Bumps, Breakages, Bandages

Abstract

For myriad legitimate reasons professional wrestling is often regarded as antithetical to sport. Despite the sporting tropes used by wrestlers, the spectacular characterization and fictionalized storylines mean this form is better categorized alongside contemporary performance practice. However, it sits oddly alongside theatre too as its athleticism undoubtedly resembles sport; in addition, its history of dubious taste and associations with reactionary politics counter the stage's typical progressive associations.

This article does not try to solve wrestling's composite identity. Rather, it accepts and uses its unique liminal lexicon to unsettle typical understandings of sport and performance art. Unpacking the wrestling notion of blading through a famous match and an infamous sporting event, it rereads a specific moment in sports history, a moment when blood appears as a visual signifier as it might do on a stage. It connects this to the blood-letting of contemporary performance practice, using wrestling as a bridge. If read alongside a history of professional wrestling, the blood of the stage and the field are imbued with new meaning, destabilizing straightforward historiographies and disciplinary definitions, and the bodies that take part in them. This approach uses professional wrestling to question the easy demarcation of sport and performance art, engendering new, often disturbing, associations. It demands a reading of blood less as an unfortunate by-product of sporting endeavour and more as a striking, performative image that erases the typical barrier between sport and art. This article proposes, then, that understanding this (and comparable moments) through the lens of professional wrestling muddies definitions of sport and performance, opening up new cross-disciplinary dialogues and methods.

Watching a professional wrestling match is an odd, often discombobulating experience. On the one hand, it is an illegitimate form, belonging to neither the competitive space of sport, nor the fictionalized world of the stage, yet imbibing characteristics from both. It is part of a network of popular cultures that merge and propagate, meaning that muscular figures of superhero films jostle with personalities familiar to soap operas. Rock music signals the entrance of characters reminiscent of horror villains or Pentecostal preachers or bodybuilders or blue-collar workers or contemporary politicians. It is a form of parody and playfulness, whose history is, nevertheless, littered with misogyny, homophobia, racism and poor well-being practices. It even has its own language: ‘kayfabe’ is the fictional story; to ‘work’ is to wrestle (but also to manipulate the crowd’s emotions – ‘work’ is a multi-dimensional word in the wrestling ring); ‘shoot’ refers to those moments when ‘real life’ crashes through the fictionalized story.

Wrestling’s overtly liminal and undefinable identity reflects the history of this mode, emerging concurrently from the amateur and competitive wrestling contests and the fairgrounds of the late nineteenth century, although its origin points can be traced back much further (Litherland 2018). Wrestling can be seen, then, as part of a long lineage of intersecting sports and arts practices. Strongmen and women, for example, first emerged in the Victorian music halls, and the Olympic Games, though a global sporting event, is more a performance spectacle of national identity.

In our 2016 book Performance and Professional Wrestling, Broderick Chow, Eero Laine and I sit firmly on the fence:

But despite the fact that pro wrestling is so clearly theatre, there is also something in it that is more than theatre, that goes beyond the purely representational, demonstrating the impossibility of a pure theatricality. Professional wrestling, then, is excessive to theatre and to the combative, competitive sports that it emulates. Professional wrestling is always more than theatre, more than sports (and simultaneously less than both of these more established, acceptable modes of entertainment). (Chow et al. 2016: 4)

Wrestling is not wholly unique here: Sarah Crews and Solomon Lennox describe boxing in/as performance and in/as culture, using performance studies’ methodologies to determine boxing’s ‘long history of representing more than just sport’ (2021: 2). But, in wrestling, this leads to a trickiness of categorization, making it notoriously difficult to define and leading to persistent misunderstandings; the accusation of fakery, for instance, springs from fallaciously structuring wrestling as competitive sport rather than theatrical performance, though it remains important to emphasize the sportive too. In our book, we used the term ‘sport-art’ (with a hyphen) to hedge our bets. Benjamin Litherland has provided a deeper reading of wrestling’s sport-art identity. It is easy, and even fashionable, to disregard professional wrestling as not-sport by attending to its dismissal or even inversion of some of sport’s key ideologies of fair play and competition; it is perhaps easier to read it as theatre. However, says Litherland, the problem is that this binary rendering reads sport and theatre as ‘unchanging, natural phenomenon’ (Litherland 2018: viii). His description correctly presents sport and theatre as shifting concepts so, while ‘sport-art’ is a useful hybrid term, it is important to note, following Litherland, that the terms either side of this hyphen are as fluid as the concept itself.

In his famous chapter for Mythologies, ‘The World of Wrestling’, Roland Barthes calls wrestling a ‘spectacle of excess’ where the bodies of wrestlers become signs of the story unfolding (1972: 15). Despite seeming chaotic, says Barthes, in actuality, it is ‘the most intelligible of spectacles’ where bodies can be read and imbued with comprehensible meaning even in the confusion of flailing limbs and noisy crowds (1972: 18). The fluids – sweat, blood – are as rich in meaning as the bodies from which they emanate. Despite wrestling’s intelligibility, what wrestling blood actually means, and how it might provide a useful lexicon for blood in other artforms and sports, is deeply complex.

THE ART OF BLADING

Blood in wrestling appears in three ways. It can be the result of an injury: an errant elbow or a punch that inadvertently connects. This is called ‘hardway’ blood and actually occurs far less often than one might imagine given the violent images on show. Second, there is a form of wrestling often referred to as ‘death matches’ or ‘hardcore’ where blood is intentionally caused by hitting one another with barbed wire, nails, thumb tacks and other weapons. Eero Laine describes this form thus: ‘Hardcore wrestling is a distinct style of professional wrestling that emphasizes bodily harm through stunts that create bleeding wounds’ (2020: 59). The connection between this form of wrestling and performance art has been well-documented by Laine and by Daniel Schulze in his article ‘Blood, guts and suffering: The body as communicative agent in professional wrestling and performance art’ (2013). This blood is inevitable and expected by performers and spectators alike, turning professional wrestling into a test of endurance with the imagery of the horror film. The third way is the act of blading, and it is this practice that is the interest of this article. Blading is when a

wrestler will discreetly make a cut in their forehead with an otherwise concealed razor blade. The wound is self-inflicted and the actual cutting of the flesh is hidden from the audience, but the blood that flows is the wrestler’s real blood. (Chow et al. 2016: 2–3)

Unlike hardcore wrestling, when the moment of slicing or cutting is vital to the subsequent spectacle, blading relies on the hidden, the unseen, the obscured: in magician’s parlance, the sleight of hand.

To provide some further sense of context and depth, I borrow from Chow and Laine’s description of a particular blading incident in a 2004 match between wrestlers Eddie Guerrero and John ‘Bradshaw’ Layfield in their 2014 article ‘Audience affirmation and the labour of professional wrestling’. This was an infamous incident because of the sheer amount of blood that the blading action engendered. Layfield hit Guerrero with a chair but when Guerrero bladed to visually narrate the ‘injury’ he cut too deep. Both competitors were covered in blood by the end of the match and Guerrero had to be rushed to hospital. Using this example, they claim blading as part of the labour of the wrestler where the body is the obvious, sweating, bleeding, exhausted site of that labour. This labour, like so much labour in the post-industrial, capitalist, technology-mediated society, is as much a performative gesture for an audience as a productive action. Chow and Laine claim, ‘It is as if there were something at stake for the spectators, and their gestures of affirmation often encourage excessive work and labour on the parts of the wrestlers. Fans cheer when wrestlers bleed’ (2014: 44). The pressure of the fandom, the fandom that is present in both the live moment of activity and in the constantly accessible social media space, compel such behaviours. These fans are (largely) not duped by the performance but, rather, consciously understand and play along with the structures of the game. This leads to a complex layering; in Sharon Mazer’s words, ‘They look to see the fake and to see through the fake to the real’ (2020: 8).

Blading complicates wrestling’s fakery because it is simultaneously real and not-real. It is fake in that it is manufactured, but it is also strikingly real, as the blood is the actual blood of the performer. The effortful physicality of the blood allows wrestling to be read as sport. But the blood emanates from a self-inflicted wound and, importantly, the moment of laceration is disguised, hidden; the point is that the audience, whose vocal fannish response has encouraged the bloodletting, cannot know for sure whether the blood is from a real injury or blading. They suspect the latter but have no desire to see the moment of slicing in the same way as the audience for a magician’s show has no desire to see the boring mechanics of the trick. They might wish to understand the real afterwards but, in the moment, they want to be, in a sense, deceived. Blading can look horrific, but, in actuality, is far less painful than other injuries such as muscle tweaks or bone breakages. In fact, the relationship between bladed blood and pain is deeply complex, as wrestler Jamie Lewis Hadley describes:

It is more than just the feeling of the blood coming down your face, but also the recognizable metal taste along with the sensation of the liquid thickening as it coagulates on your skin. These factors contribute to making it easier to feel like you’re in pain – allowing a much more authentic performance. (Hadley 2016: 157–8)

So, this is real blood, enabled by a performative action and integrated into fictional storytelling, which paradoxically, perhaps, engenders a real feeling of pain, despite not really being particularly painful, enabling a wrestler to perform with a greater sense of authenticity. Wrestling blood, then, is as liminal as the form it stains.

In her 2010 article ‘Popular entertainments and the spectacle of bleeding’ Lucy Nevitt examines a particularly contentious moment in sporting history through the wrestling idea of blading: the Bloodgate affair. I extend her thoughtful argument here by reading it through Hadley’s complex and embodied experience of wrestling blading blood. In 2009 Harlequins rugby club played Leinster in a Heineken Cup quarter final. Interestingly, and as it will transpire ironically, Harlequins has always used the commedia dell’arte figure of the same name in its club badge. In commedia, Harlequin is the witty servant, though the characteristics of this figure, like so many of the commedia zanni, have changed over the centuries. He can be capricious and devious, employing disguise to achieve his objectives. The Bloodgate affair might not have looked out of place in a Harlequin-led lazzi. Rugby allows teams to bring on blood substitutes when a player needs to be bandaged up. The Heineken Cup is one of rugby’s most valuable prizes and the financial and reputational implications of a quarter final are clear. With only five minutes to play, Harlequins trailed by a single point. Needing a drop kick or penalty to win, Harlequins used blood capsules to fake injury to winger Tom Williams in order to enable a tactical substitution. In the aftermath, the club doctor was accused of intentionally cutting William’s lip to hide the use of blood capsules. So, when the player was examined in the dressing room it looked, indeed, like an injury had occurred on the pitch (BBC 2019). There is a layering of fakery here: fake blood and then faking the injury (while actually causing an injury) to hide the fake blood. Had the doctor consented, blading here would have been used to cover up an injury rather than drawing attention to it.

Commentators and the opposition physios immediately spotted the deception. Williams (rather like Guerrero) had far too much blood in his mouth from a simple cut. He also foolishly winked at his teammate as he exited the pitch, a cocky acknowledgement that they had, in his mind, successfully performed the deception. This latter action is, again perhaps paradoxically, anathema to the wrestling ring. As Hadley suggests, the bladed blood in wrestling adds to the authenticity of the performance, not only for the spectator but also for the performer. Williams used the blood to create the deception of pain for the spectator but does not use it to, in a Stanislavskian sense, feel the ‘as if’ himself (Stanislavski 2017: 52). The bladed blood is real blood; this is not. Therefore, he is unable to have the visceral experience described by Hadley above. In the aftermath, like the Harlequin commedia dell’arte figure on the team’s jersey who does the bidding of his master, it was clear that the scenario had been masterminded by director of rugby Dean Richards (Monye 2019).

Hadley says that in the ring ‘[b]lood that escapes the body, appearing on the surface of the skin, the mat and on costumes is a frequent signifier of pain’ (Hadley 2016: 157). Williams’s blood, too, was a ‘signifier of pain’, a presence that was meant to attract sympathy, prove toughness and, most importantly, initiate an on-field change. In a sense blood in the ring and in Bloodgate aims/aimed to deceive onlookers. Blood in both is part of what in wrestling parlance is referred to as a ‘work’. In professional wrestling, work is a multi-faceted idea. It can mean the obvious: the labour of wrestling. But it also refers to the act of creating a fictional storyline in contrast to ‘shoot’, which refers to telling the truth: as Laurence de Garis says, ‘“Working the crowd” typically means the process of manipulating the crowd to elicit certain reactions’ (2002: 200). The difference is that this is a consensual experience in wrestling (I take pleasure in joining in) but in the Bloodgate scandal, the deception was more aggressive and dishonest. While wrestling often faces accusations of fakery, rugby, especially English rugby with its traditional public-school associations, is seen as a bastion of fair play. Yet, the Bloodgate case reveals that the fakery of wrestling is close to the surface of sport. More than this, the actual substance differs profoundly: in a deeply complex way, the bladed blood of wrestling means that this has a reality for the performer and spectator alike that the theatrical blood of Bloodgate could not emulate.

‘WAS THAT REALLY BLOOD?’ CURT SCHILLING, RON ATHEY AND THE INNATE DOUBTFULNESS OF BLOOD

Extending this, Nevitt claims that Bloodgate ‘is a rich starting point for an exploration of how blood and bleeding function in performance-based entertainment’ (2010: 81). While I agree, the fakery of the substance in Bloodgate means that the comparison begins to fall down. My sense is that this comparison might be even more useful to examine the presence of an athlete’s actual blood, enabling us to uncover the performativity of such blood and make sense of the history surrounding it. For blood in sport is never a simple by-product of the activity. Sporting blood stands in for larger concepts, such as exhaustion, threat, resilience and pride. In essence, it performs something more than bodily fluid, just as the bladed blood in the wrestling ring. So, to our example: it is Game 6 of the 2004 World Series. Curt Schilling is pitching for the Boston Red Sox against the New York Yankees. Schilling had suffered with an ankle injury for much of the season and, in advance of the game, the team doctor made the decision to suture the connective tissue around the tendon in his right ankle, stabilizing it so that Schilling could play. As the match went on, the blood from the injury started to seep through his sock, staining the white material red.

Schilling helped his team overcome a 3–0 deficit for the first time in baseball history. Outfielder Gabe Kapler recalls the event: ‘It wasn’t overblown. When there was all that talk about, “Was that really blood?” not only was it really blood, but what he endured and mentally overcame the way he did may never be done again’ (Browne 2014). Schilling’s stained bloody sock famously performed his incredible sporting feat. And it continues to perform, being sold at auction and displayed, for a time, in the Baseball Hall of Fame. The sock can be read through Diana Taylor’s discussion of the ephemerality or otherwise of performance in Archive and the Repertoire. Countering the assumption that the archive is unmediated, Taylor says, ‘What makes an object archival is the process whereby it is selected, classified, and presented for analysis’ (2003: 19). Most bloody socks are simply washed or thrown away, but this single sock performatively represents Schilling’s effort and remains valuable.

But Kapler asks a fraught question that throws us back into the wrestling ‘work’ and the art of blading: ‘Was that really blood?’ The incredulity behind this sentence suggests doubt or at least disbelief. In fact, there were accusations of fakery and hoax, with Yankee fans in particular doubting the legitimacy of the blood. These doubts lingered: a decade later, Schilling tweeted a picture of his ankle from that time with a large, stitched gash along the side ‘for all you ketchup dinks’ (by which he means: for those who still insisted he had faked it) (Silva 2014). This is one of baseball’s most iconic moments, a heroic effort etched in red on a white sock. And yet Kapler’s question points to the way that blood has simultaneously validated the effort and brought it into doubt, just as blading visually confirms effort and labour and yet remains tinged with a fake theatricality.

Kapler’s question might also be posed to performance artist Ron Athey whose blood-letting performances challenge the fictionalization of the theatre. Athey is known for challenging his own subjectivity and disturbing the boundaries of the performative by slicing, cutting or otherwise disfiguring his own body. Unlike the act of blading, Athey draws attention to the making of the injury, which is the key reason why Schulze and Laine compare live art practices like this to hardcore wrestling rather than wrestling in general. Athey is one of several performance artists who use blood to complicate antitheatrical claims about theatrical fakery. His performances insist on the real and can be best understood through Hans Thies Lehmann’s suggestion that in our rationalized, industrialized society ‘it falls to the theatre to deal with extremes of affect by means of an aesthetics of risk, extremes which always contain the possibility of offending or breaking taboos’ (Lehmann 2006: 186–7). But this is more complicated: the blood of Athey’s performances (and the performances of similar artists) complicates the real by denoting excess, the word Barthes uses to describe wrestling. Nicholas Ridout insists about such artists that though they are explicit about their desire to break through the theatrical ‘the reality of their work is closer to the “pain of an impossible sainthood” than it is to the achievement of this inhuman grace’ (2006: 17). In a sense, in his striving for the real, Athey’s body becomes excessive, more than real. It stands in for the suffering, self-flagellating saint. My provocation is that the presence of blood in Athey’s performances and Schilling’s efforts are not, as might first be imagined, confirmation of an unquestionable sense of the real. Rather, blood is always excessive and, in its very tangibility and stickiness, compels us to always ask, ‘Is it real?’ therefore imbuing it with at least the risk of fakery that is so familiar to wrestling.

CONCLUSION: HOW WRESTLING MIGHT ENABLE A DEEPER UNDERSTANDING OF BLOOD ON THE STAGE AND THE PITCH

Last year legendary boxer Floyd Mayweather took on Logan Paul, the popular YouTuber, in the ring. Mayweather called his rival a ‘fake fighter’. Legendary British boxer Tony Bellew called Paul ‘stupid, they’re putting their lives at risk’ (Benson 2021). In a sparring match in the lead up to this odd spectacle, Mayweather was accused by fans of photoshopping fake blood on to his shirt and arm (Figg 2021). Paradoxically, it was the real boxer Mayweather rather than social media star Paul who was accused of this stunt. Rather than authenticating the effort, the presence of this blood simply added an extra layer of performativity to this match, which was already framed in performative rather than sporting terms. Mayweather and Paul both have associations with wrestling and, therefore, understand the potency of wrestling blood. In 2008 the former took on the giant Big Show at World Wrestling Entertainment’s (WWE’s) flagship event WrestleMania. In the lead up, Mayweather legitimately broke Big Show’s nose, thereby, once again, destabilizing the assumed performative structures of professional wrestling (Rondina 2017). Logan Paul, who has a background in amateur wrestling, appeared at the most recent 2022 WrestleMania, tag-teaming with The Miz against Rey and Dominik Mysterio. Understanding Mayweather–Paul through the lens of the opponents’ wrestling experiences makes that whole event feel like a work and the blood, fake or otherwise, is an integral part of this.

My sense is that blood on the stage and on the pitch (or in this case, the ring) would benefit from the oculars and lexicons of professional wrestling. This is working out Laine’s most recent recommendation in Professional Wrestling on the Commercial Stage that wrestling should be key to the study of various disciplines ‘because it taps into, comments upon, and interjects itself into many, many facets of culture and society’ (Laine 2020: 124). To watch a professional wrestling match is to see a microcosm of popular cultures and arts crashing together. This not only means that professional wrestling requires a transdisciplinary approach where disciplines remain strong and well-defined while representatives from these areas find a common lexicon with which to study this most awkwardly liminal of forms; it also means that wrestling provides a space of meeting where scholars and scholar-practitioners from a range of subjects might find a way of communicating, or tropes and narratives that they recognize. Laine goes on say that the spectacular, sometimes gruesome world of professional wrestling ‘foregrounds those aspects of performance that are often ignored, hidden backstage, or otherwise elided’ (Laine 2020: 124). These include the hidden labour, economic pressures and dangers. Wrestling’s innate ability to draw attention to meanings, objects and presences can be transferred to sporting arenas and contemporary stages, enabling a more intricate reading of shared elements such as blood. If understood through wrestling’s liminal character then sporting and theatrical blood are not singularly defined as real or not-real, authentic or fake, but as always both/and.

NOTE

I would like to thank the British Society for Sports History (BSSH). This article is, in part, based on the keynote address I delivered at the BSSH conference in August 2021 and many of the ideas in the revised manuscript emanate from the generous discussions and questions. I particularly thank Conor Heffernan whose feedback and thoughts were, as always, so insightful, and Anka Makrzanowska for her encouraging comments on the final draft. Thank you also to Kevin Riordan who introduced me to the story of Curt Schilling’s sock.