I’ve been an Undertaker fan since
I was ten years old. I suppose that’s a
common story. Many of us saw him for
the first time at that age, when he towered over the heads of nearly everyone
in the company, accompanied by a mugging Paul Bearer, rolling back his eyes
like a zombie in heat.
No one pretends that the
Undertaker was an elegant wrestler. He
could walk the ropes and pull off the whole zombie thing, but he was creaky and
imperfect and imprecise. It took years
for him to build up this sort of cool nonchalance, this sort of image that made
questioning his skills kind of a moot point.
The Undertaker was just The
Undertaker: like a pillar or a supporting wall, he was always there if you were
a wrestling fan of a certain age, always solidly available. Performance over athleticism was his
game. For spectacle he was at the top of
his game.
He was an era straddler, staring
out as a scary immortal zombie who literally put his opponents in a body bag
back when it was entirely marketed to children, to ‘dying’ before a crowd of
thousands and ascending to ‘heaven’, only to be brought home by Leslie Nielsen,
to becoming a cult leader who performed
black weddings and blood sacrifices (“Where to, Stephanie?!”). Somehow he sprouted a brother, and then there
was some weird, soapy drama in which Paul Bearer somehow became Kane’s father
and Taker burned down the funeral parlor they were all living in.
Somewhere in the middle he became
a biker who likes to wear leather, much like the man who portrayed him.
Like many in the wrestling business,
it was those latter years that eclipsed him; the memes, the broken streak, the
goggle-eyed fans staring at him in confused wonder. There’s nothing, however, that will erase the
memories. I’m glad ‘Taker got to go out
on his feet, got to walk away even though his body is aching and slowing down
quite visibly. We all know there are
much uglier ways to go.
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