|
|
January 8, 1999/ 20 Tevet 5759, Vol. 51, No. 15
Solid Goldberg
Former NFL player winning fans as wrestling champ
PAULINE DUBKIN YEARWOOD
Chicago Jewish News
Bill Goldberg, a one-time defensive lineman with the NFL's Atlanta Falcons and Los Angeles Rams, now just goes by the name Goldberg and reigns as champion of professional wrestling's WCW.
|
It's dark in Chicago's United Center except for the stage. There, in the floodlights' bright glare, a couple of scantily dressed guys who must weigh 300 pounds each are grunting and shouting while hitting each other over the head with chairs and otherwise appearing to inflict fatal injuries, each blow bringing wilder whoops and hollers from the crowd.
The crowd's a whole other show: a mix of soccer-mom-and-dad families, young couples with matching earrings and tattoos, good ole boys out for a night on the town and, mostly, a wild, undulating wave of pre-adolescent and adolescent boys. Everybody, from babies (there are lots of them) to grandpas, seems to be wearing sweats or baseball caps or head-scarves showcasing their favorite competitors. Many of the youngest spectators clutch "Wrestling Buddies," soft-sculpture dolls that look vaguely like the guys on stage.
Many are holding up signs. Most of them are homemade and proclaim such sentiments as "Awesome!!" and "Wolfpac Rules" and "Da Man" and "Go Home Hollywood!" But tonight there are also signs that read "Shalom!" Several of the signs are the colors of the Israeli flag with a Star of David on them. They don't say anything on them. They don't have to. Everybody knows they're held aloft by fans of the current reigning heavyweight wrestling champion, who is known simply as Goldberg.
Yup, Goldberg. Or, as the fans chant when he enters the arena, "Gold-berg! Gold-berg!" In a sport (many would question that definition; more about that later) where the principals include the likes of "Macho Man," "Thunder," "Buff," "Diamond Dallas," "Lex Luger" and the "Hit man," a simple "Goldberg" is a rarity. So, of course, is a Jewish wrestler. After all, it's not often that you see a six-foot-four-inch, 285-pound, shaven-headed descendent of Jacob - who, you'll remember, was quite a wrestler himself.
But Jewish Bill Goldberg is (he dropped the "Bill" from his wrestling moniker shortly after making his debut a little more than a year ago). He had a bar mitzvah, and he didn't wrestle on Rosh Hashana, which fell on a Monday in 1998. (Monday night, as any 12-year-old boy in America can tell you, is the biggest night for wrestling on cable TV, with both World Championship Wrestling and its rival World Wrestling Federation airing live matches.)
Cable-TV wrestling may represent a subculture in America, but it's an aggressively growing one. Week after week, wrestling shows have ranked as the most-watched programs on cable. Together, the Monday night WCW and WWF shows are watched in six million households, and counting all the wrestling programs, some 34 million people view the sport on cable TV each week. That's not even to mention periodic pay-for-view events with names like "Halloween Havoc" and "Summer Slam" and "Slamboree," which go for upwards of $30 for three hours of head butting, body slamming and insults yelled in laryngitis-inducing monotones.
There are aisles of merchandise tie-ins in toy stores; 800 numbers where fans can receive weekly updates on matches; and a forest of Web sites, including many amateur ones where fans can trade boasts and insults about their favorites.
So while the 31-year-old Goldberg is unquestionably a hero to Jewish kids (boys anyway; enjoying wrestling seems to be a sex-linked characteristic) he's also a hero to thousands who aren't Jewish, who may never even have met a Jew and have only the vaguest idea of what one is. Conversely, when Hulk Hogan was WWF wrestling's biggest superstar back in the early '90s, no doubt plenty of Jewish kids were screaming their heads off rooting for him and cajoling parents into shelling out for puppets, hats, tank tops, back packs, beach towels and action figures carrying his likeness.
Does this mean that Jews are so integrated into all aspects of American life, even traditionally "non-Jewish" areas, that being a Jewish wrestler is no big deal? Possibly. Or it could just be that while pundits and journalists pontificate, kids just get off on the big guy with the pseudo-menacing manner and shaved head who never met a man he couldn't jackhammer into submission?
Wherever the truth lies, we do know a few things about Bill Goldberg. He grew up in Tulsa, Okla., the son of a Harvard-educated doctor father and a classical musician mother who divorced when he was a teenager. Always athletic, he and his two brothers hunted and fished, flew gliders and acrobatic planes. He worked for a short time as a bouncer before attending the University of Georgia, where he was a football star. He went on to play the game professionally as a defensive lineman with the Atlanta Falcons from 1992 to '94. He also did a stint with the Los Angeles Rams before a knee injury put an end to his five-year NFL career.
Allegedly recruited by another wrestler, Diamond Dallas Page, Goldberg made his debut in September 1997 with the WCW, which was created by Ted Turner and airs on his TNT and TBS cable channels. (Or, as a WCW press release has it, "This ripping muscle mass of intensity has impacted WCW like a meteor with shockwaves slamming bodies and winning fans worldwide.") Goldberg turned the body-slam known as the jackhammer into his signature move, and his star rose quickly. Last July, he beat "Hollywood" Hulk Hogan to become the WCW heavyweight champion. Since then he has continued to reign undefeated in more than 100 "matches."
WCW hyperbole has it that he can "sink the Titanic;" he's touted as one of the strongest, toughest men alive. Of course, whether Goldberg actually "beat" Hogan or not may depend on an onlooker's age and credibility level. Like Dorothy in Oz, you have to want to believe. Cable-TV wrestling, unlike the legitimate college and Olympic competition of the same name, involves about as much real sport as the fencing matches in a Shakespearean play, and the outcomes are no more in doubt.
On cable TV, each wrestler is a character in what has been called a soap opera for men; they form Byzantine alliances with some of their fellow competitors and develop unreasoning hatreds for others. It all sometimes seems like a kind of vast conspiracy engaged in by the wrestlers, promoters, announcers (who often become part of the action), and fans. Yet, though you know it's not real, you also know it's got to take a lot of skill for those guys to pretend to destroy each other and make it look so breathtakingly authentic.
Goldberg himself intimated as much during a recent telephone interview (he's not easy to catch up with, and during the interview must fend off constant interruptions, but is a warm, friendly and intelligent-sounding conversationalist nevertheless).
Are the matches staged? "We're high-paid choreographers who don't do anything fake," he replies. "The only thing we do is act a bit. It is dangerous. It's as dangerous as it looks, more dangerous. In my most recent match, a guy almost got paralyzed."
So why don't the participants get hurt worse? "That's what makes us professionals," he answers slyly. "You can't take any guy off the street to do what we do. It couldn't be done without injury."
The training is hard, he says. "At the beginning, you go to school to learn how to do the basics, and practice as often as possible. Our product is our bodies, and we do everything we can to keep ourselves in shape."
As for the famous rivalries that make cable TV wrestling the nest of dark intrigue it's supposed to be, Goldberg says they're "exaggerated, for the most part. But at times they are as real as can be. That's what makes people watch. We're entertainers."
Despite that, he says he kept his real name because "my ring persona does not depend on gimmicks. Basically what you see is what you get." And what you see is, of course, a Jewish man. Goldberg says that while he's a proud Jew, in the wrestling world, "I don't make a big issue of it. To me that wouldn't be right. I haven't had any reaction whatsoever to it (in wrestling). Nobody comments on it."
And while it may be unusual for a Jew to become a WCW wrestler, "it's no more unusual for a Jewish guy to go into it as it is for anyone else," he comments pragmatically.
His family "hated it at first, because they didn't know what I had planned. But now they love it."
And so does he - with reservations. "I haven't been at my house for three days in the last month," he says. "I don't just work Monday nights, I'm working all the time. In football, I was a competitor who worked once a week. Now I'm an entertainer and I work at lot more."
The money's "not bad," he admits, "and the camaraderie among the guys is similar to playing football. It's a good avenue to display our athletic abilities. I don't know how long I'll be able to keep it up. You just try to do it as long as you can."
He's single, but has a girlfriend of six years who sometimes travels with him. "I have a lot of pressure on me being the world champion," he admits. "It comes with the territory. I think about being a role model in everything I do. I really think I have to be one. I don't do anything differently. I just go about my business and do the same things I've always done, but I take into consideration that little kids are looking up to me and I've got to set a good example in everything I do."
Role model for many
Keeping his own Jewish name doesn't sound like it was any big deal to the possessor of that name, but others see it differently. To Rabbi Irwin Kula, "it came from somewhere deep, not wanting to give up that name."
Kula is the president of the New York-based National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership (CLAL), a think tank on many subjects Jewish, and both a fan and a friend of Bill Goldberg. He is "the family rabbi" for Goldberg's father and brother, both of whom have studied with him, and knows Bill too, though not very well. But he does follow his career and, along with his six-year-old daughter, attended one of his matches. What he found impressed him.
Of the wrestling itself, the rabbi says, "There is something wildly funny for me that wrestling is a show, that nobody gets hurt. What an amazing way to experience fighting!"
But he was more impressed by Goldberg himself. Backstage after the match, the competitor was obviously tired out, but "he took time for everyone who was waiting for an autograph, every child, and not just because it's good business. He is really extremely nice. He's gentle. What you see is what you get. There is incredible media pressure on him, and he always has time for people."
Especially for the young people who are among his most vigorous fans. And while there's no question that kids of all ethnicities, faiths, sizes and nationalities go ape for Goldberg, Jewish youths seem to take a special pride.
"I like him because he wins all the time and is totally dominant," says Jeff Hertz, a 16-year-old Chicago high school student who has followed cable TV wrestling since he was 5. "He's popular with kids in general, especially those who are wrestling fans. But I do think I like him more because he is Jewish."
Max Slutsky, 10, of Highland Park, Ill., says of his hero: "I'd still like him if he wasn't Jewish, but I like him even more because he is. He shows that we don't have to be the weakest people. We can be strong."
That's the thinking of many who are watching Goldber's popularity among Jewish audiences soar. Mike Leiderman, a Chicago sports journalist and commentator, says that while speaking to a group at a recent United Jewish Appeal fund-raiser, "I mentioned Goldberg and the crowd went nuts. This is something that does not compute."
Yet, he says, "Jewish boxers were once so big. And hey, it's a living. Nowadays if he wants to play that part, it's wonderful. It's fine with me if one big fat guy wants to go around and hit another big fat guy. As long as his mother is proud of him."
Even the official magazine of the league recognizes that there's something special going on with Bill Goldberg. Sports broadcaster "Stagger" Lee Marshall recently that "Goldberg is not only winning matches and the hearts of fans worldwide, but it seems there's also an undercurrent of ethnic pride being experienced. ... it seems that Goldberg has captured the attention and created a new sense of ethnic pride among Jewish fans."
Rabbi Kula takes the argument a step further, finding in wrestling a metaphor for Judaism in the very late 20th century. "Is Bill Goldberg the biggest deal in the world? Is Judaism going to become wrestling?" he asks rhetorically, and answers, "No, but it's a metaphor, and metaphors are very important."
Kula believes that "Maybe there is such a wide multiplicity to being Jewish that we simply haven't named all the ways." And Goldberg the wrestler could provide one of those openings, be one of those ways, says Kula: "Does this mean that Jewish continuity will survive if we all go to wrestling? No, but it means something, and it behooves us as Jews to look at what are the potential possible meanings here.
"Maybe Jewish life would be upgraded if everybody kept their Jewish name," the rabbi adds. "And it may be that Judaism may also die if we don't see the wide variety of Jewish journey people are on."
|
