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THE WWF RETURNS TO SAGINAW Or How I Got Sucked Back Into Wrestling By Randy Chandler Saturday, October 13th marked the return of the World Wrestling Federation to Saginaw. For the first time in five years, sports entertainment's brightest stars brought the violence and spectacle of pro wrestling to our own backyard, the new reinvigorated Saginaw County Events Center, now under the superb direction of Allan Vella. The wrestling phenomenon, like Heavy Metal & Bell-Bottoms, pops up every so often to take hold of our collective psyches. People almost seem to go in phases with it. I myself was an avid follower of the 'sport' in my mid-teens - the era of Randy 'Macho Man' Savage, Hulk Hogan and Jimmy 'Mouth of the South' Hart. Every Saturday afternoon before band practice was spent in front of the tube either drooling over Savage's girl Elizabeth, or laughing my ass off at Honky-Tonk Man and George 'The Animal' Steele. It had been several years since I watched wrestling when I found myself in a communal situation with another family (No, this did not occur anywhere near a trailer park). Like an old soap opera I used to watch when I was unemployed and without cable, I was sucked back into it. But this wasn't the wrestling I grew up on. No, this beast had mutated. It had become darker, dimensional, and more intensely brutal - as well as sillier and more cartoonish. The wrestlers weren't athletes anymore - they were characters (some written better than others). They have a good/evil complex going from hero to villain and back to hero, sometimes in a week's time. We not only see their pre-match interviews, we now watch their very lives unfold. People are stalked. Lives are threatened. Relationships are torn asunder. Brother turns against brother. The violence has escalated as well. Sleeper holds and snap suplexes have given way to rock bottoms, stone cold stunners, and the walls of Jericho. Everything is a weapon now - folding chairs, conference tables, garbage cans, championship belts, even the ring bell get bounced off someone's noggin weekly. And the Elizabeth's of yore looked like Quakers compared to Lita, Trish Stratus, and Torrie Wilson. Roles & divisions have broken down (as if they were all that sterling to begin with) to the point where the 7-foot 500-pound BIG SHOW (rumored to be Andre the Giant's son) can face 5-foot, 150-pound Spike Dudley - and not much later, become his tag-team partner against his own kin! At the moment, the WWF is under siege by the Alliance, a partnership of two 'lesser' wrestling organizations, ECW & WCW. This is part of a large family drama: Vince McMahon owns the WWF. His son, the annoyingly cocky Shane McMahon owns the WCW. He bought it to get back at his Dad for institutionalizing his Mom. Vince's spoiled superbitch daughter, Stephanie McMahon Helmsley (she's married to wrestler Triple H - not the guy on The Jeffersons) went right out and bought ECW just to spite her father. Linda, Vince's wife, meanwhile has foiled her husband's treachery and retaken her place as CEO of WWF. Her most recent action has been reinstating former commissioner and fan favorite Mick Foley. Inter-federational matches abound, and one federation's title belt may be on the shoulder of the enemy - witness the Alliance's leader, the paranoid turncoat Stone Cold Steve Austin with the WWF Champ Title, while the WCW title belongs, at least this week, to multimedia superstar The Rock. WWF members have defected to The Alliance, probably to fill out their ranks. Since I have yet to see Sting, Goldberg, or Kevin Nash (wait a minute - they might be part of the N.W.O. - god it's all so confusing) materialize. The near capacity crowd at the SCEC proved how pervasive this mania has become. The stereotypical wrestling fan (under-educated trailer park residents) has been joined by professionals from all walks of life and their families. I was not surprised at the number of children there, nor did I have any qualms about letting my 7-year old daughter attend. In fact, some of the kids I know have a better grip on the 'reality' of wrestling than some of the adults. Although a stripped-down affair - gone were the giant video screens, the cool entrance way and all pyrotechnics - the event treated us to personal appearances by The Hardy Boyz with Lita, The Dudley Boyz, Scotty Too Hotty, Chris 'Y2J' Jericho, Edge & Christian (the brother vs. brother match) and a main event title match for the hardcore championship between Raven and Rob Van Dam (a Battle Creek native who resembles Jean Claude's more buff little brother). The event wasn't televised, which explains the absence of the more 'high profile' stars (Austin, Rock, The Undertaker, et.al) as well as the glitzier trappings of, say, UPN's Thursday Night Smackdown or TNN's Monday Night Raw. But with the response this has garnered in our community, the next one may be. And yes, I know it's not real. If it was, it couldn't be nearly this much fun.
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