Canned Heat and Tanned Meat

Tallaght is as good a place as any to get in a fight. The line of anxious under-twelves and overgrown fanboys outside the Basketball Arena don't look like they're out for a brawl, but that's exactly what they're here to see.

Any early nineties child with cable TV will know about professional wrestling. They'll have watched shows like Smackdown and Raw is War, have played with the action figures and the 15s-rated computer games guiltily bought by parents. Growing up, WWE extravaganzas used to run three hours straight on a Sunday morning, while the less violently-inclined among us were at mass. Most of us outgrew our childhood obsession with The Rock, but for some wrestling is still a kind of religion, either eating up their lives as their profession of choice, or as an unfashionable obsession that drives them to stay up watching Sky Sports pay-per-view. As a teenaged boy in the autograph queue explains: "It's different to normal sports. The bright lights, loud music... It's really a proper event."

Tonight's show is from an independent federation called American Wrestling Rampage. Their roster is a mix of upcoming Irish talent and celebrated ex-WWE veterans, who form the main draw. There are branded black tank tops on sale at the exit with René Dupree's face on them, sold in child size and extra-extra-large. Whole families have even turned out en masse, bringing along homemade posters for a day at the human zoo. It would seems that the Irish like a battle fought in spandex tights as much the Texans.
Backstage a number of muscle-bound types are warming up in the corridor. A table of fruit, Danish pastries and Nutrigrain bars answers the question of what wrestlers eat. The stars aren't hard to spot; Scotty Too Hotty endearingly still wears his break-dancing baggy jeans and outdated Nikes, and X-Pac's mirror shades are still glued to his head, despite it being indoors and at night. His metal t-shirt and bandanna are the exact same as those worn by his action figure, the one sold in Toymaster ten years ago.
Speaking with him half an hour before showtime, the man himself projects the kind of chilled-out confidence that only a man with his own action figure can possess, the very opposite of adrenaline. X-Pac is possibly the oldest pro on the American Wrestling Rampage tour, having joined as a teenager and now in his 22nd year. Like most of his contemporaries on the tour, he describes a life consumed by his job, spent travelling with little time for normality. "It can be hard to relate to people outside the profession; Every relationship that I've ever had has been with a woman in the wrestling business."

X-Pac's famously rocky relationship with ‘WWE Diva' Chyna, and the resulting sex-tape, is something perhaps best left unmentioned. However he is more than willing to talk about a past spent on the shady, amateur margins of the industry. "I've done backyard wrestling. Back when I was younger, I loved wrestling so much I was willing to try anything. It's nothing like what we do at AWR, with all that really extreme violence, but that's fine. I can do it, I don't care."

Announcers generate epic struggles every night for big-timers like X-Pac and René Dupree, but it's the comedians that captured our childhood imaginations. Admiration comes flooding back when I meet Scotty Too Hottie, now going by Scotty the Hottie for legal reasons. As a childhood wrestling hero he doesn't disappoint: humble, straight-talking and fuelled by a strong sense of duty to his family and his fans. "There is that element of showmanship which I enjoy. I'm lucky in that my character has always been a likeable one. Though I know," he explains, "every time that I got out, that they're here to see me do The Worm. I have to do it or the fans won't leave happy." Evidently they still appreciate his dedication, as the crowd erupts when he dusts off his breakdancing signature.
Scotty is proud of his creation of the character, and of a successful career spanning twenty-two years. He returns home to Florida most weeks to spend time with his children, having finally earned a little time off. Few younger wrestlers have this luxury; success in wrestling requires the dedication of any other athletic career, coupled with the stress of a nomadic existence travelling around rural Europe (the AWR stops around France and Italy, making a point of taking their shows off the beaten track of only capital cities). Most of the wrestlers have been on the road for years and given up on settling in any fixed place. When your career consists of being pummelled and slammed into canvas every night, it's hard to hold down an ordinary life in the daytime.

Soon after, the action begins. From a ringside viewpoint, its rapidly becomes clear that wrestling is an out-of-season pantomime, a highly choreographed act balancing crowd manipulation with action and timed sound effects. The wrestling holds themselves play out like violent yoga poses, with an average of three botched attempts to pin competitors before the ref hurriedly strikes three and ends the match. Fights are punctuated with scripted sparring matches; ‘heel' characters mug at the crowd and shout abuse, while an Ireland-v-England flag match brings out the jingoism. Dubliner The Suicide Machine looks scrawny and frail, but compensates by flinging his 175-pound weight around the ring and pulling aerial moves on his opponent, a mohawked man dressed in rubber shorts.
Wrestling bad guys are easy to spot; they come with their own backing track of booing and are unsubtle in the extreme. Toffee-nosed Paul Princely emerges to the sound of violins, a man in a cape resembling Adam Ant at the height of his madness who pours scorn on his ‘lower middle class' audience. The taunts reach fever pitch with his arrival, but rarely feature anything stronger than ‘you suck, you suck!'. Eye-candy arrives in the form of female wrestler Rachelle St. Claire, a softly-spoken Irish first-timer who tells me her grandmother freaked out when she heard about her chosen profession. St Claire's lack of any discernable role in the action leaves her looking a bit superfluous, but her costume of neon green hotpants and fuzzy moon boots more than qualify her as a glamorous assistant.
The WWE are well aware that their audience these days rarely runs above age twelve. They broadcast ‘don't try this at home' campaigns and stress an adamant disapproval of backyard wrestling. But in real life, even more so than on TV, the action plays like a human comic book. Matches are blatantly fixed, predictable by public opinion. The good guy always wins, and a match played in Ireland will naturally be won by an Irish wrestler. It's a deception willingly bought into by even the youngest fans, whose cheers are aided in bigger events by ‘canned heat' - recorded chants and applause - in order to seem louder on TV. The violence is flamboyant and precise, bolstered with sound effects each time someone is slammed to the ground. Though athletic ability is a requisite for wrestlers, the show also depends on spectacle, on scripted exchanges, costumes and Metallica entrance themes. Think Lucha Libre, think carnival sideshow and you won't be far-off.

The wrestling obituaries list reads for the large part favourably, with many WWE alumni living out later years as ‘legends', putting in cameos and pitching up in smaller federations such as AWR. But the dark side of the profession is well documented and remains behind the showmanship, a product of both the hazards of showbiz (addiction, depression) and the pressures of competitive sport (steroid abuse and brain damage). WWE wrestler Chris Benoit's murder of his family and suicide last year prompted a government investigation into industry welfare, and a troubling autopsy report revealed that a career spent taking hits to the head with steel chairs had left Benoit with the brain function of an 85-year-old Alzheimer's patient. Such tragedies are rare, but wrestling history is nonetheless littered with accidents and countless untimely heart-attacks.

It's clearly a volatile way of life, and veteran acts such as Scotty are keen to stress that they stay grounded. "If you want to be with the WWE then yes, your whole life will be given over to wrestling. You have to give a hundred and ten percent of yourself to them, and for me that became kind of a problem." Having moved on from past career peaks, the former WWE star is happy to have the time to pick his children up from school. "It can be very hard to just suddenly switch from being normal all the time to being that character, the action figure, with people telling you how great you are. That can be a bit odd." Would he ever want his children to follow him into the business? "It's hard to know. Wrestling has taken me places and led me do things I might never have done otherwise. But at the same time there's a cost. You don't like to think about your kids getting hurt."

So what is it that keeps people coming back to this ludicrously predictable, outdated, oddly addictive form of entertainment? "I've wrestled in over a hundred countries," X-Pac relates, "and when you get down to the nitty-gritty, human beings are all basically the same. Psychologically I think it's just something we enjoy." Wrestling is utterly false and yet devoid of all pretension; in many respects it hasn't progressed since its origins as a circus sideshow. The soap-opera plotlines and noisy, clashing sound-effects are what entertain fans; the frenzy that propels a wrestler to hurl himself from the ropes is contagious. "You're falling over, getting injuries that you won't feel till the next day," newcomer Duncan Disorderly recounts. ‘I just run though it all on adrenaline, and I don't feel a thing...'