Bring Back Tiffany Cross!
image via The Kennedy School
As I write this, Tiffany Cross on MSNBC has not had her contract renewed. It is way too early know what exactly went on behind the scenes, but it is said that this might be the cause. If so, an adult joke about Florida — which, as states go, has a pretty good sense of humor about itself — is a pretty dumb way to render judgement on important talent.
Tales From The Territories
Photo credit: Vice
I am really enjoying “Tales From The Territories” on Vice! As a kid, I was the biggest pro wrestling fan, so it brings back memories of good times. I even purchased all the Bill Apter magazines — Inside Wrestling, The Wrestler, Pro Wrestling Illustrated — to learn about the wrestlers and titles around the world that I could not see on New York television. I watched the WWE (then-WWF, before they lost a loser-leaves-town lawsuit against the World Wildlife Fund), Championship Wrestling from Florida and Mid-Atlantic wrestling (on Telemundo, even though no one in our house spoke Spanish). This was the world before YouTube and the thousand channel cable universe that we occupy today.
Dusty vs. Tully
Wrestling back then was sort of like a soap opera for boys, with violence, racy story lines and blood feuds. Some blood feuds — like the late, great Dusty Rhodes versus Tully “The Bully” Blanchard — lasted years, always escalating, stakes raised weekly at television tapings. Dusty was the working class, overweight, big-hearted son of a plumber from the wrong side of the tracks in west Texas; Tully was the college quarterback with a silver spoon in his mouth, disdainful of the rules, charming with the ladies. Before he died, Dusty quipped in his memoir that he could fight Tully — and still draw a paying crowd! — deep into senior citizenship. To the true wrestling fan, no truer words have ever been spoken. That’s how much “heat” that feud drew back then.
It is a uniquely American form of entertainment, part carnival sideshow and part “scripted sport” — with predetermined endings. The baby-faced good guy usually won in the end, but often after months of chasing his fleeing nemesis — usually a cheater and/or a monstrous-looking “heel” — or, bad guy. Sometimes it was for a belt, or title worn around the waist. Every organization had a *World* champion — even if they were based largely in New York or Minnesota or North Carolina.
Wrestling was also a profoundly political performance art form in its American uniqueness. Class and race often played a big part in the story lines. As I mentioned before, Dusty was the hero of the working man. He ate with gusto. His only workout routine outside of the ring was probably hoisting beer steins. He was not pretty. But he had a big heart and a lot of soul. Dusty associated with African-American athletes in Southern backcountry arenas in the days where Jesse Helms was ranking Senator on the Foreign Relations Committee. Dusty believed all men were equal in the eyes of God.
Tully was the heavy. Tully Blanchard, a second generation wrestler, was fast-tracked towards championships — the Southwest title, the NWA TV title, the US title — because of his connections. He was cocky, well-dressed and played the part of the rich Texas quarterback asshole with relish. A Dusty-versus-Tully match unfolded in the ring not unlike Marx’s Dialectical Materialism, even though the crowd in the arena was solidly southern Republican conservative. The best feuds, truly, were rich-versus-poor, even though almost everyone in wrestling came from working-class roots. It was an American morality play and Greek Tragedy with catharsis all-in-one.
But the underlying thread connecting all the episodes of this series is the fact that the Territory System is no more. Gone forever. And while Stories From The Territories is a love letter from series creator Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, the first wrestler to ever become an A-List Hollywood movie star, there is a nostalgia for when the sport was not as glitzy and mainstream and — how does one say it? — McMahon-ified as it is today. In the days of old that the series fondly remembers, people believed that professional wrestling was real. People actually sent cards and letter to wrestlers that were in “the hospital” from a “sneak attack.” And each part of the country was a colorful minor league wrestling organization that fostered and nurtured local talent.
Enter: Vince McMahon. (to a chorus of lusty Boos) The key part that Tales From The Territories strategically omits is that the Territories are no more almost exclusively because of Vince McMahon. While the WWE is not technically a monopoly — they have much smaller competitors — they are very close to one. And this happened because McMahon literally bought out all of the talent of his competitors, ran shows in their neighborhoods, forced arenas to make choices between running McMahon shows or the (much smaller) territory shows as well as actively thwarted their cable tv ambitions, again leaning on those media companies make a choice between his glitzier product and theirs. From Jarod Facundo in The American Prospect:
In the 1970s, the “Territorial” era of professional wrestling, there were 32 wrestling promoters across North America who aired fights as far as local TV broadcasting permitted. Fighters often moved between territories seeking the best deals possible. André the Giant—the celebrated “eighth wonder of the world”—was working in the Canadian and Midwest territory circuits when Vince McMahon Sr. found and acquired him for the Northeast Territory (now WWE), which included New York and the rest of the Eastern Seaboard.
Today, the landscape has consolidated to the point that WWE controls 85 percent of the professional wrestling market. WWE began life as Titan Sports and gradually rose to the top of the industry, hiring the likes of André the Giant, Hulk Hogan, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, Jesse Ventura, and numerous other performers away from rival wrestling outfits. It finally achieved dominance when it bought out its biggest competitor, World Championship Wrestling, in 2001.
We will not entertain the possibility that the shows silence on Vince McMahon’s role in the destruction of those revered Territories is that Dwayne Johnson is a close personal friend of the McMahon family, or that Vice! is a joint venture with A&E Networks, which has a whole host of shows interconnected with the McMahon family business.
Perish the thought!
Postscript: It is indeed Ironic that Linda McMahon became the head of Donald Trump’s Small Business Administration despite her family’s role in obliterating the Territories, which were, essentially, small businesses in (largely) red states.
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