Thwack!

Kick Ass Wrestling means sex, blood, and all-out mayhem.

by Chris Herrington

his ain’t your Saturday-morning-TV wrestling...it’s Kick Ass!”

Ron Guidry, the stage announcer for Kick Ass Wrestling, is fired up. It’s the fifth show for the upstart “hardcore” wrestling association since its June debut, and things are rolling.

Memphis has always been a hotbed of professional wrestling, from Sputnik Monroe to Jackie Fargo to Jerry Lawler. But while the Lawler-centered Power Pro Wrestling is still the grappling of record around these parts, K.A.W. is bidding to make Memphis a two-organization town. Kick Ass Wrestling’s string of live shows at the New Daisy Theatre on Beale has roughly coincided with the return of local TV wrestling via

PHOTO BY ROY CAJERO

WMC-TV 5’s Power Pro, but K.A.W.’s adult-oriented presentation makes Power Pro seem like just another Saturday-morning cartoon.

Kick Ass Wrestling is the result of a loose partnership between Thompson Beickert Visual Marketing and Media, a local advertising agency that handles the organization’s promotional needs; Terry Golden, a local wrestler who books talent and orchestrates the shows; and Guidry, a serious fan of the sport with connections on both the wrestling and media ends. Kick Ass Wrestling mostly features free-lance wrestlers who operate on the sport’s indie circuit, with Golden, the Jerry Lawler of K.A.W., as a mainstay.

What is Kick Ass Wrestling like? Well, the referee (“Alkie Holic,” an emerging K.A.W. folk hero) arrives with a six-pack of Bud in hand, one wrestler hands out cans of beer to the crowd before entering the ring, and a security guard has a cigarette dangling out of his mouth as he tends to a fallen grappler. All of this happens while the crowd moves from one unifying chant to another – stuff like “You Suck Dick!” or “Whup His Ass!” or, a personal favorite, “Ta-ble! Ta-ble!” This last erupts from the audience whenever a table enters into the action, which, if this night is a good barometer, is frequently. Three large, banquet-style folding tables meet their demise this night, each broken in half, each a victim to the inexorable grind of Kick Ass Wrestling.

Though calling this spectacle wrestling is a bit of a misnomer: You’ll see no sleeper holds or figure-four leg-locks during an evening of Kick Ass Wrestling, not even a good belly-to-belly suplex. “Scientific” wrestling is clearly for wusses. Instead, it’s a series of (barely) orchestrated brawls, where the blood flows almost as freely as the beer and as much action takes place outside the ring as in it.

Before the combat begins, a giant screen behind the ring conveys messages to the faithful. These range from the inexplicable (“Watch Wrestling All Night Long”) to the informational (“Hooters: Thursday night is wrestling night”). Hooters, Guidry later informs us, is a proud sponsor of Kick Ass Wrestling, though that is apparent from the sight of Hooters waitresses handing out flyers to the overwhelmingly male crowd. The mood is laid-back, if a little stifling – you could scoop the testosterone out of the air.

But then the lights dim and things change: The hard rock on the sound system gives way to hip-hop. Heads are bobbin’. Multiple beach balls are bouncing around among the crowd. The guys in the expensive seats ($15 to sit up on the stage, compared to $10 for general admission) are dancing (ah, the unbridled joy of first class in a capitalist system!). What sound like various tribal chants are emanating from different sections of the … um … arena. Guidry is strutting around the front row, cane in hand and mackalicious Derby resting atop his nearly bald scalp, meeting and greeting with his people. Party time.

“What’s up, Memphis!” Guidry exclaims upon entering the ring. “I bet there’s gonna be some blood in this ring by the main event,” he says to roars of approval. “Y’all wanna see some blood?”

And blood there is. Lots of it, and it’s all real, as are some of the injuries. A slogan found on a K.A.W. T-shirt proclaims “Live Hard, Die Hardcore.” At an event where the crowd is proudly referred to as “pimps and hos,” this philosophy is clearly an extension of the stupid fatalism of so-called gangsta rap, but lest you doubt K.A.W.’s commitment to “hardcore,” the main event this night is a “Taipei Death Match.” The “Taipei Death Match” consists of two wrestlers (Mad Man Pondo and Ox Harley) who wrap their fists in tape, dip them in glue and then in crushed glass (crushed beer bottles, actually), and then precede to, well, kick each other’s ass. The over-the-top finale finds Pondo stretching Harley over one of those unfortunate tables and then leaping onto him from the New Daisy’s balcony. Thwack!

And the crowd gets involved in the action as well. Spectators in the front row bring what in wrestling parlance are known as “foreign objects” to ringside for wrestlers to use on each other (“We encourage it,” says Guidry). You throw it into the ring, they beat each other up with it. While the usual assortment of bats and chains are in full effect, this night brings tools of mayhem as random as a steering wheel and what appears to be a large tape-recorder, which is repeatedly smashed over the head of assorted grapplers.

Another K.A.W. slogan, this one from a banner, reads: “Beer, Babes, Blunts and Blood.” The “babes” seem to be about as important a part of the show as the beer or blood. Whenever anything resembling a member of the opposite sex enters the ring, one helpful gentleman in the upscale section flashes a posterboard sign proclaiming “Show your titts” (sic). And he gets plenty of opportunities to take advantage of his First Amendment rights: Those Hooters girls are just a warm-up; between matches, Platinum Plus (another, no doubt proud, sponsor) “showgirls” in string bikinis are brought to the ring to toss free passes out to the crowd. There’s something unsettling about grown men leaping over entire rows and onto a beer-soaked carpet to grab free passes to a strip club, where the cover is probably minimal to begin with.

The sensational and debauched character of Kick Ass Wrestling is no great secret, of course. Mark Thompson, of Thompson Beickert, calls it “Springer in the Ringer.” Like that ubiquitous TV show, K.A.W. exploits the worst human impulses: misogyny, bloodlust, racial tension (one match features a black supremacist wrestler “lynching” a white opponent, which draws shouts of “Go back to Africa” from a couple of the paler members of the multi-racial crowd). But, like Springer, it’s also kinetic and funny in its own sleazy way. Kick Ass Wrestling is defiantly tasteless, which does have its merits. As the evening’s festivities wind down, Brian Thompson, also of Thompson Beickert, takes care to point out: “This isn’t for everyone.”

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Brecht for Dummies, and/or Wrestling Fans

Experimental theatre is the stuff of highfalutin cocktail conversation, while professional wrestling is the victim of an acute cultural snobbery. I contest that the two are not terribly dissimilar.

A fellow once approached me with the question, “Why doesn’t somebody do some good Brecht around here?” He was referring to Bertolt Brecht, the famed German innovator whose theories forever changed the way the world thinks about theatre.

“Do you like professional wrestling?” I asked. The fellow walked away with an indignant sniff. He wanted to engage me in a serious discussion concerning the shabby state of experimental theatre in Memphis, and I had responded like a guttersnipe. Had he stuck around he might have gotten what he wanted. What follows is a comparison between the life, plays, and theories of German playwright Bertholt Brecht, and the realities of professional wrestling.

The Audience:

Brecht thought that theatre was too stuffy. He felt the audience should be able to eat, and smoke cigars. Brecht wanted plays to be more like boxing matches. Wrestling is unstuffy and unpretentious. The audiences eat and smoke while cheering their heroes and hissing the villains.

The Plays:

Brecht’s plays consist of a series of independent scenes. Each scene revolves around a central action (gestus) and is therefore a complete and wholly independent entity, equal to, while existing inside of, the greater context of the play – or something like that. This is referred to as Epic Theatre. Similar in structure to Brecht’s plays, wrestling is a massive soap opera of allegiances, grudges, unstoppable factions, and unholy unions. Good guys turn bad, and bad guys become heroes, yet each match is a complete event with a definite winner and loser. Brecht gave us the Threepenny Opera, wrestling gave us the 30-Man Battle Royal. Brecht wrote Mother Courage. Wrestling gave us G.L.O.W.

Style:

Brecht invented a style of acting unlike any other. He called his invention “the Alienation Effect. The audience should never be tricked into believing that the actors are their characters, or that they are watching a real event. Like masterful puppeteers, the actors must manipulate their larger-than-life characters to keep the audience mentally engrossed, though emotionally detached. Brecht’s characters often appeal to man’s baser instincts. We all know that wrestling isn’t real. Wrestlers are skilled acrobats, stage combatants, and raucous, over-the-top performers. When they are on, you can throw yourself into every suplex and pile-driver, and get your bloodlust worked up real good – and it’s all guilt-free. No matter how painful it looks, you always know that (providing nothing goes wrong) nobody will be seriously injured.

Sex: Brecht’s male protagonists (Baal and Mack the Knife are among his most famous) are often cursed with a massive libido and extraordinary sexual prowess. Wrestlers, such as “Macho Man” Randy Savage and old-timer Sputnik Monroe (200 pounds of twisted steel and sex appeal) claim the same curse.

Politics:

Wrestling has always been political. It is the Circus Maximus where our country’s pride regularly beats the crap out of its prejudice. Who could have been a more perfect villain for post-WWII America than Memphis’ own Tojo Yamamoto? The ’70s energy crisis brought various evil sheiks onto the canvas to pummel and be pummeled, and for the jaded xenophobic, there have always been masked strangers from “parts unknown.” Brecht believed that theatre should be the tool of ideology, and his plays reflect that belief. Had Brecht abandoned theatre and chosen to become a wrestler during his brief tenure in the USA, he would have been cast as a bad guy. It was the McCarthy era, and Brecht was a communist.

More Politics: While testifying before the rabid Un-American Activities committee, Brecht denied that he was a member of the communist party. In similar fashion, Jerry “The King” Lawler appeared before the Mississippi Gaming Commission to argue that wrestling was not real. Finding little artistic freedom in the land of the free, Brecht returned to Europe. In wrestling, we all know – the loser leaves town.