Wednesday, May 26, 1999 | 10:34 a.m.
Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at [email protected] or 259-4084.
Pro wrestling has always been fake in the sense that matches are staged and choreographed to some extent. But that doesn't mean the guys in the ring aren't getting hurt.
Particularly as the years have passed, the wrestlers have gotten bigger and stronger. And they're actually hitting each other just often enough to do some damage.
Add in the apparent need for sideshow theatrics and there isn't any doubt that pro wrestling is a dangerous game for its muscular participants.
Just how dangerous it is was underscored Sunday when one of the sport's leading men, Owen Hart, was killed in Kansas City during a pay-per-view performance in which he was to have descended to the ring via a cable attached to the rafters.
Hart broke loose from the cable and died on impact with a turnbuckle in the corner of the ring.
"Every wrestler is sad about it," said Buffalo Jim Barrier, who trains wrestlers locally and puts on a card at The Orleans every six weeks. He has a show there Saturday that has added a special guest: Charles Wright, who, as The Godfather, was supposed to have fought Hart in Kansas City.
"Hart's death should slow down some of this extra stuff that the mogul promoters feel is necessary for their ratings," Barrier said. "Wrestling's hard enough as it is without adding a lot of crazy stunts."
Barrier says he isn't inclined to go too far beyond the basics.
"I write clean shows," he said. "We'll have our good guys and bad guys and our sexy girls, but it's more good old-fashioned wrestling than pyros and stuff like that."
His notion of a wacky stunt is to slip The Orleans' mascot -- "Al the Alligator" -- into a plot that can carry-over from one card to the next. Look for Al -- who was roughed up by the Tonga Kid at the last show -- to have a role in Saturday's carnage.
"I don't want to get too far out," Barrier said. "We're wrestling and trying to entertain people. I don't see any need for some of these high-risk maneuvers."
Hart's death falls into that category, so to speak.
"I can't believe he agreed to do it, because he was afraid of heights," Barrier said. "But Charles said they'd done a couple of practice runs earlier and everything came out OK.
"But something was wrong and at the very least they missed a cue."
While Hart's descent was slated to be shown as part of the pay-per-view broadcast, viewers missed it because a packaged feature on him was being shown instead. That minor mistake was good for the viewing audience in that it didn't have to see him killed, yet the 19,000 fans in the arena had to be told his accident was not a scripted stunt.
"They wanted to make him look like a super hero," Barrier said of the reasoning behind having Hart drop from the ceiling. He said it's possible a "quick-release" cord that was designed to allow Hart to immediately shed the harness as he hit the canvas may have come open as he was beginning his descent.
As an offshoot of this unfortunate mishap, pro wrestling's zanier promoters may have to rein in a bit of their outrageousness.
"That would be fine with me," Barrier said. "I don't want to see wrestlers get hurt and neither do the fans."
The fact that spectators and wrestlers alike act like bloodthirsty savages is simply part of the show.
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