I have this painting on the wall in my office. A real one, the kind with bright oils slathered on in big chunks that you run your finger over. I keep it there in part because I love it, but also because it’s a good litmus test. I’ll be on a Zoom call, some remote meeting or a fighter interview, and those who know will know.
“What’s that on the wall behind you?” former UFC fighter Chael Sonnen asked recently, in one such typical exchange. “Is that … is that Hogan and Warrior from WrestleMania VI?”
It is. Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be? It was one of the most significant events of my childhood, which is weird to admit but true. So when I saw that an artist named Sam Evans had it for sale on his website, how could I not immediately smash that add to cart button?
April 1, 1990. I was 10 years old and at the height of my pro wrestling fandom. I can’t even tell you when or how I first discovered pro wrestling, but by this point it consumed my life.
Every Monday night I’d beg to stay up past my bedtime to watch the second hour of the WWE’s (then the WWF) weekly show. Sometimes a Little League game would force me to miss a Saturday morning show and I’d be crushed. Or my parents would drag me to church on a Sunday morning when wrestling was on and the whole time I’d be thinking that the salvation of my eternal soul was not worth missing a chance to see Mr. Perfect get what’s coming to him.
The pay-per-views were a source of contention between me and my parents. They were willing to buy me a subscription to the WWF Magazine because that was reading, an activity my mom swore to always support in any form necessary. They wouldn’t buy me any merch (though my mom did sew me a homemade Hot Rod shirt so I could go as Rowdy Roddy Piper one Halloween), and certainly wouldn’t take me to any live shows, but that was to be expected.
My dad did his part by letting me talk to him, endlessly, about various wrestling storylines that occupied my mind, while gently pointing out to me that it was probably fake, seeing as how people did not, as a rule, get punched in the face multiple times per week and still show up on TV with nary a bruise. (I refused to believe it. It was real to me, damnit. How else to explain the fact that, when Hulk Hogan was “injured” and I sent him a get well letter, Hogan personally thanked me with an autographed postcard that began “Dear Hulkamaniac.”)
But the pay-per-views? My parents weren’t convinced that this was a good use of $29.95, and so throughout the late ‘80s I was forced to catch up after the fact.
Two things changed in 1990: I earned cash money mowing lawns, and the WWF announced an unprecedented champion vs. champion headliner for that year’s WrestleMania.
It’s difficult to overstate how mind-blowing this latter development was for me at the time. WWF World Heavyweight Champion Hulk Hogan would face WWF Intercontinental Champion The Ultimate Warrior in the main event of WrestleMania VI. Two champions in one match? And both of them basically good guys, with huge though increasingly separate fanbases? I did not even know this was possible. I suspected there might be federal laws prohibiting it. But it was happening anyway, and I was determined to watch.
By the time I presented the idea to my parents, it was as a fully fleshed out proposal. I would hand over 30 crinkled American dollars in cash and they would call the cable company on the landline phone (only way to do it in 1990) and order this pay-per-view for me. They would also allow me unfettered access to the living room TV for the duration of the event, without regard for normal limits on daily TV viewing time. Plus, my best friend in the whole wide world Matt Stone would get to come over and watch with me.
My parents did not quite understand my fascination with pro wrestling, but they also didn’t try to stop it. This is to their credit, I believe. They recognized it as a passion of mine — one of relatively few but intense interests, right there with baseball and dogs and doing rad tricks on my bike — and they let me have it.
This has served as a model for my own parenting, lo these many years later. When my daughters get really into something (Taylor Swift, graphic novels about dragons, the godawful show “Dance Moms,”) and I feel tired of hearing about it, I just think about how patient and understanding my parents were when I insisted on explaining, again, how it was Macho Man’s paranoid jealousy that led to the dissolution of The Mega Powers. (True story: I learned what the word lust meant when I looked it up in the dictionary after Randy Savage stuck his finger in Hogan’s face and declared “those eyes lust Elizabeth.” I was pretty shocked, to be honest.)
All of which is to say, my parents agreed to my proposal. And so that Sunday I got to join the nearly 68,000 people in the Toronto SkyDome, as well as the “millions around the world,” in watching WrestleMania VI, an event that I was sure would forever alter the landscape of professional sports, if not the entire world.
Here’s what I remember now:
– How Roddy Piper’s double count-out with Bad News Brown was a real letdown.
– How it seemed frankly unseemly and a little out of character for The Hart Foundation, whom I loved, to attack The Bolsheviks during their singing of the Soviet national anthem.
– How my friend Matt Stone showed up late and missed the first half of the pay-per-view (shouts out to Stoney and his fam, good people, but they were chronically late everywhere and you just had to accept that).
– How I was a little terrified and utterly riveted by Jake “The Snake” Roberts vowing to make the Million Dollar Man grovel for his own money so he could enjoy watching him “wallowing in the muck avarice” — before breaking my heart by losing the match for the Million Dollar Belt.
– How even my dad, an avowed wrestling skeptic, made sure he was in his seat for the main event, when the Warrior came sprinting down to the ring as usual, attacking the ropes with his signature ferocity like a giant toddler in the midst of an ecstatic tantrum.
Decades later I went back to revisit the match itself. Only then did I truly realize that it is, sadly, a completely garbage display of wrestling.
Hogan had about three moves. Warrior somehow had fewer than that, all stiff as a board. They tried to cover it up with an extensive feeling out period filled with all these tests of strength and a lot of bouncing off the ropes at one another. Knowing what I know now, it’s hard not to imagine Bret Hart watching on a monitor backstage, muttering judgmental expletives to himself.
What stands out about that match are these snapshot images, a bunch of freeze frame moments stuck in my brain. Hogan and Warrior standing eyeball to eyeball. The simultaneous clothesline collision that knocked them both off their feet. The Warrior, victorious in the end, holding up both belts with his signature paint now entirely flaked off his sweaty face.
It was, again, an objectively bad wrestling match. But it seemed to mean so much. The mighty Hogan had been beaten. Ultimate Warrior now had two (2!) titles. My 10-year-old world had shifted on its axis.
This was, in retrospect, the beginning of my combat sports fandom. It heralded a lifetime of becoming emotionally invested in fights, both works and shoots. It was the beginning of me handing over my hard-earned money to experience the conclusion of rivalries that were genuine or contrived.
All in one night you could experience disappointment and awe and disbelief and a total reordering of the known universe. How wonderful and terrible and strange. And if ever I need a reminder what I saw in it to begin with, there’s that painting on the wall.
English (US) ·