Slaphappy by Thomas Hackett

Author:Thomas Hackett [Hackett,Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-06-202902-7
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2006-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

IT WAS a much different story for the puppets. Promoters have always jerked wrestlers around, flinging them all over the country, bashing them about in every conceivable way, and in the end leaving them in a mangled heap of broken bones and broken dreams. That is the nature of a business where human beings are treated as disposable commodities. Whether the promoters were to blame for what Roddy Piper calls “the sickness” or the despair was to be expected in a profession that indulged delusions of full-blown narcissists, of the dozens of deaths in recent years, only a few had come as a surprise. Strung-out zombies who could only occasionally rouse themselves from a drug-addicted stupor to make noise about a comeback, these men already seemed to belong to the walking dead. If only for the name recognition, the rinky-dink independents might still hire them, no matter how difficult they were to work with. But the lousy pay and ignominy of performing for a few hundred fans when, not so long ago, they had strutted their stuff before hundreds of thousands, making upward of $20,000 for fifteen minutes’ work at a pay-per-view, was more than many fragile egos could handle. Most killed themselves slowly, quietly, with Percocets, Percodans, quaaludes, somas, morphine, cocaine, Oxycontin—you name it, they took it, until one night they took a few too many pills and, with the added stress of having spent years abusing anabolic steroids, died of a heart attack in some cutrate roadside motel.

The world of porn wasn’t pretty, either, of course. Men in the business could tell themselves they were defending the last bastion of masculinity (“The one thing a woman cannot do is ejaculate in the face of her partner,” one porn producer said. “We have that power”). The fact was, though, very few actors had the clout or made the money that the top actresses did, and inevitably that led to a lot of antifeminist frustrations. “You’re just a hard dick—and sometimes you’re not even that,” an actor told me. The guys I met knew going in that nobody particularly cared about them; they weren’t happy about it, but that was the reality of the business, and they accepted it. Wrestlers, on the other hand, never stopped hoping for praise and approval—a longing that went a long way toward explaining why so many careers ended in sorrow and early disorder.

“I can tell you,” Rob Zicari said during a rare reflective moment, “wrestling is definitely an uglier business than porno. There are a lot more deaths, a lot more drug overdoses. I here’s this desperation to make it, and it takes its toll, mentally and physically. Before WWE took over everything, you could make thirty thousand bucks a year and feel satisfied that you had a good life. Now if you’re not big enough or not strong enough or not ‘over’ enough, then you’re fucked. You ain’t going to wrestle. You ain’t going to work. It’s all or nothing.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.