10 Things I Hate About The Undertaker
Think 'hate' is a bit strong? Don't worry, he's URNed it.
Although I’d been a fan for years, the first WrestleMania I got to watch live was WrestleMania IX which was the crappiest WrestleMania of all-time, and featured the crappiest Undertaker match of all-time.
It didn’t matter. I wasn’t staying up to see a technical masterclass: I saw The Undertaker come out to the ring surrounded by dry ice in a freakin’ chariot with a vulture perched by his shoulder. That colossally sh*tbox match in broad bloody daylight didn’t even register. The Undertaker was the coolest guy I’d ever seen, like the Man With No Name and Batman rolled into one unstoppable b*stard.
That’s how a lot of kids felt, watching the Undertaker enter an arena, perform his trademark moves, roll his eyes back into his skull and intone “Rest In Peeeeace…”. For me, it grew to be about more than just the character or the gimmick - I marked for Mark Calaway. But the fact is, although I was such an Undertaker fanboy that I used to joke that the Dead Man was my dad, he’s only got ten years on me.
We got older together, and that changes everything. It’s not just about how the physicality of a wrestler changes with age, it’s down to how that wrestler’s history and legacy mesh with an evolving pro wrestling landscape, and how he or she is perceived by a fanbase that grows older along with them.
In 2016, there are plenty of things to hate about the Undertaker.
10. He’s Sports Entertainment Writ Large
This is something that every ‘Taker-hater has mentioned eagerly every year that WrestleMania’s rolled around, ever since the Streak became something worth talking about: the Undertaker’s first few years in the WWF weren’t all that.
King Kong Bundy, Diesel, Psycho Sid... none of these people were much cop in the ring anyway. More importantly, Calaway was hamstrung by the character he was playing, who was still largely a no-selling snail’s-pace zombie, the walking dead.
As ‘Mean’ Mark Callous in WCW, Calaway got to throw himself about, working fast and hard while playing the big, nasty heel (a classic pro wrestling character type he’d only get to revisit once after joining the WWF, when his American Badass babyface transitioned to the vicious bully Big Evil).
As The Undertaker, for a good six years or more Calaway couldn’t bring to bear half of the tools he had as a professional wrestler. The restrictions on him were ridiculous as he did barely selling, barely bumping, barely any talking (and never in a normal register), had no facial expressions and made no fast movements.
A guy who is probably the most impressively agile big man of the era was hardly allowed off his feet.
Calaway and WWF gradually worked more and more wrestling into his character, allowed him to do more in the ring, speed up his movements, even sell a little more. By the time the Attitude Era hit, The Undertaker wasn’t a massive, sluggish revenant, he was a huge, supernaturally powerful Satanic figure, free to begin to have the kind of matches we remember him having against Mankind, Shawn Michaels and the like.
That sea change came six or seven years after his WWF debut though - and that’s a long, long seven years to struggle through, even if you’re a fan. Pitted against dead weight in a gimmick with concrete shoes, you can see why kids raised on the bloody drama of the NWA poured scorn on the Dead Man for so long.
He was everything that was risible and goofy about New York’s product, sports entertainment writ large in basic black.