Richard Hanania is hilariously confused about professional wrestling
An attempt to draw race-science lessons from something he saw on TV goes horribly wrong.
A few months ago A24 released The Iron Claw, a film about the Von Erichs, a legendary family of professional wrestlers. Richard Hanania only belatedly mentions this in his new post about a family of legendary professional wrestlers know as the Von Erichs, which reads more like an extended Letterboxd summary of the film more than anything else. I mention this because it’s probably the best explanation for how Hanania wrote an article littered with so many basic errors, but here I’ll just touch on some of the funniest.
Since Richard’s a kook with all kinds of magical beliefs about “race science,” the lesson he draws from the story of the Von Erichs is a lesson, of course, about racism. We learn that
the Von Erichs were notable for not really having gimmicks…The fact that the Von Erichs did not have to adopt fancy gimmicks serves as a microcosm of how life works outside of wrestling, too. If you are tall, blond, and beautiful, just being yourself is enough. In the 1980s, young people who couldn’t meet such standards were willing to live vicariously through those who should…We once had a unified culture, the same heroes, and standard scripts of good and evil…The old culture had its flaws, but it was generally healthier for most people most of the time, if not for all groups.
Almost every word of this is wrong, not just on a basic factual level, but as a broader analysis of the culture of professional wrestling. Consider the most famous member of the Von Erich family, Kerry. Kerry had a gimmick. He was “The Texas Tornado.” His theme song was called “Storm” and began with a tornado sound effect. His finishing move was the “tornado punch,” a punch that he began by spinning around like a tornado. In interviews, he talked like this:
There are tornado warnings at Summerslam…but the only tornado you have to worry about, Mr. Perfect, is the one that’s gonna come out of that black cloud hanging over your head right now. When it touches down in the ring, it’s going to destroy everything in its path! You see, you must not know much about Texas tornados, because Mr. Perfect, they’re powerful. They’re unpredictable. They’re devastating. And when our match is over and the Texas Tornado heads back up into the clouds, I’ll be taking with me the Intercontinental Championship belt.
This wasn’t just a gimmick — it was a famous gimmick. Wrestling journalist Michael Weyer ranks it the best gimmick of the WWE’s so-called Golden Era, which was its most gimmick-heavy era in history. The gimmick also has a lot of notoriety of fans because giving Kerry the name “Texas Tornado” was seen at the time as WWE owner Vince McMahon’s attempt to hide that he was a Von Erich and downplay their legacy.
Towards the end of his career, Kerry Von Erich began to downplay the tornado stuff and leaned into something closer to Hanania’s ideal of a gimmickless all-American specimen of athleticism. But it was precisely then that audiences began to lose interest; there was nothing interesting about him anymore.
By the way, the opponent Kerry mentions — Mr. Perfect? This is him:
If anyone exemplified the right-wing fetishization of classical aesthetics and tall blond superiority, it was Mr. Perfect. He cut his promos flanked with classical busts. He entered the ring to epic Wagnerian orchestral music. He lorded his superiority over everyone, and not just as a wrestler, but in general; he even bragged about his blond hair. Opponents constantly rebuked him by saying “nobody’s perfect”; Mr. Perfect’s response was to say that he was, and that they were just coping.
And of course, fans hated him for it. The public didn’t venerate him as some kind of god in their midst; they reviled him precisely because he thought his athletic skill and good looks made him better than everyone else. This is such a common reaction in professional wrestling that Mr. Perfect is just one of a whole genre of so-called “egotistical heels” who have touted their superiority as a way to enrage fans. Randy Orton, Shawn Michaels, The Rock, Rick Martel, Chris Masters, Bobby Roode, and Ravishing Rick Rude are just some of the most famous wrestlers who’ve relied on this gimmick. More often than not, their feuds followed the same script we see here with Perfect and Von Erich: scrappy underdog everyman defeats his superior opponent.
This is what’s truly ridiculous about Hanania’s article. There has never been some distinct era in our culture when the public has simplistically worshipped some shared ideal of beauty. And particularly in wrestling, you can see why: people hate this kind of aesthetic universalism because they rightly recognize it as delusional, self-serving, and a flimy pretext for cruelty. Particularly in the eighties, wrestling was full of all kinds of heroes — Hillbilly Jim, Jimmy Snuka, Terry Funk, George “The Animal” Steele, Dusty Rhodes — who no one in their right mind would call Aryan ubermenschen. The eighties also, of course, had more conventional heroes like Hulk Hogan and Lex Luger. Today it is generally understood that they were written that way in order to sell toys to children.