Wacky Wrestling Theory 7.03.08: Hair

Yes, wrestlers with short hair are better than wrestlers with long hair, I said it. Somebody had to. Is it true? In theory, sure, the case can be made.

With every movement of the body in the wrestling ring, long hair flails about. When a head moves backwards in response to a striking blow, the longer the hair the more streamers will follow the head like the tail on fireworks. When a tired wrestler with long hair is rising off the canvas, the hair droops from their head like heavy curtains on a stage. When a wrestler gets energized, their long hair can bounce like the cape of a super hero. If the length of the hair superficially enhances the movements of the wrestlers, then I would argue that those with little or no hair do not have the luxury of this exclamatory special effect on their moves and thus must use more physical and dramatic skill in the ring.

This is the unplugged theory of pro-wrestling. Many people believe that musicians are at their best when they do not rely on electric effects and flamboyant stage shows, and are just stripped down, acoustically pure artists. Wrestlers of course, do not have instruments through which they translate their artistic vision; they are artists who use their bodies as their tool. Therefore, the more they decorate their bodies they more they may be visually stimulating but also secretly distracting the audience from deficiencies in their ability.

Before you dismiss this as being too wacky, think about this; all (most) wrestlers shave their body hair. They do not need to be smooth to avoid the grip of the other wrestlers, like in MMA, since this is a predetermined performance, so in theory they could easily wrestle with body hair. Therefore shiny, hairless skin must be an aesthetic choice. Someone, long ago, believed that men in pro-wrestling look better with no hair on their bodies and thus they shave down as a regular ritual in order to give this pleasing appeal to the audience. Could it be that they are trying to look like real fighters or Olympic athletes and they are lulling the audience into acceptance of the scripted nature of their performance? If this is so, then would it not make sense to be completely hairless? The hair on the head works as the first signal that wrestling is not real and starts the distraction away from the pure artistry and leads to flashy trunks, flamboyant robes, face paint, elaborate tattoos and so on.

I think the best wrestlers must wrestle at some point, in their prime, with extremely short hair in order to prove that they truly are the greatest. Of course, there are many wrestlers with various lengths of hair, and many great wrestlers who have wrestled with various lengths of hair at different points in their careers. I won’t specifically list of wrestlers with each length of hair and then compare them, as that would take all day, but I encourage you to debate amongst yourselves. I want to look at four wrestlers who all have distinct claims at one point in time as being the best wrestlers in the world, Triple H, Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair and Stone Cold Steve Austin.

Triple H
The long blond, rocker hair that streams down the head of Triple H is as pedigreed as his own wrestling skill. Here is a man who obviously takes great pride in his flowing locks, as his full-bodied hair often screams Pantene more than badass. It is not so much Triple H the long-haired wrestler I want to look at, but his opponents of note.

Online fans often criticize Triple H for holding back other wrestlers. The theory that short-haired wrestlers are better than long haired wrestlers proves that this criticism of Triple H is unfair. The wrestlers who Triple H was able to rise above in popularity include Chris Jericho, Booker T, RVD, Test, Kane, Eddie Guerrero, Eugene, and they are all coincidently have long hair. While wrestlers such as Austin, Rock, Angle, Benoit, Cena, Batista, Goldberg and Orton are all short haired or bald wrestlers who were able to get major victories over Triple H and received massive pushes by the WWE despite the supposed power and ego of Triple H. The staggeringly obvious list of contrasting quality performers proves that it is not Triple H who is holding these wrestlers back, but their own barber!

Ric Flair
There is no hair with more flair that the do atop the dome of this legendary Ric. Flair comes from a time when old school tough guys ruled the roads and classic archetypes told a mythological story in the ring. In that era, a cowboy hat or shoeless feet told a story to the audience about the personality of that wrestler that didn’t need vignettes, microphoned arguments or magazine profiles. Flair’s hair made him part of the fabric of pro-wrestling iconography at the time, the natural successor to the cocky, handsome, gusto of a Buddy Rogers or Freddie Blassie. As the times changed, so did Flair, but his hair was still a hold over from another time, a time when hair spoke for you.

One criticism against Flair’s in-ring ability was that he did not have the offense to support long ‘babyface’ runs, he was too much the sniveling, heel opportunist. The way he would shake his head in fear at the comeback of the hero was done with such perfection thanks to his fluorescent head that Flair may have become complacent in the safety of his standards. When he was in his prime (as a bad guy and not as an old legend who could not be boo-ed) Flair was rarely effective as a good guy. His moves did not seem to translate well on the other shade of the moral compass. Just like his reliance on his long hair to accentuate his personality, Flair did not want to alter his wrestling style for the sake of playing a hero. We may have gotten to see the greatest bad guy of all-time, but unless he can effectively portray both sides of this scripted world, can he truly be considered the all-around greatest?

Although you cannot breath the phrase, ‘greatest wrestlers of all time,’ without exhaling Ric Flair’s name, his long hair makes it difficult for me to believe that he should be considered the single greatest wrestler ever. And yes, Flair did have shorter hair during a few runs in WCW, but these were particularly poor and openly criticized by Flair in his autobiography. So whereas Flair could not handle the state of shorter hair, there is one man who proved he was just as capable in the main event slot as he was skilled in the ring and he was bald. More on that comparison later, first let’s look at the man most would consider to be the biggest crossover star in pro-wrestling history.

Hulk Hogan
Not exactly long hair and not exactly short hair, Hogan in his prime had a truly unique bald top ring and straight long back and sides that made his image recognizable worldwide. Hogan’s difficult to categorize head of hair is a perfect symbol for his enigmatic icon status in the wrestling community. Some consider Hogan’s box office value as the only proof necessary that he should be considered the greatest wrestler ever, while others chide his technical wrestling skill as being so poor that he could never match other legends. Regardless of the subjective debates, unlike Flair, it cannot be denied that Hogan was as prolific a star on the ‘face’ side as he was on the ‘heel’ side. Just as his hair is in the middle between long and bald, so is his reputation.

Without the assistance of flipping and wildly posable hair, Hogan was still able to wrestle an entertaining match, yet his ‘selling’ of other moves was often criticized and I don’t think that this was due to his lack of hair but more because of his lethargy for the intricacies of the art while carving out a new style of wrestler in the global, capitalist, market place. It was the work of a middle ground, half-bald Hogan that was the bridge between intelligent, old school master and commercial performer. Stone Cold Steve Austin was the wrestler who was gifted with the wrestling talent of Ric Flair and the marketability of Hogan.

Steve Austin
Stone Cold Steve Austin had a fully shaved, skin-head. The decision to turn him from the blond haired ‘Stunning’ Steve Austin WCW character to the bald Ringmaster, at the time seemed ridiculous, but in hindsight that move was brilliant. His full face was on display, there was nothing in the way of his eyes and snarl, and there was no distraction from that notable brow or those evil smiling eyes. The absence of hair is an often-underrated factor in the appeal of Stone Cold.

Although not reaching the heights of Ric Flair, Austin’s ‘Stunning’ Steve WCW career was popular, exciting, and showed that he had the technical skills to match any wrestler on any North American roster. When the bald Stone Cold shattered the WWF record books, Austin became arguably the most popular wrestler of all time. Not only was he more popular than ten Ric Flairs, there is a very credible argument that can be made that Stone Cold produced even more great matches and historic moments. You can make lists all day of their respective matches and feuds, and subjectively compare them, but I would like to look at a more unique, and telling comparison, how they used their head, literally, in matches.

-Punches
Austin relied on his punching as a major component of his offensive arsenal. Flair on the other hand, used the chest chop as his main offensive attack, which in his era of big arenas was a major help in projecting the sound of his attack and eliciting a response from the audience. With each chop there was a resultant flip of the hair, as with each punch received in return there was the exaggeration of the hair flip to assist the image of the attack. Austin had to make the punches seem aggressive and realistic, on offense and defense, and could not use hair whipping to help.

Even though Austin had a multitude of injuries that forced him to change his wrestling style he never resorted to using the chest chop, regardless of how easy it would have been to give him that extra oomph with an audience in response to his injuries and age, especially when he made his ‘heel’ turn during the Invasion storyline. This is paralleled by his refusal to grow hair as well, which would have been an easy way to get cheap heat during this time. A deviantly bald Austin continued to use punches as his main strike and sold them as effectively as any wrestler in history.

-Finishers
Ric Flair’s use of the Figure Four also put the spotlight on his head. When properly administered in the middle of the ring, Flair was able to shake his head and hair in such a brilliant way that made the time that he inflicted the move, as well as the painful reversal, an engaging in-ring sequence.

Austin used the Stone Cold Stunner. This move was a modified jawbreaker and would have been enhanced by a downward sweep of hair for each hard, dropping move. However, Austin had to coordinate his timing perfectly in order to hit this move effectively and make it work dramatically in the middle of the ring without any special effect from his hair.

Although the edge in this category may go to Flair, the real question here is could he have done this move so well if he’d had short hair?

-Blood
Ric Flair needed to use the contrast of his bright red blood staining his white hair to elicit excitement from a live audience that didn’t have the luxury of close up television. Austin on the other hand had to deal with numerous cameras showing his pain close-up to millions of people and without hair he had to sell his bloody face and head with much more skill than Flair who was able to use his wild head of hair as an out for his facial expressions of pain. Flair’s saturation of the blood-head made his blading jobs indistinguishable from each other, while Stone Cold took one bloody face, from his Wrestlemania 13 Bret Hart match, and turned it into an iconic image. With hair, the cover of the ‘cause Stone Cold Said So VHS wouldn’t have been as powerful, and he wouldn’t have been able to show the greatest, most famous, most engaging and passionate selling facial of all time.

I think the question of era is the key to the entire argument. If you can judge the Ric Flair era of big arenas, little television and old school mythology as more important than the globally scrutinized, televised weekly, live era of serialized dramatics we have today than you might want to claim Flair as the best wrestler. If you appreciate all that a striped down, raw Stone Cold was able to accomplish with cameras in his face and that fate of a Hogan-grown company on his shoulders then Steve Austin should be considered the greatest ever. And if you can make this distinction, then you can see that the nucleus of what makes these two legends different is the length of their hair. Some of what you love about Ric Flair may just be traditional illusions of the trade performed by his magnificent head of hair, whereas Stone Cold was able to prove that it was possible to be as popular as Hogan and as skilled as Flair and he did it bald, without any big, wild gimmicks or simple, age-old enhancements like hair.

And for anyone who is worried, if Austin ever chooses to wrestle in one more retirement match, you can be sure that there won’t be any of the sappy, hippy, long hair, “I love you,” crap, that stained Flair’s final moments, and for that alone we should all agree that bald guys rule!