wrestling / Columns
Don’t Think Twice 07.26.08: My Back Pages, Part II
Fighting off the Viet Cong.
They’re still there, he’s all gone.
He had a woman he loved in Saigon,
I got a picture of him in her arms now.
– Born in the U.S.A. by Bruce Springsteen
Last week I set out on a journey to discover why I’m a fan of professional wrestling. I began by writing about my father and my grandfather, both of whom hated professional wrestling. But in the end I came to see that the disdain for professional wrestling shared by my father and my grandfather could only shed light on why I was never supposed to be a fan of professional wrestling in the first place. The story of their disgust and intolerance is not the story of my love. And so in order to truly begin my story, the story of my life as a fan of professional wrestling, I must look outside my family. I must look at the world in which I was raised. The culture in which I was raised. The unique time at which I was raised. The 1980’s.
I was born in 1979, when Jimmy Carter was still President and disco was still popular. But I remember nothing of my time in the 70’s or my life in Jimmy Carter’s America. My memories begin in the next decade, in the 80’s, in Ronald Reagan’s America. And I kid you not, the following story is absolutely true. My very first memory is of Christmas Eve, 1982. My parents and I had gone over to my grandmother’s house, only a few miles from our own house in suburban Chicago, for dinner and to exchange Christmas presents. My half-sister and my half-brother, my father’s children from a previous marriage, had already graduated from college and gotten married by then, and that evening they were also at my grandmother’s house, along with their spouses. As I said, my very first memory is of that night. But I don’t remember what we had for dinner or what my parents gave me. I don’t remember what I was wearing or what my grandmother gave me. I don’t remember the ornaments on the tree or what my sister gave me. But I do remember one thing. I remember one small box. I remember what my brother gave me. It was the G. I. Joe RAM, the Joes’ motorcycle of choice. And for better or worse, it changed my life.
G. I. Joe had been a favorite of boys across America since his debut as a 12″ figure in 1964, but the popularity of the line had declined by the late 1970’s. The line was in mothballs by the beginning of the 1980’s, but the seeds of its return would be planted at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York. When the U.S. hockey team defeated the Soviet Union in the fabled Miracle on Ice, a new wave of patriotism swept across the country, fueled by our on-ice victory over our Cold War enemies. The men on that 1980 U.S. hockey team became more than just hockey players. They became more than just Olympians. They became heroes. Real American Heroes. And it was that image of a team of Real American Heroes that would serve as the basis of Hasbro’s reimagining of G. I. Joe. Instead of a singular hero known only as G. I. Joe, the line would now be centered around a team of military specialists, each with their own name and unique, colorful personality. And the Joe’s would have their own arch enemy, Cobra, a menacing threat more terrifying than even the Soviet hockey team. G. I. Joe would be shrunk down from 12″ to 3¾” and reborn as G. I. Joe: A Real American Hero.
The new G. I. Joe: A Real American Hero line debuted in 1982 and quickly became a phenomenon. Maybe my brother was aware of that when he bought me my first G. I. Joe motorcycle for the Christmas of 1982. Maybe he wanted me to be part of what was to come. Or maybe he remembered his own childhood and how much he enjoyed playing with his own G. I. Joes. Maybe he wanted to pass some of that joy on to me. Or maybe was just looking for a present for the kid brother he hardly knew. Maybe it was just the first thing he saw. But whatever the reason, whatever his motivation, whatever his intentions, he had given me a gift that would change my life. He had just introduced me to my very first hero.
Of course, as my father found out seconds later when I tore into the box, some assembly was required. Oh, and the figure pictured on the front of the box, bravely riding into battle, ready to defend the good old U.S. of A.? Yeah, he was sold separately. And so in the middle of the evening’s festivities, my father darted out of the house and down to the corner drug store, returning moments later with Zap, my very first G. I. Joe figure. And the rest, as they say, is history. I’ve been collecting G. I. Joes ever since, for more than 25 years at this point. My collection is somewhere between impressive and alarming, between astounding and disturbing, between breath-taking and mind-boggling, depending on your point of view. And I see now that what has kept me collecting G. I. Joes for a quarter of a century is the same thing that drew me to them in the first place. I’m searching for heroes. In this case, Real American Heroes.
The question of why I search for heroes, why I believe in heroes, maybe even why I need heroes, is a question for another day and another column. But now at least I know where and when that search began. It began in my grandmother’s house on Christmas Eve, 1982. It began when my brother introduced me to my first hero, a hero that had just been reintroduced to America. It began with my very first memory. And as such, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t searching for heroes. As much as anything else, and maybe more so, that search has been the story of my life. The members of the G. I. Joe team were my first heroes. They fought for freedom wherever there was trouble. They never gave up. They stayed till the fight was won. They were all that you could ever hope for in a hero if you were a young boy growing up in the 80’s, in Ronald Reagan’s America. Well, except for one small detail. You see, the brave men and women of the G. I. Joe team were many things. They were strong and fast. They were honest and truthful. They were noble and courageous. And unfortunately, they were fictitious. The members of the 1980 U.S. Hockey team were Real American Heroes. But the members of the G. I. Joe team? At the end of the day, they were just stars and stripes and o-rings.
Sure, the reimagined G. I. Joe mythology was steeped in the politics and emotions of the real world. Duke, Stalker, Snake-Eyes, and Storm Shadow had all served in “Southeast Asia,” which of course was the politically correct, kid-friendly way of saying that they’d seen action in Vietnam. The distrust of the military that transformed a used car salesman into Cobra Commander was a very real emotion voiced by countless protesters and radicals during the 60’s and 70’s. The uniforms and weapons and vehicles looked perfectly realistic, at least for the first few years. But as much as the storylines and mythologies tried to embed G. I. Joe in the real world, the fact remained that these brave heroes were ultimately nothing more than fictional characters. And the problem with fictional heroes is that you always have to wonder, somewhere in the back of your mind, if real people could ever actually be so heroic. At the end of the day, fictional heroes are nothing more than words and pictures and hopes and dreams. Their ability to inspire us is finite, because their victories are always tempered by the cold hard fact that those victories never really occurred. Fiction can only go so far to inspire reality.
Of course, as a young boy I certainly hadn’t given this much thought to the notion of heroes. But on some level or another I did understand that fictional heroes had their limits. Sure, at that age I was probably just upset that I’d never be able to shake hands with Hawk or get Flint’s autograph. The members of the G. I. Joe team were action figures and cartoon characters and soldiers and heroes. But I knew that they would never be real. I made my peace with it and moved on, tucking away those lingering questions about the limitations of fictional heroes. Hey, the 80’s were a simpler time, maybe because childhood was a simpler time. It was alright to bury your questions and doubts. But all of that changed some time in the mid 80’s when I learned something shocking. Something perplexing. Something both wonderful and confusing all at the same time. I learned that one of my G. I. Joe heroes was a bit less fictional than I had originally been led to believe. In fact, he was real. A flesh and blood Real American Hero. And his name was Sgt. Slaughter.
I hope you can appreciate what a radical paradigm shift this was for me. Sgt. Slaughter was one of my favorite G. I. Joe characters, a man with the constitution of a vending machine, the only man tough enough to train the Renegades and maybe even make them into real soldiers. In 1987’s G. I. Joe: The Movie, Slaughter barked one of my favorite lines of all time. “It’s time you learned we’re a team, Red Dog. We all go home, or nobody goes home.” I still use that line today. Granted, I usually use it at a bar when one of my friends starts bitching and whining, trying to sneak out and go home half an hour before last call, but the point is that it’s still an integral part of my vernacular. But as much as I liked Sgt. Slaughter, and as much as his most classic lines would resonate with me for years to come, to me he was still just another member of the G. I. Joe team. He was no more or less real to me than Gung-Ho or Roadblock or Shipwreck. Until, of course, I found out that he was much more real than those other Joes. Until I found out that he was as real as you or me.
Now you may be asking why it took me so long to find out that Sgt. Slaughter was a real man. I mean, he was a world famous professional wrestler. How could I not have heard of him outside of the context of G. I. Joe? The answer, of course, goes back to the fact that professional wrestling was forbidden in my household. I barely knew who Hulk Hogan was in the 80’s, and I’d never heard of Randy Savage or Jake Roberts or even Ric Flair. I lived in a world devoid of professional wrestling, and thus devoid of Sgt. Slaughter the wrestler. I knew him only as an action figure, as a cartoon character, as a Real American Hero. And so even when I found out that he was a real person, even when I found out that he was a world famous professional wrestler, I had quite a bit of difficulty finding out more about him. I had missed his Alley Fight with Pat Patterson and his Boot Camp Match with the Iron Sheik, and it would be years before I had the chance to see those matches on DVD. Without the aid of the internet or the courage to sneak an issue of PWI into the house, I had to rely on word of mouth to stay informed of Slaughter’s in-ring activities. I was thrilled when I heard that he had become WWF Champion, but my informants failed to mention that he had also become an Iraqi sympathizer. When I learned that he was feuding with Hulk Hogan, I only naturally assumed that Hogan must have lost his mind and turned evil. Having never been given the chance to be a Hulkamaniac, and in the absence of more detailed information, it was only natural for my loyalties to remain with my real-life Real American Hero.
And that was essentially what Sgt. Slaughter was to me at the time. He was a real-life Real American Hero. An action figure and a cartoon character come to life. And what fascinated me most about this real-life Real American Hero was that he was not a soldier or a policeman or a fireman. He was a professional wrestler. For years I had been told that no good could come from watching professional wrestling, that it was a cheap and tawdry form of entertainment. And yet now I was confronted with the notion that one of my heroes was, in fact, a rather successful part of what I had been lead to believe was a very un-heroic industry. And so I had to ask myself the following questions. Was Sgt. Slaughter less of a hero than I had come to believe? Was he really just another dirty, disgusting professional wrestler and not a man to be respected? Or, if that was not the case, then had I possibly been misled as to the true nature of professional wrestling? Could it ever be something more than the basest form of entertainment, a filthy racket pandering to the lowest common denominator? And then came the million dollar question. Could professional wrestlers be heroes?
It would be years before I was able to have enough access to professional wrestling to begin to answer any of those questions. But in the interim my questions persisted and my curiosity grew. Because while I knew very little of Sgt. Slaughter as a professional wrestler, I still knew that he was a G. I. Joe. I still knew that he was a Real American Hero. And maybe, just maybe, that meant that the man who was one of my heroes when I knew him only as a fictional soldier could also be one of my heroes as I became reacquainted with him as a real-life professional wrestler. I see now that when my brother introduced me to G. I. Joe in 1982, when my brother introduced me to my very first hero, he had also inadvertently set me on the path to discovering a whole new set of heroes. Despite the wishes of my father and my grandfather, my brother had accidentally started me down the road to becoming a fan of professional wrestling.
I’ll be on vacation next week, so Michael O will be filling in for me and telling us the story of how and why he became a fan of professional wrestling. When I return, I’ll start to explore how my curiosity that began with Sgt. Slaughter gradually morphed into fanatical fandom and how, at almost every step of that journey, my life as a fan of professional wrestling seemed to be guided by an Icon, a Main Eventer, a Show Stopper on a journey of his own. So I’ll see you back here in two weeks as I continue to turn my back pages.
