For an upcoming, as-yet-untitled book on professional wrestling, to be published by Praeger Publishing. Here’s an excerpt:
There’s something wholesome and innocent about Baron Von Raschke, age 68, and it may be the fact that his wife, Bonnie, answers when I call her home and promises to have her husband “awake and full of coffee” the next morning for our interview. In many ways Raschke was fortunate to have heeled in an era before heels were expected to truly be deviant both in and out of the ring. It was before the twin dark clouds of recreational drugs and steroids truly made their mark on sports entertainment as well as real sports. And Raschke was that rare heel in that he made an almost organic face transition later in his career. In his ’77 championship match with Bruno Sammartino he was a hated heel, but by 1985 in another AWA turn, fans would cheer when he goose-stepped into the ring.
In fact, there’s something wholesome about the entire 1970’s and 80’s AWA scene. For the most part the wrestlers seemed about as un-roided up and wholesome as possible. Broadcasts featured a then very un-controversial Eric Bischoff, a less-roided Hulk Hogan, Bobby Heenan, and Mean Gene Okerlund who would all eventually make the jump to the WWF(E). Shows happened in places like St. Paul, Kenosha, and Cheboygan, and generally wrestlers got over more because of superior ring psychology and less because of blood, ladders, tables, and seedy storylines. The rings were small, bouncy, and blue. For most of the AWA’s existence there were no valets. Of course, all good things have to come to an end, and during the AWA’s death rattle it had a few ill-fated episodes on ESPN that were taped at the Tropicana in Las Vegas, and as is almost always the case in entertainment, nothing remains cool once it lands in Vegas.
“The business today has gone to the lowest common denominator,” says Raschke. “It’s all about shock value, and everything today is more blatant than it was back then. Back then, when there was a love scene the oceans would roar and the rain would fall. People used their minds and their imagination. Now there are television shows that show the bullet going through the body, and then everyone standing there looking at the corpse. And in wrestling, they’re showing their rears in the ring, and making love in the ring. It’s low class. And you can tell Vince McMahon I said that.”
Of course, McMahon (Jr.) did much more than just introducing lowbrow shock value into wrestling. He effectively killed the territory system in the early 1980’s by buying up all of the territories’ talent. So instead of kids in Texas growing up watching the Von Erichs on Saturday morning, kids in Georgia watching Ric Flair, and kids in Wisconsin growing up watching Baron Von Raschke and Vern Gagne, we’re all left with whatever the WWE decides its demographic wants to see. This, I think, is what people are longing for when they talk about the “good old days” in wrestling. They want to identify with something germane to their region, rather than trying to choose which roided up WWE freak to like.
It’s only when one looks at Raschke and the old AWA that today’s wrestling seems so, well, sad. The fact that Cactus Jack (Mick Foley) had to make a name by falling through rings and having appendages ripped off, and the fact that wrestling has made the crotch shot a part of American adolescent culture, seems especially sad in light of what wrestlers like Raschke were able to accomplish without such theatrics.
Check out the Baron here: http://www.baronvonraschke.com/photo_gallery/photo_detail.php?id=1