8 Vital Elements Behind The Many Faces Of The Undertaker

Survivor Series this year takes place on Sunday 22nd November - exactly 25 years to the day since the same pay-per-view in 1990 featured the WWF television debut of The Undertaker. Since then, the Phenom has become one of the most enduring stars in professional wrestling history, and certainly WWF/E€™s longest running legend. He€™s the only one left on the roster who was working there when Monday Night RAW debuted in January 1993. He€™s seen the last gasps of the territories and the tail end of the 1980s explosion of rock n€™ wrestling; the beginning of the 1990s, with the cartoon elements of sports entertainment in the WWF being pushed to the fore; the Monday Night War and the Attitude Era; the rebranding to WWE; the Ruthless Aggression era; and the gradual transition to PG programming, the digital age, the WWE Network and the move away from a traditional pay-per-view model of business. As The Undertaker, Mark William Calaway has done it all: but what do we actually know about how the man and the gimmick came together? It€™s a tricky proposition - unlike the majority of his peers, and even the generations that followed him, Calaway hasn€™t written a rasslin€™ memoir (or had one ghostwritten for him). He€™s as old school as it gets, so he€™s rarely broken character from the Undertaker persona. I€™ve trawled through shoot interviews, podcasts and wrestling autobiographies to attempt to put together a picture of how the Undertaker came together: how the character came to be the most successful gimmick in wrestling history, in all its different permutations. This is how the many faces of the Undertaker came together.