CHICAGO — It’s dark in the arena except for the stage. There, in the bright glare of floodlights, two scantily dressed men who each must weigh 300 pounds grunt and shout. They bash each other over the head with chairs, and otherwise appear to inflict fatal injuries.
Each blow brings wilder whoops and hollers from the crowd.
The crowd’s a whole other show: a mix of soccer-mom-and-dad families, young couples with matching earrings and tattoos, good ole boys out for a night on the town and, mostly, a wild, undulating wave of pre-adolescent and adolescent boys.
Many hold up signs, most of which are homemade. They proclaim such sentiments as “Awesome!!” and “Wolfpac Rules” and “Da Man” and “Go Home Hollywood!”
But tonight there are also signs that read “Shalom!” Several of the signs in the colors of the Israeli flag feature a Star of David.
They don’t say anything on them. They don’t have to. Everybody knows they’re held aloft by fans of the current reigning World Heavyweight Wrestling champion,berg! Gold-berg!”
In a sport in which the principals include the likes of “Macho Man,” “Thunder,” “Buff,” “Diamond Dallas,” “Lex Luger” and the “Hit man,” a simple “Goldberg” is a rarity.
So, of course, is a Jewish pro-wrestler. After all, it’s not often that you see a 6-foot-4-inch, 285-pound, shaved-headed descendent of Jacob, who, you might recall, was a wrestler himself.
But Bill Goldberg is a Jew. Goldberg, who dropped the “Bill” from his wrestling moniker shortly after making his debut more than a year ago, didn’t wrestle on Rosh Hashanah, which fell on a Monday this fall.
And, as any 12-year-old boy in America can tell you, that’s a huge deal since Monday is the biggest night for wrestling on cable TV, with both World Championship Wrestling and its rival World Wrestling Federation airing live matches.
Together, the Monday night shows are watched in 6 million households. Some 34 million people view the sport on cable TV each week.
So while the 31-year-old Goldberg is unquestionably a hero to Jewish kids, he’s also a hero to thousands who aren’t.
According to a Playboy survey of men and women on more than 40 college campuses, Goldberg tied with Denver Broncos quarterback John Elway and Chicago Cubs home run hitter Sammy Sosa as the best athlete alive.
On occasion, Goldberg uses his fame as a bully pulpit. Just this week, he joined other animal rights activists who are lobbying Congress to end cockfighting in the United States.
“These animals have no choice,” said Goldberg, who is featured in ads denouncing the practice. “It’s sick.”
Bill Goldberg grew up in Tulsa, Okla., the son of a Harvard-educated doctor father and a classical musician mother who divorced when he was a teenager. Always athletic, he and his two brothers hunted and fished, flew gliders and acrobatic planes. He attended the University of Georgia, where he was a football star.
He played professionally as a defensive lineman with the Atlanta Falcons from 1992 to 1994. He also did a stint with the Los Angeles Rams before a knee injury put an end to his five-year NFL career.
Allegedly recruited by another wrestler, Diamond Dallas Page, Goldberg made his debut in September 1997 with the WCW, which was created by Ted Turner and airs on his TNT and TBS cable channels.
Goldberg turned the body-slam known as the jackhammer into his signature move, and his star rose quickly. In July 1998, he beat “Hollywood” Hulk Hogan to become the World Heavyweight Champion.
Of course, whether or not Goldberg actually “beat” Hogan may depend on an onlooker’s age and credibility level. Like Dorothy in Oz, you have to want to believe.
Cable-TV wrestling, unlike the legitimate college and Olympic competition of the same name, involves about as much real sport and competition as the fencing matches in a Shakespearean play.
Yet, though you know it’s not real, you also know it’s got to take a lot of skill for those guys to pretend to destroy each other and make it look so breathtakingly authentic.
Goldberg himself intimated as much during a recent phone interview.
Are the matches staged?
“We’re high-paid choreographers who don’t do anything fake,” he replied. “The only thing we do is act a bit. It is dangerous. It’s as dangerous as it looks, more dangerous. “
The training is hard, he added. “At the beginning, you go to school to learn how to do the basics, and practice as often as possible. Our product is our bodies, and we do everything we can to keep ourselves in shape.”
As for the famous rivalries that make pro-wrestling the nest of dark intrigue it’s supposed to be, Goldberg said that they’re “exaggerated, for the most part. But at times they are as real as can be.”
While he is proud to be Jewish, Goldberg said that in the wrestling world, “I don’t make a big issue of it…Nobody comments on it.”
His family “hated it at first because they didn’t know what I had planned. But now they love it.”
And so does he, with reservations.
“I haven’t been at my house for three days in the last month,” he said. “I don’t just work Monday nights, I’m working all the time. In football, I was a competitor who worked once a week. Now I’m an entertainer and I work at lot more.”
While Goldberg doesn’t make a big deal of having kept his Jewish name, others see it differently. To Rabbi Irwin Kula, “it came from somewhere deep, not wanting to give up that name.”
Kula is the president of the New York-based National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership (CLAL), a Jewish think-tank, and both a fan and a friend of Goldberg.
Along with his 6-year-old daughter, Kula attended one of Goldberg’s matches. What he found impressed him.
Of the wrestling itself, Kula said, “There is something wildly funny for me that wrestling is a show, that nobody gets hurt. What an amazing way to experience fighting.”
But he was more impressed by Goldberg himself. Backstage after the match, the competitor was obviously tired out yet “took time for everyone who was waiting for an autograph — every child, and not just because it’s good business. He is really extremely nice. He’s gentle. What you see is what you get.”
While there’s no question that kids of all ethnicities, faiths, sizes and nationalities go ape for Goldberg, Jewish youths seem to take a special pride.
“I like him because he wins all the time and is totally dominant,” says Jeff Hertz, a 16-year-old Deerfield, Ill., high school student who has followed cable TV wrestling since he was 5. “He’s popular with kids in general, especially those who are wrestling fans. But I do think I like him more because he is Jewish.”
Max Slutsky, 10, a 5th-grader at Solomon Schechter Day School in Northbrook, Ill., likes Goldberg primarily because “he beats Hulk Hogan and he is the WCW champion. I’d still like him if he wasn’t Jewish but I like him even more because he is. He shows that we don’t have to be the weakest people. We can be strong.”
Even the official magazine of the league recognizes that there’s something special going on with Goldberg. Sports broadcaster “Stagger” Lee Marshall writes in a column in the August 1998 issue that “Goldberg is not only winning matches and the hearts of fans worldwide but it seems there’s also an undercurrent of ethnic pride being experienced…It seems that Goldberg has captured the attention and created a new sense of ethnic pride among Jewish fans.”
And if Goldberg’s accomplishments weren’t enough, Jewish sports fans can be proud of another of their own. That’s because Simon Cohen, a British Jew, recently captured the title of Mr. Universe. Cohen defeated 27 other bodybuilders to take the crown.
Kula finds in wrestling a metaphor for Judaism in the very late 20th century.
“Part of what the 20th century has been about for Jews has been widening both what it means to be Jewish and our image of a Jew.”
When he looks at Goldberg, Kula sees “a guy who, through his wrestling, became more deeply aware of his Jewish identity and his Jewish responsibilities.
“Does that mean he is going to put on tzitzit and observe Shabbos? No, but it is another one of many Jewish journeys.”