THE WORLD JUST LOST A WONDER

Treat her for just who she was: a trailblazing icon

Joanie Laurer, better known as Chyna, professional wrestling's "9th Wonder of the World", has died at the age of 45. In the coming days and weeks you'll see a lot of pieces from mainstream news sources about how her post-wrestling career overshadowed her work in the then-WWF, but I'm not here to moralise or pass judgement on a woman whose body isn't even cold yet. I'm here to talk about, to use a phrase beloved of WWE commentary legend Jim Ross, "what brought her to the dance": her career in and around the wrestling ring.

Chyna was a true cornerstone of the fabled Attitude Era. Trust me, I lived through it. She was all over the place. Every new merchandising venture the company made, the faces involved were always Stone Cold, the Rock, the Undertaker and Chyna. Not Triple H, not Mankind, not Kane, certainly not that vacant airhead Sable, but Chyna. And it seemed completely natural. It was meant to be. Here were all these powerful badass characters, and of course, there was a powerful badass woman with them. The way it should have been.

If it wasn't for Chyna standing there like an intimidating badass, the first run of the notorious* stable D-Generation X would have been truly awful, just Triple H and Shawn Michaels standing around making dick jokes to a crowd of baying idiots. Chyna, simply by standing behind the two jocks with a stoic look on her face, gave the group depth and mystery when it could so easily have been a boys' club that was even more cringeworthy than the nWo.

When the WWF started letting Chyna show some personality was, for me, when the stable started to actually be entertaining. Remember when DX played strip poker on Raw, and Chyna was cleaning up? She was genuinely entertaining despite remaining completely silent and keeping all her clothes on. That's how you build a character without having her say a word.

Notice how Chyna's standing at the forefront of D-Generation X?
It's because she was more interesting than the high school jocks behind her

During the second DX run that began after Shawn Michaels' first retirement followingWrestleMania XIV, Chyna was once again the best part of it. Look back: the guys in DX were all sophomoric meatheads. Triple H had the same tired dick jokes ("the cock-pit!") and a catchphrase he stole off that joker Michael Buffer; Road Dogg had the same speech he made every night plus what seemed to be a nervous tic brought on by a poor performance in a childhood spelling bee; X-Pac just yelled for the crowd to "make some noise," laughed at Hunter's jokes and called other men bitches, and Billy Gunn had a great physique but some of the worst mic skills I've ever heard in wrestling. Chyna, meanwhile, didn't have to do anything to be interesting and memorable. She was distant and different.

One of the most genuinely shocking moments of the Attitude Era was when she turned on Triple H in early 1999 and joined Vince McMahon's nefarious Corporation: a true "holy shit!" heel turn that was handled far better than even "Stone Cold" Steve Austin's in 2001. I was gutted. Then when she and Triple H seemingly got back together a few months later at WrestleMania XV, I was overjoyed... then crushed again later in the night when they both joined the Corporation. Apart from Owen Hart kicking his brother Bret's leg out of his leg** in late 1993, it was the first heel turn that actually affected me.

Chyna defeats Jeff Jarrett for the Intercontinental Championship
at WWF's No Mercy pay-per-view, October 1999

All this doesn't even go into the way she broke down boundaries for women in wrestling: winning the Intercontinental title, and being the first female entrant into the Royal Rumble and the King of the Ring tournament. She was a trailblazer, an icon. And none of it seemed like a marketing gimmick or anything like it, it seemed perfectly natural. "Chyna's wrestling for the IC belt? Cool!" I remember being legitimately disappointed when she lost it, principally because that opened the door for Chris Benoit to start wrestling for it, and at the time—unpopular opinion alert—Benoit bored my arse off.

Remember that this was at a time where women's wrestling was seen as an excuse to go for a piss, or for the horny teenage boys in the audience to fill up their spank banks for the next few months. Evening gown matches and bikini contests and promos that amounted to nothing more than the arcade game Cat Fight from The Simpsons. As Kefin Mahon from the Attitude Era Podcast put it, the air was thick with phrases like "Your hair is a bitch! Your fingernails are sluts!" Absolutely terrible. But despite that, you had Chyna kicking men's asses and proving that yes, women do belong in the squared circle. Fifteen years later, we're seeing the fruits of the seeds Chyna sowed, as women like Sasha Banks, Becky Lynch, Bayley and Charlotte have proven to be legitimately more entertaining and over with the fans than most of the male talent on WWE's roster.

Chyna and Eddie gave us some of the most
memorable moments of the entire Attitude Era.

However, Chyna losing the Intercontinental title did open the door for her run with Eddie Guerrero, and while a case can be made (particularly on-air by Jim Ross) that Eddie set back Hispanic-American relations by a number of decades, it was truly entertaining TV, and to see Chyna smile was wonderful, especially in hindsight, knowing what was going on backstage between Triple H and Stephanie McMahon. Mention Eddie's name to people, and a lot of them will come out with "Mamacita!" Remember that it was this angle that gave Eddie his famous nickname, Latino Heat. Arguably it was his association with Chyna that got Eddie over in the WWF, because the fans back then couldn't have given a stuff how good somebody was in the ring: if you weren't entertaining, they didn't care. And Eddie and Chyna were entertaining in every sense of the word.

I always hoped WWE would cut the bullshit moralising regarding Chyna's post-wrestling career, and induct her into the Hall of Fame. What, Hall of Famer Jimmy Snuka murdering his girlfriend isn't as bad as pornography? Hall of Famer Hulk Hogan saying he doesn't want his daughter dating a "fucking nigger" isn't as bad as pornography? Hall of Famer*** Donald Trump proposing the banning of 1.6 billion people from the "Land of the Free" and labelling an entire nation's inhabitants as drug dealers and rapists isn't as bad as pornography? Get the fuck out of my office.

I guess things like that prove that it really is just Stephanie McMahon's pettiness that kept her out of the Hall of Fame. Seems like vindictiveness is a McMahon family trait. And I must say, as Stephanie can reasonably be accused of directly causing Chyna's downward spiral, it kind of sickens me that she's all PR sympathy now. "Tragic news," my arse. A sense of relief is more like it.

So today, whatever you do, make sure you pay tribute to Chyna: punch somebody in the balls.

Goodbye, Joanie. I hope you find the happiness in death that seemed to elude you in life.

JOANIE "CHYNA" LAURER
1969-2016

* Though nowhere near as notorious as WWE's revisionist history would have you believe

** Right, Owen? Post-match interviews: always a bad idea

*** I well and truly wish I was joking. "Celebrity Wing", my arse

THAT'S HARD TIMES, DADDY

THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMPACT OF

PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING

No, this isn't a work.

I'll start by acknowledging the "wrestling is fake" lobby. Well, of course it is. If wrestlers did half the shit they do to each other in the ring for real, they'd fucking kill each other. What are you, simple? That aside, wrestlers regularly perform nightly with the kind of injuries that would put 'legitimate' athletes on the shelf for weeks and months at a time. And while wrestlers may just be playing characters, I'd like you to look at the last movie you watched and tell me if the actors therein were being themselves. For that matter, tell me if the fight scenes were choreographed with stuntmen in place of the actors. They were? I rest my case. The crazy bastards who make their living in professional wrestling don't have the benefit of choreographers, they don't have rehearsals or retakes and they do all their own stunts.

Anyway, to the point. Much like how Dave Lister described boxing in Red Dwarf, wrestling is one of the great working class escapes, from this uniquely bizarre form of entertainment's birth in carnivals and sideshows, through the days of Gorgeous George (who inspired a young Bob Dylan), to the UK's cult heroes Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks; from "The American Dream" Dusty Rhodes to everybody's favourite belligerent redneck "Stone Cold" Steve Austin.

Laugh at the crap perm all you like;
this man could beat you like a runaway slave

For the first look at wrestling's sociological aspect, I'll analyse the aforementioned Dusty Rhodes. When I first saw Dusty—real name Virgil Runnels—I wondered why he was nicknamed "The American Dream". All I saw was an overweight guy with a silly voice and a dodgy hairdo. Wait, now I get it. I kid, I kid. But what Dusty, billed as "the son of a plumber", did for people is simple to understand. He proved that you didn't need to look perfect or be in great shape to get respect, and with his legendary "Hard Times" promo, he put into words the concerns and problems of every underpaid steelworker; every mechanic who worked all the hours of the day to provide for a family he barely saw; every construction worker who saw the government taking more and more of his wage packet at the end of every month.

This was a stark contrast to the way everybody else was acting in the 1980s, the most egocentric and self-obsessed decade in recent memory, and an even starker contrast to the character played by his rival, "Nature Boy" Ric Flair: a cocky, arrogant heel who bragged about flying in Lear jets and being chauffeured around the country in limousines. It's classic storytelling: build up a heel character who possesses all the traits your audience despises, and then bring in a charismatic, good-hearted babyface to knock his sodding block off and strike a blow for the common man (which, funnily enough, was Dusty's gimmick a few years later in the then-WWF).

The dream of every underpaid worker in the world

Then there's "Stone Cold" Steve Austin. A man who'd been wrestling for several years got himself a new gimmick in the WWF: a foul-mouthed, beer-guzzling redneck who took no crap from anyone. The fan response to his character was impressive, with the usual response to a rulebreaker being thrown out the window: jaded 1990s fans could really relate to this man's disregard for authority. But it was when the WWF's owner, Vince McMahon, placed himself in Austin's sights that the Texas Rattlesnake's star went supernova. The Austin-McMahon feud would rage for a good few years, which is a hell of a long time in the world of pro wrestling, and it always drew big money. Why? Because everybody on this planet who's ever worked a day in their life would love nothing more than to hit their boss in the face with a steel chair.

If you'd had a hard day at work, with your boss riding your ass about something you didn't give a shit about, then the next best thing to smacking him yourself would be to watch Austin kicking his boss all over whichever arena they were in that week. Even as a schoolboy, which I was during the Austin-McMahon battles, you could still take heart from Austin's actions: "Vince McMahon" was basically shorthand for "anybody who told you what to do". It's an angle that's been periodically returned to ever since, most notably with CM Punk in 2011, and most recently with Daniel Bryan this past summer.

But the first time is always the best.

Short glossary of pro wrestling terms used in this post:

Angle: a storyline

Babyface: a good guy, a hero

Gimmick: a wrestler's character

Heel: a bad guy, a villain
Promo: an interview or other speech given (or 'cut') by a wrestler

Work: something that is predetermined or otherwise fixed. The opposite of a shoot.