by Michael LelloWeekender Editor
Generations of wrestling fans have watched their heroes and villains battle it out in the ring. Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, Rowdy Roddy Piper, Randy “The Macho Man” Savage, Ric Flair, Bret Hart — the list goes on.
Pro wrestling has always run parallel with the pop culture of the day. When Cindy Lauper was one of the entertainment world’s most popular figures, Piper kicked her in the head. When Jerry “The King” Lawler launched a feud with comedian Andy Kaufman, they took it to the David Letterman show, where Lawler slapped Kaufman out of his chair.
Piper and Lawler, along with Hacksaw Jim Duggan, former WWE Diva Cherry, Velvet Sky and local wrestler A.J. Sabatelle will bring the pile drivers, the body slams and the drama to North Pocono High School in Moscow Saturday, Sept. 27 for “Moscow Mania,” a fundraiser for the school’s athletic program.
Lawler, who calls the action on WWE’s weekly “Raw” TV broadcast, is known as much for his commentary work as his wrestling in his 30 years in the business. He’s well aware of the impact and resonance this particular brand of entertainment has had.
“Well, I think that probably the reason wrestling stays relevant is because it mirrors society,” Lawler said in a phone interview. “It’s changed. It’s able to adapt to a changing society. Bigger is better, so the WWE shows got bigger and better. When you go, it’s like a combination of a concert, pyrotechnics show and watching a soap opera.”
Paying the Piper
“The War to Settle the Score” was aired live on MTV in 1985. The event featured Hogan against Piper. It was the event that started “WrestleMania.”
“I think that when it exploded in, oh, ’84, ’85, it had such a gust of wind,” Piper said from his home in Oregon. “You had Hogan with the 24-inch pythons, and Andre. … That’s a hell of a roster.”
The kilt-wearing, bagpipe-playing Piper — who is actually Canadian but has Scottish heritage — gained notice as a bad guy, or “heel,” both as a wrestler and a host of the WWF’s “Piper’s Pit” segment.
Piper was asked if it was fun to play the bad guy.
“Is it fun?” he said. “A long time ago, when I was younger. But once it blew up like it did. … We’re going to Scranton, Pa. It was 20 years ago. I get on TV that goes right into Scranton, Pa., and I would insult everyone I knew that was going to fight, and possibly the town. I’d do that for three, four weeks in a row. Then I’d drive into your town, into your arena, and I would beat up your local favorite guy. Then I gotta eat. Those same people that hated me [in the arena], their opinion hadn’t changed any. I’d clear a place out. I’ve been shot at. … When I kicked Cindy Lauper, goodness gracious.
“What’ll be fun is coming to [Northeastern Pa. this time], because they’re not going to stab me, being a good guy. At least I can get in the building. I’m pretty much guaranteed a dinner. Before it was hard to punch my way out.”
The realness of pro wrestling will always be hotly debated. But what Piper has been through is very real.
“I’ve been stabbed three times, the last time an inch from the heart,” he said. “That’s where I can’t see the fun in it.”
Piper, who successfully fought Hodgkin’s Lymphoma last year, has acted in movies like the sci-fi cult film “They Live.” There’s word that another “They Live” film is in the works.
“I’ve heard that in the bowels of Universal, there’s a lot of talk about, for lack of a better word, a sequel to ‘They Live,’” he said.
He recently wrapped filming “Fancypants,” a comedy with Robert Carradine, who played Lewis Skolnick in the “Revenge of the Nerds” movies.
“Bobby Carradine and I were two sports announcers,” Piper said. “Bobby was a drunk, and I was an overzealous friend. It was very much an ‘Odd Couple’ role, and it was a lot of fun.”
It’s good to be ‘King’
“I don’t really consider myself as a broadcaster or commentator,” said Lawler. “I’m just a wrestler sitting up there.”
It’s a love for the action in the ring that keeps Lawler going and leads him to appear at shows like this weekend’s “Moscow Mania.”
“When I started, I never thought about being a commentator,” he said. “I’ve always maintained a pretty decent [wrestling] schedule, six, sometimes seven times a week. Now, I still wrestle on average two times a week and do commentary once a week.
“The show we’re doing in Moscow is an old-school type of thing, where every person that comes will get an opportunity to get an autograph and a picture taken and to shake the wrestler’s hand.”
Lawler, like Piper, has played the villain for much of his career, but at events like the upcoming local match, he’s usually greeted with open arms.
“When you wrestle as long as I have, you go on both sides of the fence,” Lawler explained. “You’ve been the good guy to some people and the bad guy to some people. There are certain parts of [being the bad guy] that are more fun. When you’re in high school and you play football or basketball or whatever, it’s always more fun — at least it was for me — to play in front of an away crowd. It’s fun to get pumped up and try to disappoint them.”
Lawler’s most notorious moments were with Kaufman, who, as part of his comedy skits, would wrestle women. Lawler took exception to it, and in Lawler’s hometown of Memphis, he wrestled Kaufman.
“It was a sold-out crowd, but the people actually hated him,” Lawler remembered. “The people wanted to see him get murdered. I thought, ‘There must be some way to get some kind of rub off this big Hollywood star.’ I finally manipulated him into a match with me. … Then the Letterman thing, that’s where it got bigger than wrestling. The rest is kind of history. That particular incident is now in the Museum of Radio and Television’s top 100 moments of TV. I think it had a lot to do with changing the face of wrestling.”
One of the things that got Lawler involved in the sport, he said, was drawing wrestlers. It’s something he’s recently re-embraced; at the end of October, Visionary Comics will publish an issue of “Headlocked” featuring Lawler’s cover art.
Generations of fans
“Moscow Mania” is presented by Northeast Wrestling, which put on the “Electric City Slam” last November. That event was the first at the former Scranton Catholic Youth Center in years. For about a decade, the Diocese of Scranton kept pro wrestling away.
“That was probably 1997, 1998,” Northeast Wrestling President Michael O’Brien said. “Wrestling and a lot of entertainment got a little bit edgier, you could almost say MTV-ish. Music was even edgier in the late ’90s than it was in the ’70s, and all entertainment genres pretty much had to follow suit, whether it was TV or movies or music, because if you didn’t, you’d fall by the wayside. At that point, the diocese said the WWF was not what they wanted to do.”
The “Electric City Slam,” at the Lackawanna College Recreation Center, formerly the CYC, was a success, O’Brien said.
“The event did great,” he said. “We had tons of fans pack the old CYC. We had people clamoring for us to come back.”
O’Brien expects Saturday’s even to do well, too.
“Rowdy Roddy Piper was at the CYC a number of times,” he said. “He’s an old-school name, but also he’s been on WWE TV recently, he was on ‘Jimmy Kimmel [Live!],’ he still does a lot of things now, and he’s a big name from before. We try to get maybe the elementary, junior high and high school kids that know Jerry Lawler, and they’ve seen Rowdy Roddy Piper on TV, but also try to draw their mom, their dad and grandparents that knew Roddy Piper from the ’80s.”
From gridiron to ring
A.J. Sabatelle is familiar to area sports fans for starring as a running back for North Pocono. At “Moscow Mania,” he’ll wrestle in front of his hometown fans for the first time.
“It’s cool to do it at my high school where I had gym classes before, and all my teammates from football are going to be there,” said Sabatelle, who also played football at Lackawanna. “It is kind of really cool to be able to that, especially in your own town.”
Sabatelle trained with the renowned Afa at the Wild Samoan Training Center near Allentown, and he has wrestled many times in that area.
“When I got out of college, I just did a lot of research about it and figured, ‘Where can I go?,’ and here I am now. …,” he said with a laugh. “It’ll be the first time I’ll actually get to be in a room with these people that you look up to or respect as a wrestler. You want to show them what you can do, and maybe they say ‘You can work on this,’ or ‘Your stuff is good.’ It’s always nice to have a response.”
It’s not only the longtime pros Sabatelle is hoping to get a response from, though.
“The whole reason why I did this is because I would love to get a contract with WWE or TNA or whatever,” he said. “That’s my goal. I want to be on TV. I want people to know who I am, and I want to do something more than work like a dog and have it go to waste.”
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