lord steven regal vs. the belfast bruiser (parking lot brawl) (wcw, 1996)
a little reflection on "The Cinematic Match" and irish-english political tensions as portrayed in american pro wrestling
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“That’s how they do things over there… Queen Elizabeth took Princess Di out back.” - Bobby Heenan
Of the many wrestling storylines booked around political conflicts or national disputes, most are obviously problematic or straight-up reactionary, a point that goes without much saying. Examples like Sergeant Slaughter siding with Hussein against Hulk Hogan in the first Gulf War, JBL rounding up undocumented immigrants at the border in his feud with Eddie Guerrero, or the more recent booking of the faux-Russian Rusev against the faux-Marine John Cena I’m sure spring to mind. A personal favorite of mine that I think gets overlooked is the WCW program between then-Stunning Steve Austin and the Great Muta, culminating in their match at Spring Stampede 1994, which casts a not-yet-bald Austin as the defender of American business interests against a hostile foreign invader, a storyline with echoes of media about the fear of growing Japanese business interests like Die Hard. The irony of that storyline is that the (American) crowd was significantly more over for the almost-mythical Muta than they were for Joe-Schmoe Steve Austin.
There’s one WCW narrative from around the same era that, however, does strike me as unexpectedly lefty: the 1996 rivalry between the brawling Irish cruiserweight Fit Finlay, packaged as the Belfast Bruiser, and his Lordship Steven Regal, perhaps the most internationally well-known British wrestler who wasn’t part of the team literally called The British Bulldogs. Their stiff as hell match at WCW Uncensored 1996 is in my mind one of the most underrated PPV matches of all time, but it’s their April 29th, 1996 meeting in a parking lot on Monday Nitro that’s a particularly masterful and striking piece of workmanship that stretches the boundaries of the squared circle. It is a fairly transparently defined and telegraphed political dispute between the proud Irishman and the vindictive English monarch, with each man working in a way that makes it impossible not to get behind the guy presented as the tough defender of an oppressed people over the imperialist asshat.
An underwritten part of WCW’s contributions to wrestling form are, for better or worse, its innovation of the “cinematic match,” a concept that came into larger focus as the possibilities of digital expanded in the following years and as wrestling became less tethered to the form of broadcast cable, especially during the pandemic. There are a number of examples you could point to, like Vampiro and Sting’s Blair Witch-like graveyard match, but one of the earliest examples of this tendency occurred at the first WCW Uncensored, the so-called “King of the Road” match, which featured Dustin Rhodes and The Blacktop Bully, better known as Smash from Demolition, fighting their way across the back of a moving truck; shades of Steven Spielberg’s Duel and the O.J. Bronco chase, and something of an illicit match aside from its documentation in that both men bladed in violation of company rules and were fired, leading to Dustin’s embrace of the Goldust gimmick in WWF.
The Belfast Bruiser and Lord Steven Regal parking lot brawl is somewhere of a mid-way point between the original Tupelo Concession Stand Brawls of Memphis wrestling, the true genesis point of “hardcore wrestling,” and the Best Friends and Santana & Ortiz AEW parking lot brawl of 2020, one of the true highlights of crowdless pandemic-era wrestling. There are no mats and no turnbuckles, but there is still a referee and perhaps most crucially a guard rail, dividing the producing space of the ring from the reactive space of the crowd, a fourth wall that is so often literally broken by a body slamming into it as the workers fracture the remove of the crowd. The presence of a crowd, the feeling of a liveness that might rupture and erupt at any time, is what separates this from the frequently hollow and airless cinematic matches of crowdless wrestling. That this is something of a defining moment for hardcore wrestling’s explosion into the mainstream is even somewhat acknowledged on the call by Bobby Heenan: “I’ve seen wrestlers pick up chairs, now we’ve seen Public Enemy pick up tables, but I’ve never seen wrestlers beat each other with Ford Trucks.” Hardcore brawls reached a new level of big-budget PPV gloss with the Nasty Boyz street fights between Cactus Jack, Maxx Payne, and Kevin Sullivan, and ECW’s influence fully arrived in Turnerland with the arrival of extreme originals Public Enemy. This parking lot brawl goes a step further by not just taking the fight from the ring to the outside environment, weaponizing ordinary objects in the process, but by completely foregoing the starting ground of the ring and setting the conflict in an environment that is completely hostile at every angle, with no mats or boundaries or disqualifications, all the conventional rules and physical rules that offer an illusion of boundary or safety stripped away.
Eric Bischoff keeps insisting that the camera hold wide and pull back further away from the men to obscure any blood, expressing that the situation is unsanctioned and out of control, given to Turner’s aversion to blading. Before Vince Russo internalized Jerry Springer, wrestling was deeply shaped by the O.J. Simpson trial, a constant reference point of the era’s wrestling commentary but an event quite literally referenced in another early cinematic match, the program in which Rowdy Piper hunts Goldust down in order to basically inflict a hate crime upon him—the car chase is not only compared to Simpson’s, but literal footage of Simpson in the bronco is cut in, with the reckless face Piper curiously aligned with O.J. Simpson. I think you can see in the media circus around Simpson a self-aware recognition of live broadcast television’s ability to generate ratings and narrative drama out of the unpredictability of real life scandal, which becomes fully realized in the era of Brian Pillman’s “Loose Cannon” gimmick and The Outsiders invasion—there’s a real sense of actual menace and explosiveness in those early nWo video packages that prominently feature cut-in shots of security guards itching to draw their pistols on Hall & Nash. The parking lot brawl is still in some ways a controlled laboratory environment, with a sense of regulation and structure enforced more by the camera than any piece of metal or rope. As Steve Mongo quips, “That’s a nice commercial for shattered glass.” Windshields and tires turn to deadly weapons, and Finlay even begins to strangle Regal with a seatbelt, a safety device turned against the very bodies it is meant to protect. The camera at one point even enters a car, as Finlay slams Regal’s body against the window and into the viewer’s face, before Bischoff demands that the camera and our perspective “pull as wide as the skyline,” ignoring the specificity of this politically charged situation by condemning all bloodshed as equally immoral. Regal ends it all with a piledriver and pin on the hood of a sedan, body and weapon colliding. If we continue with the overwrought political metaphor, it’s a no holds barred match representing a no holds barred struggle in which every element of environment and society is at risk and at play.
Regal and Finlay trust with each other with their bodies, a pact of mutually-assured destruction that can only be shared by two workers who have bled and sweat together over the course of years, as the two had, meeting a number of times across national borders in England’s World of Sports, the Welsh promotion Reslo, Germany’s Catch Wrestling Association (not to be confused with the Memphis CWA), and now on American cable television, a real-life political conflict turned into primetime pulp fiction along the lines of Tom Clancy’s Patriot Games or U2’s gotta-hear-both-sides radio anthems about The Troubles. In some ways, this feud does insist on hearing both sides, allowing both men to inflict equal punishment on one another, but also not really cast a face in the conflict. Not even granted a Christian name as the “Belfast Bruiser,” Finlay is the personification of righteous Irish vengeance rained down upon the embodiment of the stiff upper-crust English empire, brute force draped in a spindly mullet more than anything resembling a babyface. As the sweaty and hairy underdog, Finlay is significantly easier to side with, whereas Steven Regal is a slick and venomous technically-oriented dandy (and at times rather explicitly queer-coded, at least earlier in his WCW tenure) who no one would ever dare root for. At that time Regal served as one half of the deeply underrated and misused tag team The Blue Bloods, along with a rebranded and gentrified Bobby Eaton putting on airs as Sir Robert Eaton.
What Finlay and Regal share in addition to the many hours literally spent across from each other in the ring, is a supreme misunderstanding by a great many wrestling fans who have only absorbed the propaganda of WWE. For them, Regal is just William Regal, the veteran mentor figure of NXT and nothing more—though Regal has his significant share of haters in his own home country, who likely despise the wrestler that most Americans associate with England, just as all of us grow to resent the exports that grow to signify the places we live. If you only know 21st century WWE, Fit Finlay is just “Finlay,” a comic prop defined by his ethnicity and culture like the Irish-American Vince McMahon has done with so many of his workers, reduced to segments with the artist formerly known as Hornswoggle where he once stood toe-to-toe in Japan with legendary cruiserwerights like Jushin Liger, El Samurai, and Sean Waltman. Both Regal and Finlay are some of those rare defining wrestlers still with us—each semi-retired from in-ring action, as Regal has not entirely ruled out the possibility given his new prominence in AEW and Finlay has made appearances over the last decade for indies like EVOLVE and PWG—whose careers connect vast eras of wrestling history, from the loose international circuit many European wrestlers charted, to the prime Super Junior era of Japan, to the American cable boom, to the solidified and stagnant monopoly of WWE, to the modern-day indie revolution. These are two workers who fought almost anyone anywhere, each heavily identified with a specific national and cultural identity, but who are both responsible in their own ways for the further development and refinement of the Esperanto that is pro wrestling, a global tongue of mental endurance and violent sacrifice spoken in one dialect or another almost everywhere.
RIP THE BAD GUY SCOTT HALL… definitely have to write something on him soon