Source: The Daily Reveille
If I learned anything from attending World Wrestling Entertainment’s “Smackdown” on Monday night at the Baton Rouge River Center, it was this: Jack Black’s movie “Nacho Libre,” about a monk who wrestles in the Mexican equivalent of WWE, contains one fundamental truth. When some men grow up, they really do enjoy dressing up in stretchy pants – just not always in the privacy of their own monastery cells.
And unsurprisingly, most of the fans, who were in large part either male or younger or both, agreed with me.
Justin Savant, 10-year-old fourth grader at Melville Private School, said he would like to be a wrestler. His name would be “Bad Boy,” and his signature move would be “the F-U – pick ’em up on your shoulders and slam ’em.”
Jordan Hall, 11-year-old fourth grader at Walker Elementary, said he’s always dreamed of being a wrestler; he would be called Jordan “The Great” Hall.
“[My specialty would be] the dominator just like Bobby Lesley,” Hall said. “It’s me picking up the dude and him being turned over on his back and throwing him down just like Bobby Lesley does.”
But when I told Neal Hebert, a University graduate student and Student Government speaker pro-tempore of the Senate, that most of the kids I talked to wanted be wrestlers and asked him if he had ever wanted to do the same, he said, “They do? I mean, when you’re nine, you have lots of uninformed impulses that once you’re rational you can refute. And that’s all I’ll say.”
There were eight rounds of fighting Monday, pitting members of WWE Smackdown, WWE RAW and Extreme Championship Wrestling against each other and ranging from tag teams to a three-man free-for-all. The fights involved folding chairs, metal barriers and anything else the wrestlers could get their hands on before the referee intervened.
Silly me, I thought there was only going to be one match.
Sitting through the same fight repeated eight times with different people led me to wonder about the IQs of the people shouting abuse and stirring up a ruckus around you.
The hits obviously aren’t real and certainly don’t make contact. You won’t see anyone stepping out of the ring bruised or bloody. Most of the noise comes from the wrestlers stamping their feet on a hollowed-out stage.
Peter Saucier, LSU-Alexandria alumnus, said wrestling is like going to a play with special effects.
“It’s a little bit of acting coming into the ring tonight,” Saucier said.
He and Mary Germany, student at the Blue Cliff massage therapy college who was sitting with him, said that while WWE wrestling is fake, it was worth attending because it is so entertaining.
Jon Cogburn, University associate professor of philosophy who has done scholarly research on professional wrestling, disagreed, saying it is not fake.
“The Saints’ loss last night was proof that professional wrestling is better than football because had football had predetermined outcomes, the Saints would have won,” Cogburn said. “Had the Saints been wrestling, they would have won. It’s a better story line.”
Hebert said story lines dictated how wrestlers, especially villains, fight.
“One of the common tropes in wrestling is, particularly in the South, the suggestion of homosexuality as a way to show that a given wrestler is a bad guy,” Hebert said. “And as I explained that to the person next to me, it was quite funny because two of the wrestlers in the ring that were bad guys immediately fell into a position that suggested they were having sex with each other.”
Germany said all the wrestlers have certain characters that they follow. For example, the Boogeyman is really weird and sickening, but some people like him for that, Germany said. She said the worms he eats look real and move on TV.
Ozzy Osbourne, anyone?
“What sane human being would do that?” Germany said.
Christian Canatella, 10-year-old Melville Private School fifth grader, said the Boogeyman was his favorite because he is cool.
“He does a lot of crazy stuff,” Canatella said.
Canatella said he did not think it was gross the Boogeyman ate worms and that he would do it too.
The fights between the first and the last were interesting, but none compared to those featured on the bill – those of King Booker and Batista. Booker and the Boogeyman’s match had that interesting gross-out factor and was full of smack talking. Batista’s contained an unmatched raw athleticism.
Before the beginning of the sixth match, Booker slowly walked down the center aisle toward the ring with his wife Queen Sharmell – and she really is his wife – trailing behind, both looking every bit the part of royalty. The picture was ruined as soon as the king opened his mouth.
“Thank you all, my royal subjects,” Booker said.
“Except for you,” he said, pointing to someone in the crowd. “You lucky I don’t kick your country ass right now. I’m King Booker. I cannot stand not a one of you rednecked sons of bitches.”
But his big talk did not last for long. His opponent, the Boogeyman, was definitely something out of a child’s worst nightmare. He slithered, kind of squat-walking toward the stage where he then proceeded to do an almost-Native-American rain dance, stomping his feet, emitting occasional pterodactyl-like screeches while spewing gobs of worms.
Booker won the fight but couldn’t have done so without the aid of his wife. Sharmell blew a white powder into the Boogeyman’s face, temporarily obstructing his sight and allowing her husband to win.
Booker was not the only wrestler who talked trash into the microphone, but what Kennedy, Batista’s challenger, said hit closer to home.
After calling the audience “trailer-park trash,” Kennedy said he absolutely loved the Chicago Bears, especially after Sunday, even though they had a long-standing rivalry with the Green Bay Packers, the team from his hometown.
Karma paid Kennedy back; he suffered from several “Batista bombs” – some of them in a row – and lost.
A “Batista bomb” is Batista’s signature move, Saucier said. It’s when he puts the other wrestler’s head in between his legs and flips the wrestler over.
While wrestlers are cool and everything, it seemed that most of the red-blooded males at the arena were there for one reason, the diva bikini contest between the second and third rounds.
One sign held up said, “Divas, can you help me lay my pipe?”
Three divas – Rebecca, Ashley and Jillian – came out in satin, knee-high dressing gowns for a contest that quickly turned into a two-against-one, stiletto-heeled stomping when Jillian refused to wear a bikini.
Jillian said she did not come to the event to get naked.
Hope Guidry, 11-year-old fifth grader at Melville Private School, said she did not blame the two girls for beating the third one up. Guidry said they were ugly.
“They’re nasty,” Guidry said.
Savant disagreed, saying he thought girl wrestlers were cool.
But when I asked why he thought that, he paused, looked at me weirdly and said, “I can’t answer that.”
