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Inside the squared circle, the wrestlers strut their stuff. Each has a role to play, as carefully sculpted as Chaplin's Tramp, or as their own Everest flesh. Hulk Hogan is the all-California beach boy--David Lee Roth, giant size --with imposing biceps ("my 24-inch pythons"), a genially intimidating line of patter and a well-earned legion of "Hulkamaniacs." Piper is the swinish bully in every late-night barroom, oinking epithets and sucker- punching anyone smaller than he. Nikolai Volkoff and the Iron Sheik, the W.W.F.'s current tag-team champs, are twin xenophobic nightmares: Volkoff insists on singing the Soviet national anthem before each bout, while the Iranian Sheik waves Khomeini's flag and shouts, "America--hack, pfui!" One of their premier opponents, before he defected to the rival National Wrestling Alliance, was Sergeant Slaughter, who leads his audience in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. In many matches, the ring is a cartoon United Nations, in which the U.S. always has a fighting chance.
There is drama. There is ideology. There is also wrestling, after a fashion. This is not legitimate, Greco-Roman- style grappling of the sort made famous every few years by the Olympics or a new John Irving novel. This is show biz; the promoters determine the outcome of most matches in advance, and the mayhem is at least partly pretend. But precisely because pro wrestling is a roughhouse-ballet form of improvisational comedy, the performers must be fine athletes. These lumbering behemoths can flash with agility--as if Godzilla had turned up in a kung fu picture and done O.K. They are not so much gladiators of camp as movie stars who do their own stunts. It can be no small feat of strength and precision to execute an atomic knee drop, a figure-4 leg lock, or the dreaded Boston crab, let alone a flying body block from the ropes to the center of the ring, without seriously injuring either party. "I don't want to hurt anybody," declares the Incredible Hulk (real name: Terry Gene Bollea), 31. "One bad fall could wreck a career--and that means six figures a year for most of us, and at least half a million for me as the champ. After all, this is a business."
For the journeyman wrestler it can be a rough business: keeping your wits while having them knocked out of you, for real or surreal, five or six nights a week. "I admire their total commitment to quality in a profession fraught with danger," says Professor Gerald Morton of Auburn University at Montgomery, who is co-author of Wrestling to Rasslin: Ancient Sport to American Spectacle. "They have no union, no workmen's comp. The promoters, like the old dock foremen, essentially say who is going to work and who isn't." Morton sees an evolution in W.W.F. wrestling "from morality play toward farce. The wrestlers are characters in a continuing story that extends over a series of traumatic situations--matches--with elements of the ludicrous. And like any drama, it has a predetermined outcome. Wrestling can't be fixed because it was never intended to be a sport. You wouldn't say Hamlet was fixed."