Me and the Ultimate Warrior
I was alone when I first saw him. My dad was out back doing something to the car, my mother upstairs bathing, my brother either out with friends or at some cub scout thing. It was just me, on my own on the living room couch, doing what I usually did on a Saturday lunchtime: watching the wrestling.
In the late eighties, British wrestling was still a stodgy product: bulky Northerners rolling and jumping around in ballrooms and sports halls for the gratification of homicidal needle-wielding grannies. Matches were fought over a series of rounds - which allowed workers to break and figure out new narratives, while also aping the format of more legitimate boxing contests - and were pretty much uniformly best of three falls affairs. You would get two bouts, or maybe three if you were lucky, in the average hour-long programme. It. Was. Slow.
This particular Saturday, however, ITV were trying something different: as a one-off, they were showing an episode of an American wrestling show, produced by some outfit calling itself the World Wrestling Federation. I hadn't heard of them before. I decided to give it a chance. And that was how I came to see him.
The American TV wrestling format was a very different bottle of baby oil to the British product. Instead of long matches booked roughly equally between both performers, the WWF approach was to put on a show full of squash matches between 'superstars' (WWE wrestlers are forbidden by their employer from using the w-word to describe what they do in the ring, an instance of CEO Vince McMahon's desire to forget the business' carny roots in favour of entertainment legitimacy) and jobbers, low-ranking performers whose role was to make their opponents look good. This built up the promotion's stars as quarrelsome demigods whose internecine feuds would be restricted to backstage skits and postmatch run-ins on network television, building to a blow-off match on pay-per-view.
Obviously at the age I was then, I knew none of this. But what I did know, unquestionably, was that the Ultimate Warrior was quite literally like nothing I had ever seen before.
For starters, he ran to the ring to the sound of heavy metal guitar riffing, instead of waiting patiently in a corner for the announcer to present him to the crowd. And he kept running: into the ring, between the ropes and corners, and at his terrified opponent, who he mowed down again and again with an extremely non-World of Sport move which, the commentator informed viewers, was called a clothesline. I didn’t know at the time that the Warrior resorted to the clothesline so often because it was one of the few moves he could pull off convincingly; didn’t know the rifftastic running entrance and gorilla-press mannerisms were a deliberate choice to conceal a limited moveset; didn’t know that his opponent might well have been genuinely terrified that he might botch a move and leave him injured. All that, and more, would come later. All I knew at that moment on the sofa in my parents' living room was that I’d just watched a reallife comicbook superman demolish a mortal for what seemed the sheer bloody thrill of destruction. I was hooked.
It wasn't just the running and the moshing and the clotheslines which hooked me on Warrior though. If I'd just been into watching rampaging Goliaths I could have just as easily got into that era's wrestling ambassador, the brawny, bearded balding behemoth Hulk Hogan. No, what drew me more to Warrior was his look.
Unlike the thickset, hirsute males of the UK circuit, the Warrior's body was hairless and sculpted to perfection. He wore face paint, and let his long hair hang down over his chiselled shoulders. He wore colourful ring attire, embellished with tassels on his biceps and boots.
Like the Warrior, I wanted to grow my hair long. Like the Warrior, I wanted to paint my face, and to accessorize with tassels, bracelets, cuffs and all manner of things. And like the Warrior, I did not want to look like a big hairy bear-man.
Let me be frank: I didn't like the Ultimate Warrior because he was the man that I wanted to be. I liked him because he seemed to me to be as close as one could get to being a girl while still conforming to the culture's codes of masculinity. My love for the Ultimate Warrior was an expression of an already queer approach to gender.
He would not have approved.
The man under the Warrior facepaint, Jim Hellwig, was a former bodybuilder who worked his way up to the then-WWF via a series of smaller promotions. Originally paired with fellow muscleman Steve Borden as one of the Blade Runners, a near-carbon copy of the fan-favourite Road Warriors tag team then tearing up the National Wrestling Alliance, Hellwig struck out on his own for World Class Championship Wrestling in Texas, home of the legendary (and legendarily cursed) Von Erich clan. In WCCW, the solo Hellwig redubbed himself the Dingo Warrior, and began to hone the snarling, ranting persona that would serve him so well in his promos. By this time, Hellwig had got on the WWF’s radar: liking what he saw, McMahon brought him in, rechristened as the Ultimate Warrior, in 1987. And Hellwig himself would complete this transition years later when, in the throes of litigation with the WWF over the rights to his name and gimmick, he would change his name legally to Warrior.
Another point of similarity there: like Warrior I, too, changed my name; and like him, the name I chose was freighted with symbolism, a declaration of intent. Anathema. A word meaning both cursed and blessed, unheimlich, tabu. A judgement pronounced, with extreme prejudice, on a thing or, in my case, a world reviled. 'I name myself Anathema,' I was fond of saying, in my melodramatic moments, 'because I am the judgement upon you.’ It sounded cool, it sounded tough and dangerous, it sounded unyielding. It sounded, in fact, a lot like the sort of thing Warrior would say in his promos.
And of course it shortened rather conveniently to Ana. So I could seem to have a less exotic name for those times when I had to seem banal. I don’t know if Warrior had a similar name he’d use, a short form, or if, on days when he was too tired to tell the whole story, he just asked folks to call him Jim. He didn’t seem the type, though.
It’s hard to imagine Warrior in normal life, even in what passes for normal life as a pro wrestler. Did it say Warrior on his gym membership card? What did cops think when he produced his driver’s licence? What name did he use on his steroid prescription?
In any case, normal life as a wrestler came to an end for Warrior shortly after the name change. Having burned his bridges with WWF and shaken rival promotion WCW down for as much as he could for an underwhelming comeback run, the erstwhile Hellwig diversified into philosophy and politics. And it was only at this point that those of us outside the business got our first glimpse of just how little he had been play-acting when he ranted, raved and flexed. This wasn't just living the gimmick, the way Randy Savage did when he trained himself to always speak in his trademark growl: this guy wasn't just playing. He believed it.
Just what he believed was difficult to say exactly. He had a word for it - destrucity - but that scarce made things any clearer. All we could gather was that it had something to do with being intense, something to do with being extreme, a lot to do with working out obsessively and shouting quasi-mystical bollocks and, to judge from the Warrior’s bizarre and short-lived comic book, beating up and stripping Santa Claus.
In a way it was almost a relief when Warrior's afterlife took a turn into more garden variety right-wing nutjobbery. He might have started touring college campuses shouting 'masturbate at home!' and 'queering doesn't make the world work!' at feminists and eating disorder survivors, but at least this was a madness we could understand - indeed, one with which, in the age of Trump, we have become all too familiar.
By the time I learned that Warrior had become an alt-right blogger avant la lettre I had already taken a lot of steps away from being the kind of 'little warrior' he would have approved of. I had started painting my face with actual make-up, and was getting pretty good at it; I was switching up my gender presentation a lot (while still not at the stage of realising I was actually transgender); I identified as bisexual; and I was involved in a kinky relationship in which a lot of our play centred on recreational grappling of the kind of which Warrior would definitely not approve (What can I say? I’ve always been a sucker for a girl with a good headscissors). And worse still, I had become the kind of wrestling fan who dismissed the Warrior’s overblown, 80s Superman style in favour of performers with better workrate and storytelling skill: workers like Samoa Joe, Shelton Benjamin and Awesome Kong, all of whom had bodies far removed from the Warrior’s ripped perfection.
I was evolving, in my own way, just as he had - but towards self-creation, rather than self-destruction (the model WWE used to describe Hellwig's transition before their latterday reconciliation with the man). And part of that evolution made it hard to think of my former hero in the same uncomplicated way I had that morning on the couch in my parents' front room.
I could never let him go completely - I still think about his furious energy when I have to psych myself up working out or preparing for a gig, and I will break into a recitation of his legendary pre-Wrestlemania VI 'Dead Pilots' promo at the most minatory inducement to do so - but somewhere along the way I had to let him go enough to let me be a better person.
I've been thinking a lot about how and to what extent we let go of our heroes lately, in the wake of the #MeToo revelations and, especially, Rose McGowan's recent wretched, public, transphobic breakdown. As a trans woman and a survivor of sexual assault myself, the latter is particularly hard to process. Hero-worship is always dangerous, yet hearing the stories of other survivors can inspire us to tell our own. But what do you do about survivors who then prove unwilling to listen to the stories of survivors they consider Other?
All of which is to say that I get why McGowan is important to many survivors of all genders and none, and I also know that if we want to grow both as a movement and as *people* then we need to let go of our heroes enough to allow us to grow. If McGowan is your hero, she doesn't have to also be your Buddha on the road, but you need to be aware and acknowledge that she has a serious blind spot about trans survivors, and adjust your sights accordingly. We should be better, even if - especially if - that means being better than our heroes. It's what we owe the world.
And yes, there is something bathetic about being inspired to these thoughts by reflecting on my teenage adulation of a face-painted carnival wild man, but any story which begins with two damaged women screaming at each other is plenty bathetic already. There is tragedy and grace in even the most reviled circumstances, and heroes too - if you know where to look for them. And how.
