Sex, Lies, and Headlocks by Shaun Assael Read Free Book Online Page A

synonymous with ethnic champions such as Pedro Morales, Sammartino, and Killer Kowalski—men who shared the grainy UHF (ultrahigh frequency) universe with ice hockey, Roller Derby, and Charles Bronson movies. They were the pulp heroes of the immigrant labor class, actors without airs, and most couldn’t have cared less if the world accorded them the respectability of porn stars. Backlund was a different wrestler in a different age, a collegiate medalist with a clean image built around a sensible six-foot-one, 191-pound frame.
    However, Vinnie was tired of Backlund and ready to ride another shift in public sensibilities. He’d hired Hulk Hogan because he was everything Backlund wasn’t. So as Vinnie waited to start filming the WWF’s studio television show in Allentown, he motioned his champ to the ring. “Things are going to be changing, Bob,” he started. “We need wrestlers who are bigger than life.” Backlund winced, knowing what was coming next. “We have a guy coming in who’s going to take us to the next level.”
    Vinnie knew he couldn’t let Hogan take the belt directly from Backlund. Wrestling convention holds that babyfaces rarely battle one another. He needed a heel to stick in the middle of the transition—someone Backlund could lose to and Hogan could beat. Scanning his roster, he found his answer in an aging novelty act with curly toed genie sneakers: the Iron Sheik.
    Wrestling has always fed off simple prejudices, and the papers were full of news about Iran sponsoring secret terrorist cells in the United States. It didn’t matter that the Sheik, known to his friends as Khosrow Vasiri, helped coach the American wrestling team in the 1972 Summer Olympics or that he now lived in Atlanta. With anti-Iranian fervor at its height, he was the perfect choice to take the heavyweight belt off Backlund.
    But when Backlund arrived at Madison Square Garden on December 24, 1983, he refused to lose to Vasiri. He’d held the company’s heavyweight belt for six years; he had his pride. So a long backstage negotiation ensued. Finally, Vinnie agreed to let Backlund exit with an old boxing gimmick. He could pretend to wrestle hurt until his manager threw a white hand towel into the ring, signaling surrender.
    The beauty of Backlund’s surrender to the Iranian was that it required a swift corrective justice, something to reorder the moral universe that it had skewed. On January 23, 1984, Hulk Hogan was unveiled before a sellout crowd at the Garden to do just that. While the yellow taxis stacked up three thick outside Seventh Avenue as they always did on a big night, Hogan and Vasiri worked out their spots backstage, agreeing that the babyface would start the match by landing a double-fisted blow to Vasiri’s head and follow it with an open-palm slap. Vasiri knew what was expected of him, and at showtime he paraded around the ring waving the Iranian flag and playing the foreign fool. Hogan’s entry was simpler. He stalked up the runway in tight yellow trunks and a too small T-shirt that read “American Made.”
    Tradition holds that the heel calls the wrestling match, much like a lead dancer, in order to keep it in rhythm, and once Hogan locked Vasiri’s head in the crack of his sweaty elbow the more experienced heel whispered their next move—a clothesline. Despite his improvements as a showman, Hogan was still stiff as a wrestler and the clothesline was one of the few moves he could pull off, or sell to the crowd. So as he threw Vasiri into the ropes and watched the heel sink into them, Hogan stuck out his left arm, knowing Vasiri would run into it when he bounced back. On cue, Vasiri did just that, falling hard to the mat.
    Though exceptional workers could wrestle for as long as an hour, shifting momentum a dozen times, Vinnie didn’t want to keep Hulk onstage anywhere near that long, in part because he didn’t have the arsenal of moves to keep it interesting, in part because he wanted his new star to look