The Ultimate Warrior died yesterday,
which must come as a shock to those who believed he had died – or, at the very
least, should have died – years ago. Born James Hellwig, the Warrior was for
several years one of the most popular professional wrestlers in the world.
A heavily muscled, paint-faced,
tassel-wearing dynamo, he stood out as a cartoon superhero even among the
legions of over-the-top characters that populated the late 80s/early 90s WWF.
And while his ring work as sloppy and predictable and his shouty, rage-filled
promos never made a lick of sense, he had an aura that attracted young
wrestling fans the world over. When his catchy theme music hit and he ran full speed
toward the ring to grab and shake the ropes like a lunatic, we knew that,
despite the size (think Andre the Giant), strength (Andre again), or technical
superiority (just about everybody else) of the opponent, we were in an awesome
display of sheer willpower. But the most remarkable thing about the Warrior was
not that brief-but-memorable time in the spotlight; it was the direction his
life took in the years thereafter.
Owing to its carnival roots,
professional wrestling has long been about working the crowd. While there have
been plenty of actual wrestlers, athletes, and legitimate tough guys (the late
All American, “Dr. Death” Steve Williams embodied all three) in the business,
it remains a scripted production, a performance piece. There are good guys and
bad guys and storylines designed to elicit pathos, sympathy, anger, and
inspiration. The primary difference between the WWE and any other show is the
physicality and the potential for harm, both real and imagined. The agonizing
blows we saw on screen were faked for our entertainment while the actual damage
(drug abuse, alcoholism, legitimate injury) occurred, pre-Internet uprising,
out of the public eye.
The Ultimate Warrior both
exemplified and subverted this reality. On the one hand, the Warrior began as a
picture-perfect example of professional wrestling’s fraudulence. Though an
accomplished bodybuilder, Hellwig’s actual wrestling skills were poor - try
watching his matches at a remove from childhood admiration, and his inability
to do more than warm up the crowd and clothesline the competition becomes
painfully obvious. But give him some facepaint, that entrance music, and an
opponent who is willing to make him look good, and his lack of grappling
ability becomes a non-issue. Suddenly, as the Ultimate Warrior, he is eminently
credible as a charismatic hero in a pseudo-sport where the chief requirements
for heroism are looking like you can beat someone up and not antagonizing the
audience. To put it bluntly, this was a man who looked like he could kick some
ass, and he did, and people cheered him for it.
At the same time, however, the
Ultimate Warrior’s ascendance turned the professional wrestling script on its
head. Even in an era of big egos and rampant substance abuse, Warrior’s
unreliability, unprofessionalism, and steroid use were so blatant that WWF
owner Vince McMahon fired (and re-hired) him on several occasions. In addition
to sparking countless death rumors (Hellwig appeared smaller post-steroids,
leading fans to speculate the character had been given to another performer),
this brought a dose of external reality to an industry that thrived on creating
its own. The Warrior’s departures showed that what happened outside the ring –
pay disputes, McMahon’s ongoing steroid trial, etc. – had the ability to
completely discredit what went on inside it, and no amount of narrative gloss
(i.e. a worked “injury” or a fake burial a la The Undertaker) could reset the
pulled-back curtain.
This pattern of defying expectations
would extend to Hellwig’s post-ring career as well. One of the many reasons for
his rocky relationship with McMahon was that Hellwig sought to profit from the
character he embodied and helped to create while the WWF saw the Ultimate
Warrior as company property. This prompted Hellwig to legally change his name
to Warrior in 1993 and later sue the WWF for rights to the character, sparking
rumors that he had lost his mind and cementing his reputation as an egomaniac.
Yet while Hellwig was demonized for chasing a paycheck, comic book artists Jack
Kirby and Joe Simon are often celebrated as tragic figures who fought –
unsuccessfully – for the ability to profit from iconic characters they helped create.
One man’s martyr is another man’s leech, and visa versa.
As the 90s faded and the new millennium
dawned, Warrior’s reputation as a megalomaniacal has-been continued to grow. He
appeared in WCW to work a brief, disastrous program against old WWF frenemy
Hulk Hogan, for which he collected a hefty sum before retiring. He published a
comic book starring (surprise!) himself. He became a prolific blogger and a
conservative pundit, responding, sometimes abrasively to fan inquiries, and
using YouTube videos to attack nemesis in the industry. In short, the man who
had once been one of wrestling’s biggest faces (good guys) became for many a consummate
Internet heel: caustic, incomprehensible, self-absorbed, and more than a little
petty.
This was the narrative that defined
The Ultimate Warrior for the last years of his life. It was one that was soundly
reinforced by his corporate nemesis: the WWE. McMahon’s company rounded up several
of Hellwig’s former coworkers for a “documentary” that makes Michael Moore’s
agitprop look subtle and balanced. Like many narratives, however, the Warrior
story plays loose with facts to tell a tale, and like many narratives, it is
subject to revision.
For starters, take the notion that Warrior
bought into his own hype. When he wasn’t hurling put-downs, Hellwig made it clear
in his writings and videos that the Ultimate Warrior was a character he played
and wrestling was a proud chapter in his life but definitely not the entirety
of it. This awareness of the limitations of one’s celebrity separated Hellwig
not only from the quintessential has-beens (such as perpetual spotlight-seeker Hulk
Hogan) of any field but from many poor, deluded still-ares (I’m looking at you,
James Franco).
If the Warrior’s egoism was at least
partially a narrative embellishment, so too were other aspects of his supposed
lunacy. To be certain, Hellwig’s writings, like his wrestling promos, sometimes
came across garbled: standard capitalization and punctuation were not part of
his regular moveset. And yes, he made more than his share of inane, ignorant,
or idiotic remarks. Incorporating “Queering doesn’t make the world work” into a
speech for college students, for example, paints him as a second-rate Ted
Nugent. But for a supposed rightwing caricature, Warrior had no problem
deviating from the script, such as when he excoriated Republicans for their
heavy-handed intervention during the Teri Schiavo fiasco. Though abrasive and
politically incorrect to a fault, Warrior was guided more by conservative
philosophy (the Western canon and Greek mythology in particular) than by
irrational hatred.
One salient aspect of Warrior’s creed
that shined past the murk of his ranting delivery was a belief in the power of
the individual to shape his or her own destiny. This belief explains how a
still-fit competitor walked away from a well-paying career to pursue personal
interests rather than acquiesce to its demands. It also explains how a man
years removed from the spotlight and seemingly universally loathed in the
business that made him famous could achieve reconciliation with a company he
quit – and sued – on numerous occasions. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
A few days before his untimely
demise at the age of 54, the Warrior was inducted into the WWE’s Hall of Fame.
In a class containing other once-formidable names (Mr. T and Jake “the Snake”
Roberts chief among them), he stood out as the headliner. His hair was short
and gray, and he limped when trying to replicate his signature energy, but his
message, delivered sans quixotic shouting this time, is the same as it’s always
been. To paraphrase, he said every man, by his actions, can make his own
legend, and he thanked his fans for keeping his legend alive.
In retrospect, the speech turned out
to be an early eulogy. Three days later, while walking to his car with his
wife, the Warrior collapsed, was rushed to a hospital, and pronounced dead. In
the wake of his demise, legions of former colleagues – including past nemeses
Hogan and McMahon – have taken to Twitter to pay respects.
By conventional wisdom, none of this
should have happened. The late 80s/early 90s Warrior was popularly imagined as
roided-up rockstar and seemed doomed to burn out rather than fade away. Conversely,
the post-wrestling Warrior was taken for a washed-up, selfish provocateur, poised
to fade into obscurity and pass bitter and alone. Instead, neither happened.
The Warrior died a husband and a father, at peace with his legacy and
reconnected to an industry that gave him his start. In death and in life, the
Warrior, like any good practitioner of individualism, did not allow the
narratives thrust upon him to define him. He wrote his own.
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