Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges [4]
Ray Traylor was a prison guard in Georgia before debuting as a professional wrestler in 1985. Known on the wrestling circuit as Big Boss Man, he was portrayed as a brutal, sadistic wrestler devoid of human compassion. Traylor showed up at the ring with a nightstick, a flak jacket, handcuffs, and a ball and chain. During a match in 1992 a digitized voice came over the loudspeaker. It warned the Boss Man that someone from his past was coming to exact revenge. Sure enough, the Boss Man was ambushed in the ring by Nailz, a wrestler who claimed to be a former inmate brutalized by the Boss Man during his time as a correctional officer. Nailz, a six-foot, eight-inch brute with severe post-traumatic stress disorder, appeared in the arena wearing an orange prison jumpsuit. The two began a bitter, long feud. It was a feud many in the crowd knew too well. It was the feud between prisoners and guards. It was the feud between those who had once been incarcerated and who wanted to do to their keepers what had been done to them. Traylor later adopted a new persona in the ring, also known as the Boss Man, but now a hated security guard, dressed in a SWAT-like outfit, for Vince McMahon’s Corporation, which owns the wrestling franchise. McMahon, in tune with the passions of his audience, is always trying to exploit, threaten, and cheat the wrestlers who work for him.
The Boss Man’s most infamous stunt was publicly taunting a wrestler named Big Show when it was announced that Big Show’s father had cancer. The Boss Man, at least in the scripted melodrama, hired a police impersonator to go into Big Show’s locker room moments before a match and tell him his father had died. Big Show, shown weeping, withdrew from the match, and the Boss Man won by forfeit. A grainy black-and-white video, purportedly lifted from a surveillance camera in the Boss Man’s locker room, showed Traylor asking the impersonator for a detailed report on how Big Show reacted.
“What he do, what he do?” the Boss Man asked, eagerly shifting from side to side.
The police impersonator pinched the bridge of his nose and bowed his head. “My daddy! My daddy!”
“My daddy! My daddy!” the Boss Man squealed. “Waaaa! My daddy gone!”
In the ring he imitated Big Show and wailed to the crowd, “My daddy! My daddy! Waaaa! Waaa!” Stalking the ring in mirrored sunglasses, he read a ditty to the booing, enraged crowd:
With the deepest regrets and tears that are soaked
I’m sorry to hear your dad finally croaked.
He lived a full life on his own terms,
Soon he’ll be buried and eaten by worms.
But if I could have a son as stupid as you
I’d wish for cancer so I could die too.
Boss Man then supposedly smashed Big Show’s family heirloom, his grandfather’s gold pocket watch, with a hammer and anvil. A video of the Boss Man was played to the crowd, showing him at the graveside service of Big Show’s father, in a Blues Brothers-inspired police car with a huge loudspeaker on the roof. The Boss Man blared through the speaker as he drove up the cemetery path, “He’s dead as a doornail, and no matter how much you cry and cry, nobody but nobody gonna bring him back. . . . You’re nothin’ but a momma, and speakin’ of yo’ momma, hey, Ms. Wight [Big Show’s mother], now that you’re a single woman, how’d you like to go out with a man like me?”
He then drove the car into Big Show, who weighed close to 500 pounds. As the mourners huddled around the fallen Big Show, the Boss Man hooked the coffin up to the police car with a chain and dragged it away. Big Show got up and ran after the casket, clinging to it until he fell off.
Boss Man then “secretly” taped a meeting with Big Show’s weeping mother in her kitchen. He held up a manila envelope and shook it in her face.
“If you don’t tell him what’s in this envelope, I will,” he threatened.
“Let me tell him, it should come from me,” she sobbed. She confessed that she had had an affair