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Guest Columns | Jim Gramze |
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PICTURE THIS
Come in, sit down. Thank you for coming at such
short notice. I've just read something very disturbing and I desperately
need a sounding board to sort out my thoughts.
You know, the book I just read was so sick it made me
think of Ernest Hemingway in some ways. With Hemingway, you have writings
about killing animals and how such ultimate victories give you god-like feelings
of immortality. That is incredibly sick.
The book I just read, Mick Foley's autobiography, is about
someone who actively seeks out getting hurt for mass approval. It goes
beyond the personal disregard for safety to actually insisting that others hurt
him, especially opening up cuts that profusely bleed. What further
complicates this idiocy is that many people, children included, idolize this
person.
On the one hand, I fear that there will be kids that will
try to emulate his behavior in similar attempts to gain approval. On the
other hand, such individuals are going to do incredibly stupid things with or
without any real provocation or sources of ideas. Rest assured, the herd
will be thinned one way or the other.
In the words of Bret Hart, which you can read on a link a
bit lower on the main page, "Great wrestling is not about how many bones you
break, or how many teeth you lose, or being set on fire, or walking back to the
dressing room with tacks in your back." Further, "The pride used to come
from not hurting anybody and not getting hurt yourself."
The hardcore trend in pro wrestling is a very dangerous
one. As wrestlers take more and more risks, so are the kids who imitate
them. I have seen film clips on the TV news of kids jumping off garage
roofs onto flaming tables covered with barbed wire. Way to go kids!
Yeah, Mick, you write one sentence in your entire book saying that kids
shouldn't do stuff like that and you spend the bulk of 500 pages talking about
how you yourself do exactly that on a daily basis. People imitate those
they idolize.
In many ways, the book is about a failure who learns how
to capitalize on failing: by getting the living shit kicked out of him for
pay. That really is most of the story of Mick Foley, a loser who learned
to make a bloody art of losing. If he only could have gone deeper into the
desire of getting hurt and becoming a bloody spectacle to feed his hunger for
crowd approval. That would have made this autobiography art, and would
shed light on a sickness worthy of Hemingway.
Jim Gramze |
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