25 years ago, US troops were fighting in Kuwait. John Lister explains why WWE’s attempts to profit from the conflict caused outrage and explores why wrestling and politics have always been uneasy bedfellows.
Sgt Slaughter was by no means the first foreign-sympathizing heel in wrestling. There were Terrible Turks dating back to the 19th century, while the post-second world war TV boom period was filled with goosestepping “Nazis” and underhand Orientals. And it wasn’t exclusive to the US: heroic native grapplers defending the country’s honour against oversized Americans was the core of the Japanese business for nearly three decades.
But the big difference was the timing. The likes of Mr Moto and Hans Schmidt took on their characters years after conflict had finished. Later on, while Khosrow Vaziri repackaged himself as the Iron Sheik during a crisis where Iran held 52 American citizens hostage for more than a year, his WWF title run and nationalistic feud with Sgt Slaughter came several years after the release of the hostages.
When Slaughter returned to the WWF in vignettes that first aired on 21 July 1990, there was no expectation of his military character being related to an active conflict. Neither viewers nor the WWF had any idea that 13 days later the 1.6 million-strong army of Iraq would invade Kuwait, quickly overpowering its defence force of just 16,000.
Initially Slaughter simply returned in his original heel role of an aggressive, bullying drill sergeant, the explanation being that he was disgusted by the audience’s acceptance of Nikolai Volkoff as a babyface. (That turn had been inspired by warming relations between the US and USSR, though to be on the safe side, Volkoff was now announced as from the particularly Western-friendly republic of Lithuania.)
However, by Survivor Series the politics of WWF storylines were changing. Slaughter was now accompanied by legitimate Iraqi Adnan Al-Kaissie (now known as General Adnan) and had pledged his allegiance to Saddam Hussein. During the show he directly addressed US troops who were watching the show free of charge on the Armed Forces Network and openly mocked them for having to eat their Thanksgiving dinner in a desert, surrounded by the aroma of camel dung.
While the show still pushed the Ultimate Warrior as one of the two top stars alongside Hulk Hogan, it’s clear in hindsight that plans for WrestleMania had already changed. While Slaughter and Hogan were in different matches, Hogan’s pre-bout interview mirrored Slaughter’s, with Hogan dedicating the match to the US troops and personally offering to go over to Iraq and win the war singlehanded.
Vince McMahon and company had a simple plan in place, with Slaughter winning the title from Warrior at the Royal Rumble and then losing it to Hulk Hogan at WrestleMania in the LA Coliseum, the theory being that a feud based around the war would do better business than a Hogan-Warrior rematch given the latter’s disappointing run on top.
The idea was that this would all take place against the continuing background of Operation Desert Shield, in which US troops spent several months camped in Saudi Arabia to prevent any further Iraqi advances, but showed no immediate signs of engaging in armed conflict. Indeed, this lengthy standoff even allowed an opportunity for Antonio Inoki to run a show in Baghdad in December 1990 and personally claim the credit for the release of several Japanese hostages.
As so often happens, real life events refused to develop in accordance with Vince McMahon’s timetable. Just a week after Survivor Series, the US gave Hussein a deadline of 15 January to withdraw from Iraq or face the consequences. Undeterred by the prospect of war interfering with plans, the promotion continued to build up the Warrior-Slaughter match and even made reference to the deadline in at least one promo.
With Hussein refusing to budge, the deadline passed and the US began airstrikes the following day, preparing for a ground invasion known as Desert Storm. Just three days after the war had started, Slaughter captured the title as planned. It proved a hugely controversial move both inside and outside WWE, with many feeling McMahon had crossed a line by “exploiting” what was now a military conflict with troops in harms way.
That argument was bolstered when Hulk Hogan visited US troops in what was no doubt a genuinely motivational appearance, only for WWE to use the footage as a promotional tool on the NBC The Main Event show on which the WrestleMania main event was confirmed.
While there was room for debate about the ethics of the storyline, there’s no arguing that it flopped in every aspect of business. The NBC show attracted the lowest audience ever for WWF programming and the sister Saturday Night’s Main Event show was cancelled after just one further episode. The WrestleMania pay-per-view drew barely half the audience of Hogan vs Savage two years earlier.
And most significantly the show had to be moved from the LA Coliseum to the adjacent Sports Arena. Officially the story went that the show had to be moved because of a security threat, with no question at all that low ticket sales were to blame. While Slaughter and Adnan most definitely had a worrying level of heat, the claim does not hold up. There was no clear explanation of why the Sports Arena should be any safer. More to the point, despite the fact that the Coliseum had a capacity of nearly 100,000 and the Sports Arena held around 16,000, nobody who’d already bought a ticket had to be refunded as a result of the move.
Despite the disappointing business, the fact that Hogan won decisively, and the ground war lasting just a matter of days, the WWF stuck with the feud for the rest of the summer, if anything stepping up the poor taste. The Iron Sheik returned as the Iraqi “Colonel Mustafa” while Hogan & Slaughter wrestled a “Desert Storm” match at Madison Square Garden. And in a reference to chemical weapons used by Hussein, the SummerSlam double main event of a Randy Savage-Miss Elizabeth wedding and a tag match featuring Slaughter’s group was introduced as “nuptials turn to napalm.”
Subtlety has of course never been a strong point for WWE. While the promotion bills itself as a scripted TV drama, its very nature means it often lacks the nuance to handle difficult issues in a sophisticated manner.
For example, while 24 is hardly the deepest or most complex of dramas, it captivated conservative and liberal viewers alike by confronting them with the realities of Jack Bauer having to take some unpleasant and even illegal measures to prevent wider bloodshed. Similarly Homeland has never shied away from the debate about the balance between civil liberties and security.
Compare and contrast that with WWE’s handling of the second Gulf War in 2003. It marked the occasion by holding a debate on Raw between Scott Steiner and Chris Nowinski, who gave opposing views about whether or not the US should have invaded to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
At first glance, Steiner came across as a parody of loudmouth jingoism, preferring volume over logic, while Harvard graduate Nowinski put forward a coherent, rational case against military action, citing international politics and the role of the United Nations.
However, Steiner was clearly portrayed as the babyface acting in the right, while Nowinski was shown not only as an arrogant academic, but as a villain who was using the debate solely as an opportunity to allow the tag team of Three Minute Warning and manager Rico to sneak-attack Steiner.
Even when wrestling has tried to handle politics in a more sophisticated manner that challenges the audience’s preconceptions, creative teams did not always stick the course. Perhaps the ultimate example came at the end of 2004 with the WWE debut of Muhammad Hassan. In his introductory vignettes, Hassan discussed having grown up as an ordinary American only to face prejudice as an Arab-American in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
On one reading, it appeared the characters of Hassan and sidekick Daivari offered a depth not formerly seen in ethnic characters, raising the possibility that once they made it into the ring they might be upstanding, decent competitors who tried to overcome the prejudice of villains or untrusting partners.
Instead, the pair’s first appearance turned out to be interrupting Mick Foley during a promotional speech for the Tribute to the Troops visits by WWE wrestlers to raise morale among US soldiers. Hassan introduced himself to the live crowd by questioning the patriotism of those who supported the troops and calling them “gutless cowards” while Mick Foley began citing the sacrifice of soldiers for the right of free speech, including naming individuals, and even declaring the WWE ring to be the only place where free speech and democracy were not allowed.
Once Hassan began wrestling, it soon became clear he was a typical rulebreaking villain. In many ways the character was more offensive than the traditional foreign heel. The storyline gave the clear implication that Hassan’s claims to be the victim of prejudice were bogus and part of a deceit. This wasn’t simply a case of portraying people from enemy countries which weren’t WWE markets as villainous. Instead it was a negative portrayal of Arab-Americans, many of whom would have been among the US fanbase. Meanwhile Foley’s comments went beyond patriotism and instead directly used the deaths of specific people as a way to promote the Hassan character.
Controversial as his entry to WWE may have been, Hassan’s departure would be even more infamous as the promotion proved once again incapable of responding to real world events. On 4 July 2005 at a Smackdown taping, the Undertaker beat Daivari. After the match, Hassan adopted a prayer-like position on the entrance ramp while five men clad in identical uniforms with black masks, tops and gloves and khaki combat trousers attacked Undertaker and choked him unconscious with wire. They then carried Daivari to the back accompanied by Hassan’s Arabic music theme in a scene announcers Michaels Cole and Taz directly likened to Daivari having made a martyr’s sacrifice.
At any other time, the incident’s clear Islamic terrorism overtones might have passed unmentioned. However, on the morning of the show’s scheduled North American broadcast, suicide bombers struck in London, killing 52 people. Despite the show being pre-taped, the segments still aired in the US and Canada. The subsequent outcry from mainstream media meant it was quickly pulled from the following night’s showings in Europe.
Amazingly WWE responded to the controversy by having Hassan address the issue on the following week’s Smackdown, “calling out” the media for wrongfully assuming the incident symbolised terrorism and describing the attackers as “Arabs in ski masks” when in fact they were portrayed by Caucasian actors. If the promo was meant as a defence for WWE, it was seriously undermined by the fact that Hassan’s character had long been established as making misleading claims of anti-Arabic prejudice and was not to be trusted.
Smackdown broadcaster UPN not only demanded to edit the promo (in the event it instead only aired on WWE’s website) but at the very least pressured, if not outright demanded, that WWE drop the character. Rather than switch Hassan to Raw (which aired on a different network) WWE instead chose to have Undertaker powerbomb him on concrete at the next pay-per-view and write the character out of storylines.
While there was talk of repackaging the characters, WWE decided to release the wrestler behind the Hassan character, Mark Copani, just two months later. While on the surface it appeared unfair he paid the price for a storyline developed by others, the scuttlebutt had it that his personal relationships with colleagues and management had been far from harmonious.
While Hassan’s character certainly had the intended villainous heat, the same can’t be said for some of WWE’s attempts to use nationality as the basis of a character before. As well as the Nowinski-Steiner debate, the promotion tried to capitalise on the Gulf War by packaging French-Canadians Rene Dupree and Sylvain Grenier as disgruntled Frenchmen who were upset at Steiners negative comments about France, which had opted against joining the invasion of Iraq. (The anti-French feeling in the US at the time was highlighted by the decision to rewrite cafeteria menus in Congressional buildings to offer “freedom fries” rather than French fries.) While the pair, and subsequent addition Rob Conway, had several tag title runs, their portrayal as cowardly pacifists somewhat limited their ability to pose a threat to top babyfaces.
Arguably the most tenuous foreign character came a decade earlier. Tony Halme was repackaged as Ludvig Borga, playing off his legitimate Finnish heritage. As a heel he had a good run with the All-American patriot Lex Luger and memorably ended the 21-month on-screen undefeated streak of Tatanka, before being derailed by injury. However, his character’s motivation was less impressive, with one of the main thrusts of his introductory vignettes being that the United States lacked the environmental responsibility of Finland.
22 years after Borga’s debut, the idea of foreign wrestlers being villainous remains, if not a staple of WWE programming, a trusted fallback. Indeed, when the promotion began to panic about falling ratings this autumn, its answer was to hit the reset button and come up with the heel stable of the League of Nations. In this situation it seems simply being foreign is enough to earn villainous status, despite the fact that of the four countries represented (the UK, Ireland, Bulgaria, and Mexico), three are among the US’s NATO partners and the other is hardly a political or military threat.
It’s one League of Nations member — Rusev — who illustrates why WWE’s attempts to mirror geopolitical realities are perhaps more limited than ever in 2015 however. A legitimate Bulgarian, he was repackaged as having moved to Russia just weeks after his full-time WWE debut, which raised some questions about his commuting schedule.
The explicit portrayal of Rusev and Lana as being supporters and even friends of Vladmir Putin brought back memories of the likes of the Koloffs and Nikolai Volkoff in the 1980s, but two developments showed things had changed. The first came shortly after a Malaysian Airlines flight was shot down by what proved to be a missile originating in Russia. Days later Lana referred to Americans unfairly blaming Russia for “the recent events.” While the wording was no doubt meant to allow plausible deniability, the mainstream media seemed confident it knew exactly what she meant and reacted accordingly, rather than simply ignoring wrestling as being below the radar.
Meanwhile the situation was complicated by the fact that, unlike in the 1980s, WWE not only airs on television in Russia (and offers the WWE Network there), but has run house shows in the country. The problems with the character were taken care of by local TV commentators for Raw and Smackdown who normally simply translate the US announcers, but made a point of using their own wording to praise Rusev as a superior athlete whose actions are justified.
Things got even more problematic when the Big Show pulled down a gigantic Russian flag that had been raised for Rusev on RAW. Not only did WWE have to quickly issue an apology “to the Russian people for the incident on Monday Night Raw that could have been construed as disrespect for their nation’s flag” but they then faced criticism from US viewers who felt the apology was hypocritical given how many WWE storylines involve heels making anti-American comments and gestures.
Earlier this year, Rusev ditched the Russian element of his character and once again represented Bulgaria. While there was a storyline explanation (stemming from his break-up with Lana), it came across as if management wanted to downplay the political element of the character. Indeed, it’s notable that Rusev has retained his heritage now he has reunited on screen with Lana and he is now a more generic foreign villain.
The Rusev situation may be a sign that, for several reasons, WWE may be unlikely to again repeat such a blatant exploitation of military conflict as the 1991 Slaughter angle. Between today’s audience being more sophisticated and media-savvy, the increased risk of controversial storylines getting negative mainstream attentions, the growing complexity of military conflicts with no clear national enemies, and the need to serve a truly international audience, it seems that WWF may finally have to agree with Edwin Collins’ view that war is good for absolutely nothing.
