The Great Russian Chain Match

Bruno "the Italian living legend" Sammartino sprawls against the turnbuckle, the air knocked from his chest, the life gone out of his legs. Ivan "the Russian Bear" Koloff advances menacingly, his bald head and tattooed arms proclaiming unredeemable evil. With the 18-foot chain that binds them together, Koloff begins to strangle the World Champion of the east coast. He twists the Russian chain elaborately around Bruno's powerful throat.

But the experienced crowd knows what must come next. Even as Koloff adds a twist to the chain, even as he forces Bruno farther into the ropes, the roar begins to build, cutting through the smoke and the beer and the disbelief. The obvious fakery and slapstick theatricality of the earlier bouts has been forgotten, swallowed up in screams for vengeance and blood.

Finally Bruno wheels on his assailant. His meaty hand, riding on the roar of the crowd, smashes into Koloff's chest. Koloff staggers while the boy behind me, his band on the thigh of his hard-faced date, continues to shriek, "Kill, Bruno, Kill." Moments later, as Bruno smashes Koloff on the head with a wooden chair (not the Hollywood breakaway variety) the crowed swarms like jackals in a feeding frenzy against the plexiglass enclosing the ring. It is obvious that the mere defeat of the villain will not satisfy them--they howl for blood, for dismemberment.

It is missing the point to call it a fake, to point out that the blood on Koloff's head came from a plastic pouch concealed in his trunks, or that the two wrestlers probably rehearsed for weeks the choreography of this championship bout. When Bruno delivers the flying drop kick or Koloff applies the Siberian sleeper hold, art and reality begin to merge, even for the Harvard cynics to my left and right.

In an earlier bout, we scoffed when Baron Mikel Scicluna (a bad guy) reached elaborately into his trunks for a small peice of hard plastic (the "foreign object" as the TV announcers call it) with which to rake his opponent's neck. We recognized this as one of professional wrestling's ritual gestures, like the stunned, stylized way the wrestlers react to punches, with the dazed expression and wobbly walk they have all learned. The bad guy pleading for mercy with a fist clenched behind his back, the resounding stomp of the foot on the mat as each punch is delivered--these are the basic elements of professional wrestling. Second-rate actors like Man Mountain Mike (a quarter ton of lard) and Baron Scicluna use these elements to create a theater of fake violence and feigned pain. The crowd falls for it (the hungering suspension of disbelief), and when the greatest hero (Bruno) meets the most vicious villain (Koloff) their dissembling of pain and terror raises the crowd to levels of cruelty and desperation you don't find in any sport. In sports, the violence is sublimated to the greater purpose of wining goals and scoring points--even in hockey the fighting is incidental. But professional wrestling is the thing itself: unalloyed physical violence. A dispassionate observer could point out that in wrestling no one ever gets more than a few bruises, that the body slams, the flying drop kicks, and the overhead airplane spins are al carefully planned and rehearsed. But in the crowed at the chain match, even the dispassionate observers were eagerly subsumed into a seething mob wanting savagely to believe that the pain and blood were real.

On the surface, wrestling seems tawdry and cheap: a couple of overweight men (or women, or midgets) pretending to hurt each other, the crowd taking pleasure in their pain. But professional wrestling appeals to much more than the crowd's delight in random violence, since it shows not mere brutality but a struggle between the forces of good and evil. The program for the match makes it easy to tell one from the other--all the bad guys are listed in the left-hand column. But the crowd already knows most of the wrestlers from television interviews--Bruno, of course, is earnest and modest on camera, while Koloff plays a sadistic braggart. In the ring, it is easy to tell the good from the bad by the wrestlers' techniques. Bad guys use strangleholds and foreign objects, while good guys generally fight clean.

One of the political aspects of wrestling is that the rules and the referee seem to end up hindering the hero instead of protecting him from evil. The referee always remains oblivious when the bad guy uses a foreign object or a stranglehold. What often happens therefore is that the hero will have to resort to dirty tricks to gain a victory. The insidious effect of professional wrestling is not that it extolls brutality and violence, although it certainly does that, but that it promotes the abandoning of fairness and restraint to achieve personal ends. Bruno grinds the chain into Koloff's face, then strangles him against a turnbuckle--and a small man in front of me, sitting with his mother, wife, and children, shrieks with delight.

Bruno is a popular champion because he refuses to take abuse lying down, because he fulfills the violent fantasies of his fans. He plays fair as long as he can, but when evil and the rules seem to conspire against him, when it seems he can't win any other way, he lashes out with his hands, or his feet, or the chain. The crowd identifies deeply with him. Seeing themselves threatened by unsympathetic laws, their their police handcuffed by the Suprem Court, their neighborhoods surrounded by hostile forces, the people in the crowd clamor for Bruno to rise from his stupor in the corner, to turn and savagely destroy the alien monster behind him. More than mere sources of pleasureable violence, Bruno and Koloff become, for the fifteen minutes they are in the ring, symbols of the real wishes and frustrations of the crowd.