The Smackdown!
The lowdown on wrestling and race
BY Michael Holmes
Photography by Reuters/Daniel Aguilar
Outrage, in professional wrestling’s alternate universe, is almost always marketable. Careers, and fortunes, are made by wrestlers—and companies like World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), the publicly traded, virtual monopoly that controls the billion-dollar industry—capable of sustaining fear, loathing and controversy. Grannies powerbombed through tables, pantomimed necrophilia…. Since Hulk Hogan thrashed the Iron Sheik and began telling the kids of Reagan’s America to say their prayers and eat their vitamins, wrestling has thrived on the vanguard of shock and reality culture.
Sure, much of its scripted mayhem remains essential good versus evil. But for two decades there has also been a subtlety (exploring gay marriage; championing the blue collar Everyman who gives the finger to corporate greed) that the sport’s detractors—dismissing the “low-brow” spectacle as culturally irrelevant—have ignored.
And then, suddenly, rope opera mattered.
As the world processed the London transit terror, the July 7 episode of SmackDown! ran unedited on North American network television. Filmed three days earlier, the show featured an Arab-American character orchestrating a group assault on one of wrestling’s most beloved superstars. The Undertaker was in the middle of beating down Muhammad Hassan’s Farsi-speaking manager, Khosrow Daivari. Then Hassan’s masked henchmen—dressed in black T-shirts, desert fatigues, black army boots and armed with clubs and piano wire—attacked. The Undertaker was symbolically garrotted and Hassan administered the coup de grâce, his Camel Clutch finishing move. Martyr-like, Daivari was carried out of the ring on the shoulders of his allies.
Today, I’m not sure what shocks me more—that United Paramount Network (UPN) aired the incident; that, according to WWE spokesman Gary Davis, the segment received only 200 to 300 complaints from its five million viewers; or that American news media finally reacted to a wrestling storyline.
By late July 2005, UPN caved to mainstream criticism: WWE was ordered to remove Hassan from SmackDown! Unable to address the controversy on television, Hassan used WWE.com to reiterate what was simply the basis of his character—a Middle-Eastern-American, who, since 9/11, had been routinely and unfairly discriminated against. The lines between reality and pro wrestling began to blur, however, as the New York Post’s Don Kaplan became part of Hassan’s streaming video indictment of the prejudiced media and wrestling fanbase he believed was preventing him from appearing on TV. At their next pay-per-view event, The Great American Bash, WWE effectively killed off Hassan by having the Undertaker send him “straight to hell,” through a stage and onto a concrete floor.
For seven months, Mark Copani, a charismatic New Yorker of Italian and Jordanian descent, made Muhammad Hassan one of wrestling’s hottest “heels.” Why his character was hated—his angrily articulate and violent response to routine discrimination—was both plausible and disconcerting: Hassan dared to complain and react. He was fascinating—and, perhaps, too extreme for sports entertainment. A citizen of a country grappling with everything from racial profiling to the casualties of an increasingly unpopular war, Hassan just didn’t fit into the us-versus-them storyline that Hulkamania exploited so successfully.
Weeks before the Undertaker was terrorized, wrestlers were discussing discrimination. An “impartial judge,” Stone Cold Steve Austin, was brought in by storyline “management” to hear the grievances of Hassan and Daivari. Austin’s first words to the duo?
“I see sand people.”
With just four words, Austin put Hassan’s complaints into perspective. The media, however, ignored this incident. And others. By February 2005, Washington’s American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee was already trying to persuade WWE to modify its presentation of Copani’s character. Because although, in spokeswoman Siwar Bandar’s words, he “deals with a very sensitive issue,” his matches cause people to “get emotional…. And these emotions, even though they are based on a fictional story… are very much a reality.”
So, was WWE stumbling through just another “rasslin’” storyline when Hassan’s “terror cell” attacked on July 7, 2005? Were they just trying to shock fans when they got caught in the spotlight of circumstance? Absolutely. But on the heels of mainstream rap superstar Kanye West’s disturbingly real, emotional and unscripted indictment of the American media and governmental response to hundreds of thousands of—mostly black—Americans whose lives have been catastrophically altered in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, professional wrestling is more relevant and challenging than most people want to believe.
“George Bush,” a distraught, angry West told the world, “doesn’t care about black people.” And Muhammad Hassan had been asking America to scrutinize his priorities long before TV Guide and Variety decided to pay attention.
