Gotta Get Theroux This: My Life and Strange Times in Television

In 1999, while coming to the end of the second series of Weird Weekends, running dry of ideas, I began circling around the subject of muscle men in strange uniforms (capes, tights, leather jackets, with canes and little hats) slamming each other to the floor, sometimes cutting themselves with tiny concealed razors, in front of screaming crowds – in other words, professional wrestling.

It was a natural subject for us. Unlike Olympic-style grappling, pro-wrestling is a semi-fictional activity in which the bouts are choreographed and the outcomes predetermined. The code of secrecy that surrounds wrestling is sometimes called kayfabe, a term whose origin is disputed but which means presenting staged performances as though they are real. People describe pro-wrestling as ‘fake’ but that isn’t really accurate. The athleticism is real and so are the injuries. Wrestlers have to perform night after night, taking body slams and chairs to the head, and risking brain trauma. They are actors, stuntmen, and athletes all rolled into one. This gets lost because of the benign deception at the heart of pro-wrestling that it’s a competitive sport. Which it isn’t.

To direct, we brought back Ed Robbins, the thoughtful and slightly eccentric veteran of the ‘Head for the Hills’ programme. He and an English AP, Will Yapp, began working the access. The biggest wrestling league, Vince McMahon’s WWF, turned us down but its rival outfit, the WCW, said they were open to filming. How much they’d be likely to let us see backstage was unclear. To cover ourselves we also approached a much smaller local wrestling league of part-timers in South Carolina called the AIWF. This would, we hoped, fill in some of the gaps, and maybe provide intimacy and pathos as well as giving the programme a sense of range, showing the entire food chain of the wrestling world.

It went without saying that I would not be maintaining kayfabe in reporting my documentary. In fact, I saw the wrestlers’ refusal to break character or acknowledge the fictional aspect of their craft as both a bit of a problem and also a potentially helpful source of conflict.

Early in the filming, I flew down to Florida with my crew to visit a WCW road show called Monday Night Nitro. It was a bright, sunny day, and fans in ballcaps and a few in wrestling masks were streaming into a vast arena. I’d been hoping for free-range access backstage at the event. That was how we’d filmed the doc about the porn industry, being allowed to wander around more or less willy-nilly, if you’ll pardon the pun. In my fantasy of how the wrestling shoot might go down – which is always a dangerous place to dwell, and extremely alarming to directors because it is often so out-of-whack with a sense of reality – I’d envisioned myself in a huddle with the wrestlers, helping them on with their trunks, and planning storylines for the bouts. Yeah, right. After protracted negotiation, the WCW PR guy – an Elton John lookalike called Alan Sharp – had permitted us to stand at the entrance to the dressing room, interviewing the dribble of wrestlers as they arrived. I was like a little press gauntlet of one.

A wrestler named Randy ‘Macho Man’ Savage walked past, incognito in dark glasses and a tight black t-shirt. For a moment he appeared on the verge of saying something, then thought better of it and walked on. An old-timer called ‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper, also in dark glasses and a leather jacket, asked me my name then, mishearing it, said, ‘Louis LaRue.’

‘Theroux,’ I corrected him. ‘But you can call me LaRue if you want, being a wrestler.’

I asked how old he was.

‘April 17, I turned forty-five,’ he said. ‘And they still can’t beat me! All right? So you should have caught my act when I was twenty-nine! I would have made love to you!’

‘Ha ha! Steady on!’

Next came a young German wrestler in dark glasses, with Mohawk hair and a trench coat. He was debuting a new character, he said in accented English. ‘I used to be Alex Wright in WCW and I used to dance techno. But the American people are not very familiar to techno so I changed to be a bad mean guy and I came up with my new look.’

‘So tonight you’re debuting a new persona?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he replied.

‘And is there a new name?’

‘Yes. Well, like I said, before I was Alex Wright. Now I am Alexander Wright.’

He was there to give his new ‘Alexander Wright’ character a soft launch, not by wrestling but by walking the aisles and the ringside, creating a buzz around the new identity, ‘Achtung! Achtung! Alexander Wright!’ he exclaimed. (Sadly, I later heard that the news of the Columbine School shooting – and the negative association around trench coats – put paid to the ‘Alexander Wright’ identity.)

The show was an extravaganza of ultra-muscular men in boots, slamming and swinging one another around the ring and tumbling over ropes. A study in paradoxical violence, it was a ludicrous simulation of combat that was at the same time extremely dangerous. I don’t like to think about the amount of concussion that was sustained. In the entire display, more than the stunts and the danger, I most enjoyed the grace notes of the over-the-top storytelling, which had a tongue-in-cheek quality. At one point, a camera feed outside the hall showed an injured wrestler being helped into an ambulance before the door closed and the camera revealed the name of a mental hospital as the wrestler pounded on the windows to escape.

It was only after the show – possibly prompted by its outrageous storytelling – that I realized I hadn’t asked any of the wrestlers about the choreographing of the bouts. Not that I expected any of them to break kayfabe, but it was less about getting an answer than being seen to have asked the question. By now, with the crowds streaming out of the venue, it wasn’t clear whom I could speak to. There was no sign of the publicity guy, Alan, and I was running out of options. I spied Sarge, a bullet-headed muscle-bound man I knew to be the head wrestling trainer, breaking down the ring.

I approached him, camera in tow. After some pro forma compliments about the excitement of what I’d just seen, I said: ‘One thing I don’t totally understand is to what extent they know what’s going to happen in the ring when they come out. Do you know what I mean?’

‘No, I don’t,’ Sarge said.

I sensed a hint of irritation, so I retreated and made a fumbling concession to the ‘enormous amount of athletic and acrobatic ability’ of the wrestlers, and ‘tremendous strength and that type of thing’, and then wobbled to the end of a vaguer and now slightly nervous question about ‘how it worked’ in the ring.

‘I don’t have any idea,’ Sarge said, ending the interview, though not explosively, and I didn’t give much further thought to whether I might have annoyed him with my gentle sally at the is-it-real question.

After the big-bucks show business of the WCW, the AIWF was a different proposition. Based in Mount Airy, North Carolina – quintessential small-town America, and supposedly the real-life model for the fictional Mayberry of The Andy Griffith Show – it was like a hillbilly am-dram troupe getting together at weekends to put on a performance for the local crowd.

The owner-manager was Dean Puckett, a friendly mullet-haired carpet fitter whose nom de guerre was Rick Deezel. As an outfit, they were friendly and hospitable, flattered by the attention of a foreign film crew. Rick’s boast was that they were the most extreme wrestling troupe in America: ‘Fire, barbwire, thumbtacks, glass doors. That’s our claim to fame. Most hardcore extreme wrestling federation anywhere.’

One of their wrestlers, Jody Rushbrook, worked nine to five changing the oil in cars at a Jiffy Lube. The afternoon I arrived in town we spent a couple of hours at his workplace, hitting each other with a tin tray so I could get a flavour of how it all worked. Their star wrestler fought under the name Brian Danzig. Brooding and a little withdrawn, he worked in a sock factory, but for his bouts Brian had a horror-clown persona with ghoulish black-and-white make-up. An hour before showtime, he would take five or six aspirin to thin his blood, tape little razors to his thumbnail and then, once in the ring, lacerate his forehead out of sight of the crowd to make blood pour down his face. In the wrestling world, this sort of self-inflicted bleeding was called ‘getting colour’.

The venue for the AIWF event was a school gymnasium. I helped them set up the ring, and quizzed them on how it worked – unlike the wrestlers at WCW, they were fine with acknowledging that they planned fights and happy to let us in on their professional secrets. Clearly they had less money at stake than the big-name wrestlers. I also tend to think their self-mutilation was so sanguinary and extreme that they didn’t feel the need to lay claim to any other kind of authenticity.

‘It’s a soap opera for men,’ Rick said. ‘A lot of people they think, “Oh well, these guys know who’s going to win, who’s going to do this, so it’s fake.” That may be one side of it, but this is not fake.’ He picked up a coil of barbed wire that was stapled to a plywood board. Then, pulling Brian’s hair away from his forehead to show a patch of skin that was etched with a multitude of tiny scars, he said: ‘And this right here is not fake.’

The ensuing carnage and gore of the evening’s performance took place before a crowd of seventy or so, some of them small children. The wholesome atmosphere of the school gymnasium, its association with nativity plays and beanbags, made a strange contrast to the extremity of the display. Brian’s bout had him pitted against some ‘kung fu fighters’ from a local martial arts academy, ‘The School of Hard Knocks’, who were bald-headed and dressed in only pyjama bottoms. One of them was blading for the first time, but as he went to gouge himself he got jogged and cut too deep. His face as he came off stage after the fight was a horror mask of pale white skin doused in red. Yet he appeared thrilled with how it had gone, beaming as a nurse patched up his wound. Brian, too, was transformed – no longer shy and introspective, he had become ebullient.

‘Well, as long as you’re not really hurt,’ I offered, though truthfully I was a little freaked out at how much gore was on display.

‘Other wrestlers’ll be like, why do you get out there and half-kill yourself? But I don’t! I don’t half-kill myself! I’m fine! I’m going to go tear the ring down and go to the Waffle House.’

A few weeks later I flew to Atlanta to see Sarge the trainer at the Powerplant for a follow-up interview and what had been planned as a light-hearted workout session with some of the wrestlers-in-training. I didn’t think too much about it in advance. The sequence we were shooting had ‘unpromising’ written all over it. I suspected most of those present would be second- and third-division wrestlers hoping to make it. It felt potentially like a segment for breakfast TV. ‘Ever wondered how wrestlers get in shape? Our presenter Darren went to find out.’

Arriving at the airport, for some reason I treated myself to a greasy breakfast – possibly it slowed us down because when we reached the gym we were a little late: thirty or so budding made-for-TV monsters were already doing squats and chanting in a cavernous space under Sarge’s tutelage. Ripped and shiny and hairless, the wrestlers combined extremes of masculine and feminine in classic bodybuilding style – like a hair-metal band that had been overfilled with air.

Sarge was wearing a loose tank top. The armholes were so wide that from time to time the taut red rivets of his nipples would poke out distractingly. I had the sense Sarge was irritated by our tardiness and I jumped into the workout, squatting, doing sit-ups and press-ups, trying to keep up, but it was clear I wasn’t so much fifteen minutes late as ten years too late – ten years of crunches and pull-ups and squats that I’d been too busy reading and drinking wine and smoking spliffs to bother with. Still, I tried my best.

At first I was enjoying the liveliness of the scene, the shouting and chanting. Then I got tired and that’s when things got slightly weird. It seemed it wasn’t as simple as saying, ‘Right, lads, thanks, we’ve got what we needed.’ Sarge had no intention of letting me stop.

‘We been doing this since ten o’clock,’ he shouted as I attempted a kind of human coffee table posture, pushing my belly in the air and bending my arms back like a crab. Sarge was bending over me, sweat dripping off his nose and on to me.

‘It’s hurting my back!’ I said.

‘I was here yesterday doing this, I’m here today doing it and I’ll be here tomorrow. Get up now!’

‘It’s killing my back.’

‘I don’t care!’

I was experiencing muscle failure. I protested that I couldn’t do any more press-ups. The trainee wrestlers gathered around me in a throng, all shouting in a way that was somewhere between turbo-pep-talk and psychological gangbang. I waved my hands to try to let them know that – in a friendly and respectful way – I was withdrawing from the field of battle.

‘Everybody back up!’ Sarge shouted. ‘Lie down. Move your arms. Move your legs. Say, “Sir, I’m a dying cockroach.” ’

This I was more than happy to do. I wondered if it might be the ‘safe word’ that would end the torture. Thinking it might help, I added: ‘I am a dying cockroach because I haven’t got the will to win!’ But there was no noticeable lessening of the verbal assault.

‘These guys go through this every damn day!’ Sarge said, sweat spanging off his shiny head and nipples. ‘And you got the nerve to ask me that bullshit down at Nitro. What the hell? You think we aren’t athletes? Hell, we’re the best athletes in the damn world!’

Fine. I did some more ‘hindu squats’, some running on the spot and screaming, then, feeling I really had had enough, I retreated to a small dressing area, only for Sarge to come literally running after me to pull me out.

‘Where in the hell you think you’re going? No! You’re coming out and watching everybody else! I don’t give a shit. Get your ass back in the ring . . . Do you see how stupid the questions were you asked at Monday Night Nitro?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I do, yes.’

‘Do you see why I am the Sarge? Huh?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘SPEAK UP! Say “Sir, yes, sir!” ’

‘Sir, yes, sir!’

‘Look at these guys! They started at ten o’clock. Now you see why this is the toughest sport in the fuckin’ world. Bar none. And they gotta put up with my short irritable ass every fuckin’ day.’

I was happy to agree with him, and was nodding and shaking my head as vigorously as I could, as cued, my discomfort only somewhat relieved by the awareness that everything was being captured on tape and might be helpful for the documentary.

The workout continued. ‘I give up,’ I said, not for the first time. The greasy breakfast was now making its presence known; I was beginning to feel nauseous. ‘I’m going to throw up,’ I said and went to get a small paper cup of water from the cooler. Seeing this, Sarge slapped the cup out of my hand and sat me down – dunce-style – on an upside-down plastic bucket. The workout moved outside and, still feeling the need to prove my willing to the wrestlers, I joined them as they ran lengths in the gym parking lot.

It’s possible I might have managed to keep the sick down if I’d tried – or at least in my mouth. But I was secretly hoping my vomiting might have a shaming effect on Sarge. Up it came – a couple of small acid mouthfuls that went splat onto the parking lot tarmac. Its chastening effect on Sarge, however, was nil.

‘That ain’t nothing! You ain’t done nothing!’ he shouted. ‘If you’re gonna puke, puke chunks!’

This may have been the weirdest part of Sarge’s critique of my performance – his disappointment at the consistency of my vomit.

After that, seeming to feel he’d made his point, Sarge disappeared. We shot a couple more bits. In one, with some other wrestlers, I practised delivering hyped-up speeches to camera, talking up fictitious future bouts under the new ring name they’d given me, Waldo.

Weeks later, I viewed Ed’s rough assembly of the episode and was surprised to see he hadn’t included the moments of the workout spinning out of control or the regurgitation. Possibly he was a little embarrassed that he hadn’t done more to stop it in its tracks, even though he had been right not to intervene – the entire episode was an exercise in humiliation but not physical danger. I encouraged him to put it all in, including wobbly shots, to give the sequence its flavour of authenticity. When the episode appeared on TV, at least one reviewer thought the whole sequence faked, which I could sort of understand. Given how intrinsic fakery is to wrestling, it would have been a sly but understandable storytelling device. In fact, it is real, though clearly there was a performative quality to the moment, with Sarge enacting a ritualistic humiliation of the visiting journalist.

It is also true, though, that what I experienced was business-as-usual at the Powerplant. Five or six years after my visit, a well-respected wrestler, Dave Bautista – who went on to find success as an actor, playing Drax in the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise – described a very similar experience in an interview: being shouted at and forced to work out until he vomited, and being told by Sarge that he would never make it. I also heard that puking during workouts was a regular occurrence – in which case, the only surprising part was that Sarge was holding me to his usual standards of what he expected from young wrestling try-outs.

It was only later that I came to see it as an example of a certain kind of documentary making: those moments when the contributor takes over control and ‘produces’ the encounter. In dramatic terms, it is the satisfaction of seeing the protagonist find himself at the sharp end of the story in a way he hadn’t expected.

The paradox of wishing for moments of unplanned jeopardy is, of course, that they can’t be planned. The expression that comes to mind is hoping for lightning to strike. This isn’t as difficult as it first appears. If you run around a hilltop during a thunderstorm, waving a long copper stick in the air, you’re likely to get struck by lightning.

You may also get burned to a crisp.