The wrestler stabbed in the bum by a crazed fan in 1980
As an art form, professional wrestling takes from many different inspirations. Far from being the meat-headed display of fake violence it so often thinks it is, your average professional wrestler harks back to improvisation, stage combat, drag, and pantomime when doing what they do, even if it’s subconscious.
That’s just the art form itself. Pull out a little bit, and you’ll see the culture that surrounds the medium is just as complex. It’s different now in the aftermath of Vince McMahon testifying that wrestling is a fixed form of entertainment in court, so he wouldn’t have to pay sports taxes. Bt for decades, the entire sport was built on what we now know as kayfabe. A commitment to treating the storylines as real in front of the fans, both in and out of the ring.
Many people believe that this means that wrestling fans thought that what they were watching was real. A stick which has been used to beat fans for decades. The truth is a little bit more complicated, one that harks back to another art form that seeks to construct a form of reality separate from our own, that of stage magic. A magician won’t sit down to explain exactly how their tricks work, and if you ask them outright, they’ll tell you it’s magic.
However, if a group of people watch a magic show and genuinely think that what’s on stage is real-life magic, they’d scream and run, and wrestling is much the same. Kayfabe is merely part of the tradition of the business. Sure, it might stem from a time when pro-wrestling was presented as actual competitive Greco-Roman wrestling, and the fact that it being fixed was a dirty secret of the industry. Nevertheless, no one over the past 50 years, over the age of ten, has truly believed that professional wrestling is real. At least, most of the time.
The truth is, wrestling is a popular medium. All sorts get invested in the antics of their favourite wrestler, and that emotional investment can make people do crazy things. Take one of the most spectacular heel turns of all time, from a time before McMahon kneecapped the idea of kayfabe, 1980. The two grapplers in question were Bruno Sammartino, a man with one hell of a claim to be the greatest wrestler of all time, and his on-screen protégé, Larry Zbyszko.
The storyline went that Zybyszko had broken into the industry as Sammartino’s student, and by the end of the 1970s, was getting frustrated with being treated as nothing more than Bruno’s understudy. Finally, Zbyszko was given the chance to prove himself to his mentor in a match. However, Sammartino so thoroughly outclassed the younger man, which saw Zbyszko finally lose his temper, getting himself disqualified by battering his beloved teacher with a wooden chair and leaving him in a pool of his own blood.
Zbyszko suddenly became the most hated person in professional wrestling. Incensed fans would flock to his car after shows, on one occasion overturning it with him inside it – he was pelted with trash from irate fans and even attacked multiple times. During one match, a fan managed to clang him on the head with an iron bar, but that wasn’t even the worst of it. No, that came after a match against Pedro Morales in Albany, New York.
According to Zybyszko, he was so hated that following his contest with Morales, he’d started jawing back and forth with the fans. Back in those days, the audience was a lot closer to the wrestlers than they are today. In fact, they were so close that Zybyszko got stabbed in the buttocks by a Bruno Sammartino fan who wanted revenge on behalf of their idol. Thankfully, the wound wasn’t deep, and Zybyszko barely needed time off the road to heal up, because if the injury was any worse, that would have thrown a spanner in the works of what the storyline was paying off.
Finally, Zbyszko and Sammartino faced off in the main event of the 1980s Showdown at Shea in front of 36,000 fans in a steel cage match. Very few of whom would have genuinely believed that what they were watching was real, much in the same way that very few people who watch the Eastenders Christmas special think what they’re watching is real.
Yet in both cases, there’ll always be people who take their love too far.