Hogan was splitting time between the AWA and Japanese promotions at the time. He didn’t become a star because of the movie; it happened in 1983, when McMahon rehired him and gave him the belt.
You can watch it here. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NYQ0coy7TbQ
They brought him back and made him a star greatly because of the movie. Hogan was a heel and mostly out of the big wrestling scene. Backland was the champ. Iron sheik was the big heel. They brought in Hogan and he was touted as the “Star of Rocky III!” The movie was certainly the catalyst to his fame in the WWF. His time between movie, entering into the WWF and getting the belt was very short. No movie, no belt.
That’s debatable. It’s certainly no conincidence that Hogan’s HUGE push coincided with his tag-teaming with Mr. T in the first Wrestlemania. Hogan owed a lot of his early press to Rocky III.
I think **FordTaurusSHO94 *has the end of kayfabe pretty well nailed. As far as when matches started being “worked” as a matter of course, Lou Thesz claims it was probably around 1900. A common practice was for a legit wrestler with great submision moves–a “hooker” in Thesz’s parlance–to go around the region working county fairs. His hype man would start the show by yelling that the “champion” would take on all comers. Group dynamics being what they are, no one would want to be the first to come forth. Then some guy would run up to the ring claiming he could “lick the sonofabitch,” and so the match began. This would be a close, drawn-out affair, with the champion on the brink of losing many times, until, exhausted, he would manage a pin or submission. Then the hype man would holler for the next challenger. Now you would see some local hero come up. After all, the champ was shot and, frankly, didn’t look so tough after almost losing. Of course, said local hero would be screaming for mercy in about a minute, usually caught in some arcane submission like a double wristlock (or “Kimura” to MMA fans). Another guy, thinking this was a fluke, would be the next to take his turn, with similar results. The champ would go through a few folks like that until the local got tired of having their joints hyperextended.
As you probably guessed, the first match was a “work.” The challenger was a confederate, and the two wrestlers would put on a great facsimile of a close, hard-fought wrestling match. While the champ was disposing of local talent, a couple more confederates would be working the crowd, making money taking side bets. According to Thesz, this admixture of “real” and “fake” persisted for a long time in professional wrestling. Through the 1920s, promoter feuds over territory would often be settled by combat between the quarreling parties’ best wrestlers.
As time went on, more and more “performers” (impressive-looking guys who couldn’t really wrestle competitively) made their way into the business. In 1925, some big promoters tried to push football star Wayne Munn as world champion. The guy would bring the crowds to their feet by winning matches via flying tackle, which was much more impressive visually than a double wristlock. Then a legit wrestler named Stanislaus Zbyszko decided he didn’t want to play, and there wasn’t much Munn could do about it. For decades after that, the “champion” of a promotion would almost always be a legit wrestler. WWF champs Superstar Billy Graham and Hulk Hogan (who has some wrestling training, but wouldn’t have stood a chance against someone like Antonio Inoki) were two of the first real exceptions to this. It really spoke to the control of the promoter that the McMahons felt comfortable putting their belt on guys who couldn’t compete for real.
To an extent, having guys who weren’t “real” wrestlers compete as champions may have been another hastening factor in the demise of kayfabe; it was increasingly “just a show” with no pretense of sport. When a group of pro wrestlers (including “bad guy” Ric Flair and “good guy” Tim Woods) were injured in a 1975 plane crash, there was real concern that kayfabe would be broken, since these guys were supposed to hate each other. Woods was in (barely) good enough shape to work a short match the next night, preserving the illusion that these guys really didn’t socialize outside the ring. At the time, promoters really feared that, if this became public knowledge, the business would be over. Then in 1987, mortal enemies Hacksaw Jim Duggan were pulled over in the same cocaine-laden car. This made national news, but nobody really cared. This, too, may have hastened the demise of kayfabe.
*Some purists claim these are two different holds, but the nuances are so subtle, and the hold’s application so inconsistent depending on circumstances, that this is a pretty trivial distinction.
Hogan had worked the WWWF prior to his re-emergence after Rocky III. He had been on approved loan from Verne Gagne’s AWA promotion. The movie was the stimulus for Vince to offer Hogan the title and pay him enough to jump ship altogether. Gagne (according to wrestling lore, remember it’s all lies) offered to pay the Iron Sheik to injure Hogan as punishment. The Iron Sheik turned him down and went on to became a major star in the WWF. All of wrestling was changing at this point as a younger generation became fans of the sport and the non-athletic entertainment portion of the shows grew in importance. The new generation of wrestlers was never as convinced of the reality of the sport as the older generation appeared to be. But I don’t think the older generation thought it was all that real either, it’s just suspension of disbelief to make the show more interesting.
I’ve heard the Iron Sheik story before, but I’ve never put a lot of stock in it. Perhaps the one consensus in all of professional wrestling is that the Iron Sheik is nuts. There may be some debate about whether or not it’s a good kind of nuts, but no one is saying that this guy is a stable, solid citizen. Everybody who ever worked with the guy has a Sheik story; the man was a menace to be around. (A fun menace, to be sure, but a menace nevertheless.) If others have backed up the story, fine, but when you quote the Iron Sheik, you quote perhaps the most unreliable character in a population of unreliable characters.
Keith Richards, Shane MacGowan, and the Iron Sheik are the three guys under 70 who most surprise me by their continued survival.
In that scene from Rocky III, Thunderlips was taunting Rocky as he was pummeling him in the ring. Rocky was in serious pain, (as the announcers shockingly noted) and Thunderlips was being sarcastic. “It’s all fake, right Meatball?! All fake!! If I can’t break your spirit, I can sure as hell break your back!!”
And thinking that this particular scene from a scripted movie is somehow an admittance of wrestling being fake is ludicrous. He was reading from a script. It was a fictional move.
Be careful of what you say about the Iron Sheik. He will put you in the camel clutch and fuck you with his big 10 inch dick. For someone who claims to be straight he is obsessed with anal rape.
This true. Even in pro wrestling a reputation like his can’t be made out of whole cloth.
In his WWE HOF speech, The Iron Sheik also tells that same story, but says he wanted to be loyal to McMahon because he didn’t want to bite the hand that was feeding him.
He managed to avoid wishing death to Jose Canseco and The Ultimate Warrior in that same speech.
For bonus points, consider what Rocky is saying right before that: the match starts, they’re circling each other in the ring, and our hero breezily says, “Listen, why don’t we just move around a little bit, y’know, and, like, give 'em a good show: first I’ll chase you, then you’ll chase me, okay? How’s that? All right?”
So (a) they apparently haven’t rehearsed this – or even discussed it – beforehand, and (b) while Rocky thinks they can now amiably choreograph a little pre-arranged play-acting, Thunderlips is about as receptive as Ivan Drago would be.
Both freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling, the non-scripted variety, is in the Olympics. That of course is different from the scripted wrestling we are talking about in this thread.
It is just a movie. But in 1983 rehearsals were rare in that sense. The rehearsals were wrestlers competing against each other repeatedly in different venues and using a small set of stock moves. An actual charity exhibition like that wouldn’t have been conducted without establishing ground rules first. But if a boxer had issued a real challenge to a wrestler, he’d end up in far worse shape than Rocky did.
ETA: Should have said real challenge to a* real *wrestler. For all I know Rocky could have beat up that lame ass Hogan.
In one of his books, Mick Foley relates stories about the Iron Sheik and pretty much confirms that yes, the guy is bonkers.
Also, Bob Backlund is apparently not just nice, but scary nice.
Judge for yourself.
The Sheik has a strong amateur background. He even coached. He was a smaller guy then at 180 lbs.
IIRC, there was a female wrestler who spoke out against McMahon in the 90’s after she was punished for refusing to participate in an evening gown match in which it was scripted that her breasts be “accidentally” exposed. That was the first time I recall hearing a public statement from an insider verifying that wresting was fake. I’m not sure if this predates McMahon’s admission at his trial.
Sorry for no cite, but the safesearch filter on this computer is making it hard for me to research the topic. It won’t even allow me to display the entry for “Chyna” on Wikipedia.:smack:
In the early '80s I went to a match at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh (Sgt. Slaughter vs. Iron Sheik top of the card). I guess I was about 14 or so. Bob Backlund was on the undercard vs. some jobber.
As Backlund walked past me to the ring, I yelled, “He’s still the champ!”
Backlund turned around, yelled, “Who said that?”, found me, and put me in a bear hug.
He proceeded to tell me how grateful he was that he had fans like me, he does it all for us kids, yadda yadda; but I believed the guy. He seemed genuinely surprised and pleased that some nobody kid was still a big fan.
I’ll never forget that.
They actually tried to make Backlund a heel. It didn’t work.
That was back when WWF was badmouthing WCW for having over the hill main eventers. They then had Backlund go over Bret Hart…
My post stated they were both in the Olympics. It also stated that anything goes in the professional circuit referred to in this thread. So I don’t really get what point you’re trying to make, since nothing you wrote contradicts anything I said.