How To Make A Wrestler Mad

Hey all, Ernie at Tedium here with a fresh piece from Andrew Egan, who decided to cover a topic that Tedium has never covered before. Anyway, while I go work out my wrestling persona, read on …

Today in Tedium: Have you ever endured the specific torture of listening to a diehard fan explain their love of whatever it is they love? If you happen to share the same passion, you just made a new friend. If you don’t get the appeal, you’ll endure a blitz of jargon, anecdotes, and backtracking to explain why the thing they just said was so interesting. This isn’t limited to any one fandom. Take your pick of niche interests, from Dungeons and Dragons to Mystery Science Theater 3000, if you don’t get the appeal, hearing about it isn’t likely to help. On occasion, very rare occasions, someone manages to explain it just right. While you don’t become a fan, you understand the appeal. This happened to me recently thanks to the help of comedian Dave Columbo. Today’s Tedium steps into the ring to explore the Montreal Screwjob, the incident that changed professional wrestling forever. — Andrew @ Tedium

(via the WWE website)

The man who set the course for modern wrestling as entertainment

To understand modern professional wrestling, you have to understand Vince McMahon. To him, wrestling is a family business. His father was a promoter that dabbled in wrestling, boxing, and pretty much anything to pay the bills. He was successful enough with wrestling that Vince followed into the business, seeing promise in new cable and satellite technologies. He wanted a national audience.

“In the old days, there were wrestling fiefdoms all over the country, each with its own little lord in charge,” he said in a 1991 Sports Illustrated article. “Each little lord respected the rights of his neighboring little lord. No takeovers or raids were allowed. There were maybe 30 of these tiny kingdoms in the U.S. and if I hadn’t bought out my dad, there would still be 30 of them, fragmented and struggling. I, of course, had no allegiance to those little lords.”

This 1999 issue of Cracked encapsulates the world of wrestling perfectly.

Say what you want about Vince McMahon, and people have said plenty, but the dude knows his way around a phrase. By the late 1990s, professional wrestling (or sports entertainment in company speak) had been consolidated into two competing companies, the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) and World Championship Wrestling (WCW), the latter being one of Ted Turner’s many endeavors.

McMahon was certainly the lord and master of the WWF, with the power to make superstars overnight. But back when he had competition for talent (the WCW would fold in 2001), McMahon occasionally lost headliners when contract negotiations failed.

This was the case when the WWF’s Survivor Series rolled around in November 1997. What transpired at the Pay-Per-View event would become legendary in wrestling history. And understanding exactly what happened shines a light on why wrestling fans love the spectacle.

The endless rabbit hole of wrestling and obscure trivia that is the “Montreal Screwjob”

This rabbit hole of wrestling history started when I saw friend/workplace proximity associate Dave Columbo hit the front page of Reddit with this post:

Since Dave is a fairly (reasonably?) well known comedian, I wasn’t surprised to see his face on my Reddit feed. It surprised me that he was a wrestling fan.

“Who wouldn’t enjoy a soap opera with strangleholds?” Dave defends.

Fair point. But wrestling always struck me as silly and juvenile, not something to be appreciated. Then Dave told me about the Montreal Screwjob.

In the late 1990s, Bret Hart was a bona fide wrestling superstar. The Canadian native held the WWF Heavyweight Championship belt and was arguably the most popular figure in the sport. However, he and Vince McMahon hit a wall in contract negotiations. Hart had other options and accepted a contract with the rival WCW. Seems pretty straightforward, right? Give me a second because this is about to get screwy.

“At this point ‘wrestling is fake’ isn’t even an argument,” Dave said. “Everyone is in on the fact that the undead mortician isn’t ACTUALLY fighting the matador for ownership of a golden belt. But the story and the illusion, or kayfabe as it’s called, has remained mostly intact as professional wrestling evolved over the last fifty plus years, we just enjoy it FOR the deception from reality. And I’m honestly surprised why more people don’t think of it as a genuinely special performance art.” (Emphasis there was from Dave.)

Kayfabe, the illusion fueling wrestling fandom, is at the core of the sport and it’s essential for understanding the Montreal Screwjob. Wrestling fans know its fake. They’ve always known. Maybe a few kids believe its real, like they believe in Santa Claus. But grown men watch and love wrestling. In fact, the median age of a professional wrestling TV viewer is 54. Unfortunately, most grown men are intimately aware of how punches are thrown in the real world.

McMahon himself is on the record as admitting wrestling is a staged spectacle. In fact, it’s the origin of the phrase “sports entertainment”. An article on the history of wrestling in the British newspaper The Independent (one of a series!) writes, “Ever the smart businessman, Vince McMahon decided that enough was enough. Having already torn up the wrestling landscape, he was going to do the unthinkable: he was going to come clean and reveal wrestling’s biggest secret.”

They go on to call his testimony before the New Jersey Senate as “the day the facade died”. He testified that wrestling is “an activity in which participants struggle hand-in-hand primarily for the purpose of providing entertainment to spectators rather than conducting a bona fide athletic contest.”

So wrestling outcomes are predetermined. Fans don’t mind, performers don’t mind, and the business keeps moving. Except it took a few years for that information to really take hold among the fan base. How these outcomes are determined, behind the scenes, had largely been cordial. Wrestlers knew the score and had no problem disappearing into the performance. They’re wrestling fans themselves. But happens when the only man with the power to break protocol decides to do it?

You get the Montreal Screwjob.

Bret Hart, left, and Shawn Michaels, during the fateful match in Montreal. (via WWE)

At the heart of the Montreal Screwjob was a massive slight

With Bret Hart primed to leave the WWF, he had to lose his championship belt. Every wrestler knew you couldn’t leave a company as the champion. Hart understood this but understandably wanted some say in when this happened. McMahon seemed willing to comply.

His requests weren’t substantial. (This is a common thread in stories about professional wrestlers. They are amazingly compliant, if you want further evidence check out that great Andre the Giant documentary on HBO.) All he wanted was to not lose his belt in front of a Canadian crowd. With something called the Montreal Screwjob, you can guess what happened.

The mechanics of the 1997 Survivor Series match between Hart and Shawn Michaels aren’t especially important for my purposes here. The two had a rivalry, all staged of course, but got along behind the scenes. They worked through their routine according to plan but Hart didn’t know that Michaels had been ordered to win. Just as Michaels was using Hart’s own signature finishing move against himself, the referee was ordered to call the match for Michaels. Hart lost his belt in front of his home crowd.

The Hitman went ballistic. He broke monitors and tables, he spit on McMahon. The boss just stood there and took it, reveling in the chaos he’d created. McMahon got what he wanted. A spectacle. Wrestling fans were in shock.

“At the time it was conflicting,” Columbo told me. “I was old enough to know wrestling wasn’t real but this was the first time I could remember the show really stopping cold. It would be like Anthony Hopkins forgetting a line doing Shakespeare, it was REALLY noticeable.”

Somehow in a sport where the outcome is predetermined, the Montreal Screwjob felt like a fixed fight.