know anything about wrestling but kindly listened to me go on about it in emails, enjoying my enthusiasm and asking questions about my favorites. Eight months into our lengthy exchange, she wrote me “Uh, wait, you mean the outcomes of these matches are pre-determined? It’s not an actual competition?” Going back over my emails mentally—where I talked at length about how well Sami suffers and how I enjoyed every chance to watch him and Kevin fight each other—I wonder how much she marveled at how bloodthirsty her mild-mannered academic friend was under the meek veneer.)
January 5, 2018, and I’m in the front row at New Year’s Dash in Tokyo, the smaller show after New Japan’s Wrestle Kingdom. Traditionally this is a show where new plots for the next year are set in motion, and most of 2017 was spent building tension between Bullet Club members Kenny Omega and Cody Rhodes, as well as Kenny and his old tag partner Kota Ibushi teasing a possible reconciliation. I’m excited to think that these stories might be kick-started in 2018, but I hardly dare hope.
There’s a tag match between members of the Bullet Club (including Cody but not Kenny) and a group of loosely-affiliated wrestlers, including Kota Ibushi. I love Ibushi, but with the awed, distant love you would give a faerie prince–there’s something untouchably remote about him, beyond mundane human emotions. I’m not certain what he feels about anything at all: if he misses Kenny, if he worries about the future, if he yearns for any kind of connection.
After the match, as Ibushi slides out of the ring, Cody suddenly decides to attack him from behind. This happens right in front of me, and I discover that apparently one of my emotional hot-buttons is someone unfairly attacking Kota Ibushi. It’s like watching someone pull the wings off a butterfly–a vicious, amoral butterfly that can kick your head off, but still. Suddenly ablaze with anger, I scream “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!” at the top of my lungs at Cody, who repays me by hurling Ibushi against the barricade and nearly dumping him into my lap. I watch, startled and seething, as Cody yanks Ibushi into the ring and grabs a chair, preparing to clobber him with it as his Bullet Club members hold Ibushi down. There’s an awful pause: surely someone will run out and save Ibushi, right? Everyone looks to the side of the arena where the faces enter from, waiting for Tanahashi or Taguchi to come running back and rescue him.
When I hear screams start breaking out in the audience and realize they’re coming from the heel locker room side, I can barely believe it. But indeed, Kenny Omega comes flying into the ring to grab the chair from Cody. The audience goes utterly mad, shrieking with amazed delight. Kenny takes two steps toward Ibushi and the sound spikes upward to deafening levels, dying back down as he turns away again and confronts Cody.
As the Bullet Club begins to implode, Kota Ibushi rolls painfully to the outside of the ring right in front of us. He’s just a few feet away. I don’t even dare look at him until Dan says in a hushed voice, “Oh. Kota is crying.”
My head snaps to look at him and indeed, he’s staring down at his feet, wiping his eyes. I realize that the cameras must be focused on Kenny and Cody, that no one is seeing this but us. Without thinking, I whisper to Dan, “Quick, take a picture.”
The words are barely out of my mouth before a wave of guilt obliterates me at this invasion of the man’s privacy. God, I’m a ghoul, I’m a vulture, to gape at someone at such an intimate moment of emotion, as if they were some kind of spectacle. I freeze, immobilized with shame and remorse, and it’s only when he walks past me that I realize how completely and totally I was immersed in the moment, to the point of truly believing with all my heart that we were not meant to witness something that was planned out in advance.
“Did you… did you get the picture?” I mutter to Dan, still feeling somehow guilty about it.
“No,” he says sheepishly.
Ah well. I was there, and I saw them, those tears on his face, and I will never think of Kota Ibushi as impassive or aloof again.
Wrestlers love the dramatic impact of blood–made even more dramatic by its very scarcity in WWE, where almost all the blood is gained “hardway,” through legitimate impacts. Watching Sami Zayn wrestle in NXT, I notice he’s running his tongue around his mouth oddly. “What’s he doing? Is he okay?” I ask Dan.
“He probably can taste blood in his mouth and is trying to get it to show,” Dan says as Sami touches the corner of his mouth and checks his fingers.
“Wrestlers,” I say with vast annoyed affection.
On the main roster, after fighting Braun Strowman, Sami sits on the floor recovering from the match. “Am I bleeding?” he announces as if vaguely surprised, smearing as much blood on his fingers as he can so the camera can get a good look at it.
At the top of a ladder, Seth Rollins snatches the IC title practically out of Finn Balor’s hands and as it falls, the rivets catch Finn just above the eye, sending blood trickling down his face. I don’t know about you, but I for one would respond to that with “Auuugh I’m bleeding I gotta make it stop auughhh now I’m falling off the ladder AND bleeding noooo.” But Finn, crumpled artistically at the base of the ladder, totally resists the impulse to wipe his own blood away and instead allows it to vividly frame one tragic, bright blue eye.
Xavier Woods realizes that the inside of his mouth is cut, and his response is to make sure to find a way to drool blood across his arm as strikingly as possible:
The utterly calculating use of blood as a dramatic accent always makes my heart catch–both at the instinctive level of oh no my favorite is bleeding and at the intellectual level of jeez, that is some badass self-composure. Reading Mick Foley’s autobiography, I come across his description of wrestling masked in Nigeria and managing to get badly sliced open under the mask. He’s horrified, especially because “to make things worse, my black mask had hid all the precious juice, so no one even knew I was busted wide open.” The tragic waste! What good is suffering if you can’t make it part of the performance? That’s the true badassery of wrestlers: not that they’re stoic about suffering, but that they’re unflinching in their determination to turn that suffering into spectacle.
It’s a small New Japan show, part of the Best of Super Juniors tournament, where the smaller wrestlers battle for a trophy. Our seats are in the fifth row, but by some fluke the seats in the four rows in front of us happen to be empty, creating a sort of corridor of empty seats. What luck!
Or not so much. Because, as it turns out, that serendipitous blank space is irresistibly tempting to wrestlers and their love of crashing violently into things.
The first time it happens is during the early tag matches, when the gigantic Bad Luck Fale is manhandling David Finley. He gestures angrily at our area of the seats and it becomes clear that he’s going to hurl Finley five rows into the audience. We scramble to get out of the way as he winds up, and Finley comes flying across the seats with a tremendous clatter, coming to rest sprawled out dramatically at our feet. There’s laughter and supportive noises, and eventually we manage to help Finley to his feet and back to the fray.
The second time it’s Kanemaru and Desperado, who are members of the same heel faction fighting each other for the trophy. However, this time there’s almost no warning: Kanemaru simply grabs Desperado and winds up to whip him into the empty seats directly in front of me. What, they’re not going to do this exact spot in this exact place twice in the same night, are they? I think in disbelief, and then Oh yeah, they probably didn’t see Fale and Finley do it earlier.
Then I think: You know, this time could probably have been better spent dodging.
I jump to my feet, but it’s too late; Kanemaru is just about to let go of Desperado and send him sailing at me. A mass of chairs is blocking my escape route. As I scuttle desperately sideways, my eyes meet Kanemaru’s, and I swear I see the briefest flash of alarm in them: Oh no, the foreign lady is never getting out of the way in time.
Desperado, mask tassels flying, sails over the first two rows of chairs, smashes into the next two, and careens past me.
I feel his boot just barely clip my wrist as he goes by.
I manage to stay on my feet, wobbling, but then one of the chairs he collides with shoves up against a chair I’m standing next to, which nudges me, and I finally tip over with comedic slowness: ahhhhhhhhhh. Unharmed, rather shocked, I am helped to my feet by laughing fans. Desperado crawls back to the ring. The match goes on.
At the end of the show, another fan who failed to get out of the way holds up his arm to show off a bloody scrape on his forearm, grinning. Here it is: proof that I collided with a wrestler and lived to tell the tale. Everyone gathers around to stare at it, admiring and slightly jealous of this badge of honor.
Blood, sweat and tears: in competitive sports they get wiped away quickly, because they’re truly a disadvantage. Sweat makes your grip slippery; blood obscures the vision; tears betray weakness. But in wrestling they’re the greatest of advantages, a badge to be displayed. At the end of a New Japan show it’s traditional for the winner of the main event to give a speech to the audience; many sports figures would probably wait until they’d gotten their breath back to start, but usually the wrestler will begin while still panting for breath, dripping with sweat: not theatrically overplaying it, but certainly not bothering to be stoic about how exhausted they are, either. It’s a statement to the crowd: know that whatever else, the energy I burned for you is absolutely real, the pain I put my body through is utterly authentic.
At New Japan’s New Beginning in Sapporo, Kota runs out to save Kenny in turn. This time, though, he doesn’t ignore Kenny as Kenny ignored him. He turns to Kenny and holds out his hand, hoping that maybe, just maybe they can truly have their own new beginning. Kenny hesitates for an agonizingly long time, and Kota’s hand begins to drop in despair. Making the gif of that moment later, I catch a sudden glint in the frame, a flash of light. Looking more closely, I realize that in that moment of despair, one single perfect tear has fallen from Kota Ibushi’s eye.
To hide or obscure such evidence of emotion would be to miss the whole point of wrestling: it’s there to be seen, it’s a huge part of the spectacle. Even if–maybe especially if–it’s just one tear.
There’s a promo from PWG, a pinnacle of goofiness, where Colt Cabana tries to teach El Generico how to cut a promo in English. He feeds the “oblivious” Generico increasingly ridiculous lines (“I piss in your ears! I eat your children like a buffet!”), and as Generico struggles to repeat them straight-faced and not reveal that he understands the awful things he’s saying, he ends up drooling a little bit.
Colt completely loses his composure. “That’s spit!” he announces gleefully, and then he asks through uncontrollable giggles, “Is that real?”
I love this so much because–what a weird question, Colt, it’s not fake spit, you know? But obviously that’s not what he’s asking. What he wants to know in that moment is what we always want to know about wrestlers’ blood and sweat and tears: is the emotion behind it real? Is that shoot-spit, showing that Generico is truly flustered? Is that blood a sign of legit suffering? Are those tears a proof of real emotion? In a world of fakery, where most of us accept without complaint thigh-slaps and worked props and all the many tricks used to create the illusion of combat, part of us still wants the tears and the sweat and the blood (especially the blood; there’s nothing quite like the furious contempt for fake blood) to be real. Because we want the exertion and the emotion and the anguish to be real, to be tangible, to be something we could reach out and touch with our own hands as our beloved heroes and villains pass by.
Another show in Tokyo, but this one’s a WWE show, one of the two or three Japan sees in a year. Heath Slater and Rhyno, victorious, are taking a victory lap, high-fiving fans. Heath’s red hair is soaked, rivulets of sweat pouring down his back. As he rounds the corner and turns away, I see a fan reach over the barricade after him, stretching as far as she can on her tiptoes, towel clutched in her hand.
She manages to brush the towel across his back, just a fleeting touch, and everyone cheers as she comes away triumphant.
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