WORLD RACIST ENTERTAINMENT

It's easy to brush it all off as "gimmicks" and "angles". But the race problem in WWE is very, very real…

Sometimes it's so hard to justify being a fan of sports entertainment. We're not just talking about men beating up women or the repression of gay men here (not that such things aren't bad enough to begin with); we're talking about a major organisation with an outlook that sets race relations back by at least 30 years.

Picture the scene: a huge, verbally challenged Indian giant grapples with a lying, cheating, stealing Mexican in the ring, while their tag team partners - an Irishman in a green, shamrock-adorned leotard and a big black guy claiming to be ‘street' - do verbal battle on the apron. On the outside, a stereotypical southern commentator is doing play-by-play while a midget Leprechaun is being chased by a lumbering guy wearing Union Jack trunks. Welcome to any given night in World Wrestling Entertainment, the perennial pariah of political correctness and the antidote to open-minded racial tolerance.

Before anybody starts muttering, “Oh, it's just another chance for FSM to have a pop at WWE,” let's look at the facts: in the quarter of a century that Vince McMahon has been at the helm of World Wrestling Entertainment, there have been just eight non-white World Champions (nine if you include the ECW Title, but let's be serious). Of those, Yokozuna was a Samoan playing a stereotypical Japanese sumo wrestler, The Iron Sheik's Persian nationality was exploited to play off the American-Iranian hostage crisis, and Eddie Guerrero was a paper-thin parody of his Chicano heritage. That's simply appalling.


TELL ME HE DIDN'T JUST SAY THAT

The company has attempted - and, at on least a moral level, succeeded - to undermine almost every wrestler of ethnicity that has ever been on the books. Some people might choose to write off the racial stereotypes and transparent favouritism of Caucasian wrestlers as “paying dues”, “cheap heat“ or “colourful characters“. We wonder what these people thought when, in a ‘comedy' segment, Vince McMahon referred to John Cena as - and we quote - a “nigger” in the presence of Booker T, live on pay-per-view.

As shocking as that was, the company's outrageous actions speak louder than its outrageous words. Black wrestlers are often shamelessly lumped together and given base, racially-orientated gimmicks (The Nation Of Domination and Cryme Tyme, to name just two). And, most worryingly of all, every time there is a major political or international crisis revolving around race or nationality, WWE exploits it with crude, abrasive characters designed to rile its global audience.

This should not be the behaviour of the biggest wrestling company in the world - these actions demean and devalue the audience, the performers and the content, and leave fans wondering why the hell they ever liked this crap in the first place. As ever, though, management would probably explain the whole situation away with that well-worn, insincere bromide, “toying with the emotions of the fans”.

This is, of course, absolute bollocks. When wrestling plays with issues like racism, it literally plays with fire - like when the pop culture icon of Americana, Sgt Slaughter, became an Iraqi sympathiser at the height of the Gulf War and burned the American flag while his Middle-Eastern allies cackled. Indeed, WWE has always loved to deal with the hottest of all political hot potatoes, international conflict. But there is a huge difference between satirizing politics and pushing vile, vindictive characters that mock the very real-world situations that see scores of human life lost by the day.

But WWE knows this - it routinely takes its wrestlers into the war zones to support the American troops. It sees first-hand the atrocities of military skirmish and, after being the first live entertainment show to run in the States after 9/11, it's sure as hell more than aware of the consequences of extremist terrorism. But why would little things like the Twin Towers or suicide bombers stop the WWE brass from having their fun? Mohammad Hassan was designed to make light of a conflict that rages to this day and is literally ripping the world apart; that character had no place in a wrestling arena.


MIDDLE EASTENDERS

Compared to Hassan, ol' Sgt Slaughter seems pretty tame. But back in the day he caused uproar. Working to the old WWE adage that ‘no publicity is bad publicity' (which it took the Benoit tragedies for the company to finally see the obvious flaws in), the American hero was turned heel and aligned himself with his fiendish Iraqi backers, Colonel Mustafa (the Iranian Iron Sheik in another vulgar racial gimmick) and General Adnan. For the first time, WWE was dealing with global issues head on and, oh boy, was it dealing with them badly.

Robert Remus, the man behind the chin, lived in fear for his life, such was the depth of feeling surrounding the issue. WWE flogged the idea was half-past dead, then promptly tossed Sarge into a flimsy pro-America team with Jim Duggan. Despite being a former AWA Champion and one of the greatest ring psychologists in the business, Slaughter was pretty much ruined as a performer from that point on. Many still have fond memories of him - he was, after all, the first person ever to be immortalised as a G.I. Joe figure and was inducted into the WWE Hall Of Fame in 2004 - but the angle was a fundamental mistake from beginning to end. Much like Mohammad Hassan.

As odd as it may sound for us to say this, however, Hassan could actually have been a great character. The initial vignettes, where he raised the issue of post-9/11 prejudice faced by people of Middle Eastern descent, had real potential. He could have been a fantastic heel - somebody who was clearly dysfunctional but whose words cut deep, because they betrayed the very real racial intolerance of the American audience. But, instead, the persecuted became the persecutor.

WWE no sooner introduced Hassan than it made him a radical, racial extremist. With terrorism a pressing global concern, and fears of Islamic fundamentalism rising by the day, he was pitched as an aggressor, not a madman (as WWE would have had you believe), but was ultimately shot down by the very extremists he was portraying. When his henchmen, wearing black jumpsuits and ski masks, choked The Undertaker with piano wire and then carried their fallen brother, Daivari, above their heads like a martyr on the 7/7 edition of SmackDown (the same day as the terrorist bombings in London), the timing truly could not have been worse.

Hassan was quickly taken off TV and, with WWE too cowardly to take responsibility for its own “creativity”, he was made the scapegoat for the brainfart angle; his character was killed off by Taker at The Great American Bash, never to be seen again. It was the death knell for the career of Mark Copani - the 24-year-old behind the gimmick, who was actually a native of New York - all just for doing what the company thought would be good for business.


DAMN!

It isn't just overtly racist characters that WWE prides itself on, though. Repression and ridicule are also a particular forte of the group - and didn't guys like Sylvester Ritter and Koko Ware know it. Heck, just ask Ron Killings what he thinks of WWE's policy on pushing young black wrestlers. Killings was a guy who walked into the company as one of the most exciting young talents it had seen in years, but as K-Kwik ended up being released as just another black kid that the clean-cut, Caucasian Stamford suits didn't want to push.

We could dedicate an entire issue to listing all the guys who have been held down because of their race in the last two decades, and WWE plays a huge part in that. From its treatment of guys like Tony Atlas (who, as Stephen John so rightly noted in his letter in issue 20, went from “The World's Strongest Man” to the barefooted tribesman Saba Simba in WWE) and Umaga (who went from a treble-tough street punk to a primitive, Kamala-like island savage), is it any wonder that Samoa Joe, one of the greatest talents in wrestling today, won't go near the biggest promotion in the world, given its track record?

The Headshrinkers, The Highlanders, The Mexicools, Santino Marella, Los Guerreros… (We told you we could go on all day.) But does it really have to be this way? Aren't the best characters those like The Rock, who reach beyond the gimmick or typecasting and pull out something truly unique? Instead, WWE would rather strip wrestlers of their personality, reduce them to the bare bones of some glaring stereotype and then expect them to work a supposedly ‘entertaining' gimmick and mean something to the fans. In truth, they end up meaning nothing and are left smouldering on the scrap heap.

We take our hats off to Ron Simmons, one of the most criminally-misrepresented performers in WWE history, who has risen above it all and managed to get over with just one word. But behind Simmons, who had a lengthy, worthy career in other organisations, are young guns like Monty Brown and Shelton Benjamin. Men who have all the talent in the world but, rather than seeing their stars shoot into orbit, instead spend their days trying to shatter a five-foot thick glass ceiling. Men who will seemingly only ever be midcard performers. Men who, for some reason, are robbed of their personality and sent to the ring with a screaming, stereotyped black ‘Momma' bringing up the rear.

And how about every Japanese performer to ever darken World Wrestling Entertainment's doors? From Mr Fuji to Funaki and Jinsei Shinzaki to Jimmy Yang, the company's track record with grapplers from the East has been abysmal. TAKA Michinoku, for those who don't know, was a hugely popular and influential performer all over the world. In America, he was a joke.


“WORLD” WRESTLING ENTERTAINMENT

Anybody who has followed wrestling for more than a couple of years knows of Canada's tremendous wrestling legacy. From Gene Kiniski and Killer Kowalski to Roddy Piper and Abdullah The Butcher to Bret Hart and Chris Benoit, the country has produced some of the finest talents ever to appear on the international stage. WWE has been one of the main benefactors of Canadian talent over the last two decades, yet continues to fuel the animosity between the two countries at every opportunity.

From turning The Hart Foundation heel to introducing gimmicks like The Mountie to the never-ending parade of Montreal retreads, WWE has shown no restraint in running down America's neighbour - and isn't it interesting how it's always the foreigners who seem to be the evildoing infidels. The Un-Americans are a case in point; with William Regal, Test, Lance Storm and Christian at the helm, what the company had in its hands was a talented team that could have been great. Instead, the group was made a target of spastic xenophobia and mindless flag-waving, and the unit went nowhere.

Of course, The Un-Americans aren't the only group of wrestlers to have been thrown together purely because of their ‘heel nationality'. For The Mexicools - who were legitimately some of the hottest talents that Vince McMahon could have laid his hands on at the time - their WWE tenure must have been horrendously disheartening. Granted, given his history, Juventud Guerrera had about as much chance of hanging around as Kurt Angle does of going onto a radio show and not saying anything crazy, but the group could have meant something to the audience.

They were introduced at a time when WWE's Latino audience was peaking, thanks to the Guerreros and Rey Mysterio, and brought a truly unique style to the table. However, they were sent to the ring on lawnmowers to play off the awful stereotype that Mexican immigrants are only good for mowing lawns and manual labour. Can anybody reading this article take Vince's aforementioned, on-camera comment to John Cena and then seriously believe that all of this - the racial humiliation, degradation and belittlement - is for anything other than his own personal, bigoted amusement?


WHAT'S YOUR FAVOURITE COLOUR?

But then, wrestling loves a bigot. JBL, who many saw for a time as a modern-day “Million Dollar Man”, had Orlando Jordan bringing up the rear wherever he went. Much as DiBiase had Virgil carrying his bags, both were little more than manservants. That Jordan was saddled with the doubly-hard reality of being a bisexual black man in wrestling was, inevitably, a bigger cross than he could bear.

When rumours began running wild that he was courting an underage boy backstage at WWE live events, he was promptly shown the door. Of course, the same thing happened to Pat Patterson years before, and he was soon back working for the company. Perhaps we're being too cynical, but when we see a black man and a white man fired under similar circumstances, then the white guy is brought back while the black guy isn't, it certainly seems that race could be the deciding factor. If in doubt, white must be right.

In this respect, Cryme Tyme are another case in point. After absorbing all the crap and playing to a tremendously stereotyped (and potentially massively offensive) gimmick, it was them - not good ol' southern boys Cade and Murdoch - who were fired recently after a spat erupted between the two teams. It started backstage at a house show when Lance Cade was stirring things up with Shad and JTG, who were having trouble understanding the finish of their match. Irritated by Cryme Tyme's green-ness, the redneck intimated that liberties might be taken in the ring.

Things never got violent, but Cade convinced the referee to “rib” the newcomers with an unplanned shoot count-out, leaving them looking confused and feeling humiliated. After the match, Shad and JTG took out their frustration by hitting their finisher on the ref, regaining their heat with the equally baffled fans. But even though it was Cade and Murdoch who had initiated the conflict and acted unprofessionally by goading the pair, it was the two black who took the rap and the pink slip while the white boys got off scot-free…



For the rest of this feature, check out issue 22 of FSM - available at WH Smith and all good retailers. (For US readers we are now carried at Borders and Barnes & Noble, so check for local availability or click here to subscribe.)