INTRODUCTION TO THE FREE ONLINE VERSION When Vince McMahon decided to turn wrestling into a live-action cable TV comic book in the early 80s, he not only changed the business, he changed television. Hulkamania drove the World Wrestling Federation to the top of the cable ratings chart. It also defined a new way for a TV program to interact with the audience. American pro wrestling as we know it has always been ‘staged,’ but for most of the twentieth century, the audience wasn’t in on it. Certainly, respectable people had their suspicions, but the question, “Is it real?” sparked legitimate debate. When Vince McMahon forced wrestling to change from a decentralized live show with definite territories to a cable TV phenomenon, he quickly saw that the old model for putting on a show was no longer relevant. In a tightly controlled live audience, the old tricks of the trade -- stomping your foot when you deliver a phony punch, falling hard when your opponent delivers a flying forearm – could fool a large chunk of the audience. But on cable TV, broadcast nationwide every week, there was no way to maintain the illusion forever. McMahon’s solution: drop the facade of realism altogether: The audience will know it’s fake, let’s not try to fool them. Instead, let’s make it more fun. Grand entrances with elaborate costumes; ridiculous characters straight out of a comic book; stories suitable for a daytime soap opera. Hulkamania. It was huge. I knew in kindergarten that it was fake. I didn’t care. I loved it. But by the time I was a teenager, I thought it was all a bit silly, and changed the channel. I wasn’t alone. McMahon lost the bulk of his audience when my generation hit puberty. In the 1 early 80’s, Hulkamania was the right marketing at the right time – cable TV was a new medium that desperately needed a flagship program. The WWF’s competition in those early days was Japanese rubber suit monster shows and Bozo the Clown. Vince McMahon was the first media mogul to put a sustainable, entertaining, regularly updated show on cable TV, and he quickly dominated the entire medium. By 1990, much of my generation had outgrown the antics of the Hulkamania era. For a time, Vince tried to bring in a new crowd of youngsters, but it wasn’t the same. The younger generation who should have taken my place in the WWF audience now had lots of other options on cable television, and the audience for pro wrestling in America languished. But it didn’t disappear. In the early 90s, the fans who stayed with pro wrestling were those who liked it for more than just the comic book spectacle, and over time, both major American promotions re-tooled their show to play to the remaining audience. Spectacular gimmicks like Hogan or The Ultimate Warrior gave way to great in-ring athletes like Bret Hart and Ricky Steamboat. Allowing the technical masters to rise above the charismatic actors was a crucial step towards wrestling’s rebirth later in the decade. It was an admission on the part of promoters like McMahon that the little kids were gone, and if wrestling was going to survive, it would have to play to the people who actually liked wrestling. In 1995, WWF superstar Diesel cut a promo where he said he was happy he no longer had to be Vince McMahon’s corporate puppet. This sort of “worked shoot” was brand new to WWF fans, and was exhilarating to watch. For most of the twentieth century, wrestling promoters insisted their show was real. In the early 80’s, Vince McMahon effectively admitted 2 it all was fake when he pushed the show beyond any believable boundaries. For more than a decade, we fans watched in full knowledge that it was all staged, and played along with the game. One Fall begins with a wink from one wrestler to another. That wink, and its ramifications in the story, are a nod to powerful storytelling device pro wrestling unearthed in the idea of a “worked shoot” like Diesel’s. In a worked shoot, wrestlers are winking at the fans. They’re saying, “Yes, this is all an act, and it’s our little secret.” A worked shoot is when an actor breaks character as part of the script. Pro wrestling’s decision to wink at its fans this way was a brilliant move that revitalized the industry. This change in storytelling style happened at the same time the Internet exploded from an obscure text network for computer geeks to a part of daily life for most Americans. The leading demographic for this huge new medium was also the leading demographic in the wrestling audience: young men. Just as it had with cable television the decade prior, pro wrestling found itself riding the tide of cutting edge communications technology. The Internet further blurred the distinctions between fiction and reality in the wrestling world. It allowed fans to speculate, to share news, to gossip. It also rewarded promotions who used wrestling angles to get people talking. We all know where this went. The NWO, Bash at the Beach, The Montreal Screwjob. Without even knowing it, wrestling promoters were creating a new kind of modern theater, one where semi-improvised stories onstage leaned heavily on the audience reaction for the next plot points, and a 24-hour worldwide communications network allowed the audience to work together 3 at shaping the larger story. I loved it. The dramatist in me still adores those groundbreaking days in the late 90s, when the lines between what was real and what was fake were so blurred, so fresh, we had no choice but to rush online after the show and speculate about what the hell just happened on TV. One Fall is an attempt to capture the excitement of those days and immortalize it as only a book can do. It’s a fantasy, where the worked shoots have become so sophisticated that not even the wrestlers fully understand what’s real and what’s fake, and the smart fans on the Internet don’t just affect the storyline, they are an integral part of it. It’s now five years since One Fall was first released. I am immensely grateful to everyone who gave the novel such a warm reception. In those five years, One Fall has gone from a story that takes place in the current world of wrestling to a story from wrestling’s last golden age. It’s now a part of history. As such, I think it should become public record (so to speak, this free eBook is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 license). Thank you for reading, and I am proud to present the completely free eBook version of One Fall. Enjoy! Spencer Baum September 26, 2009 4 CHAPTER 1 There is an instant of clarity right before the pain. Joey had felt it before. The world slows down and is more brightly lit. Muddled noise becomes distinct, separate sounds. Skin is a circuit board, alive with current at every switch. Joey took advantage of that clarity to let his colleague know that everything was okay. Just before falling to the ring floor, as if knocked unconscious by the violent chair shot to his skull, Joey winked. Normally a wink wasn’t necessary. In most cases a wink would be frowned upon, lest the audience saw it and the illusion was broken. Normally a chair shot hurt, and sounded good, and left you with a headache the next day, but didn’t require any reassurance that the match could continue. But this chair shot wasn’t normal. This chair shot snapped all the way to the upper deck. The sound was so vivid that it might have been Joey’s spine snapping like a wishbone. Maybe the wink wasn’t a good idea. Someone might have seen it. Joey hoped he hadn’t ruined what was potentially a great moment in wrestling history – the nastiest chair shot ever. Then the clarity was gone, washed out with the pain, and any second thoughts about the wink would have to wait. The pain pressed against his entire head at once, as if his brain had grown too big for his skull and would squeeze its way out of his ears. Joey lay motionless on the ring mat, knowing that this spot would be most effective if he appeared totally unconscious. But it took all his will not to grab his head with both hands and scream in agony. He hoped the crowd was buying it. Judging by the noise, they were. Or was that just the 5 ringing in his ears? He wouldn’t know until he watched the tape tomorrow morning. Joey Mayhem was a new face in the Global Wrestling Association, and tonight’s match was his first appearance on their flagship television program, GWA Burn. Joey’s opponent tonight, Rob “Jumbo” Sanders, was a familiar face on Burn, having wrestled for the promotion for the past eight years. As a television character, Jumbo was among the nastiest of villains, and always drew some decent venom from the crowd. A muscular black man with a 70's-style afro, Jumbo was half way between six and seven feet tall (but always introduced as a “Seven-Footer”) and dwarfed Joey by comparison. That size disparity made the chair shot all the more sinful. Jumbo was already a foot taller than Joey, and had been systematically beating him into mush for ten minutes.