Warrior Pose
Our writer confronts his childhood fears — and a woman named Venom — on the set of American Gladiators.
by Justin Clark
January 7, 2007
I am standing at the base of a thirty-five-foot red-and-black vinyl pyramid, afraid for my life. It's padded and ridiculous looking, like a gigantic prop from a video game. It smells like a used yoga mat. Nevertheless, I'm convinced that even with the helmet and neck brace I'm wearing, a fall could be fatal. Fatally embarrassing, anyway. My major fear isn't of heights, but the Amazon standing atop the pyramid, ready to halt my progress. Chiseled, Spandexed, arms akimbo, she looks a little like Superman, if Superman were a blonde bombshell with thigh bulges the size and shape of sourdough loaves. Her name is Venom.
I'm on the set of the recently reincarnated television program American Gladiators, further proof, along with Hillary and O.J., that the '90s are still very much with us. I'm not even a contestant — the show's final competition was taped the night before. I'm a journalist on a junket, and there's no one around I care about impressing except maybe co-host Hulk Hogan. I will not win the SUV, nor the $100,000 awarded the winning contestant last night. What's more, I hate American Gladiators. And yet I've been looking forward to this moment for days. As the Hulk himself might say, it's payback time.
Back in sixth grade, I was one of the show's victims, along with every other scrawny eleven year old for whom P.E. meant fifty minutes of humiliation followed by lengthy crying. I couldn't catch, couldn't throw, couldn't even be seen by the naked eye, judging by the frequency with which I was picked for teams. But until American Gladiators, being small and weak conferred one small advantage: people felt sorry for you. When confronted by a giant bully, cowering was socially acceptable.
Then, on September 16, 1989, the show that transformed bullying into ratings gold premiered in syndication. Part of American Gladiator's appeal was that any casual channel flipper could see who was David and who was Goliath. Even though the contestants were themselves athletic, they squared off against bodybuilders and linebackers, the show's overly augmented regular cast. Admittedly, names like Nitro and Ice were as comic as their famously skin-tight costumes, which even Captain America might consider garish, and many of the events were more whimsical than brutal. Atlasphere saw contestants running around in gigantic steel hamster balls; Swingshot sent them soaring across the stadium in bungee-harnessed underwear.
Yet the underlying message of the show — that size didn't matter — seemed to mock the tragedy of my delayed puberty. In my eleven-year-old mind, sports were stupid, but American Gladiators was offensive.
My parents loved it. I understood in the case of my father, a devout football fan. But to my knowledge, my mother hadn't watched a sporting event since my short, miserable T-ball career. The only televised competition I had known her to watch was Jeopardy!, a picture of '90s civility. "You'll see when you're an adult," she reassured me when I became the favorite target of a mustachioed sixth-grader named Ryan. "People learn to settle their differences in a civilized manner."
Now, without warning, my mother wanted to watch two men beat the hell out of each other with colorful pillows on gigantic sticks while standing on pedestals twenty feet high.
In hindsight, I can dig it. For my parents' generation, American Gladiators was probably a kind of therapy. After decades of Cold War, all that pent-up aggression had to be vented, and like the original Circus Maximus, the show was a victory dance at the apex of empire. Until Saddam invaded Kuwait, our army was all dressed up with nowhere to invade. With Communism in retreat, all we had to battle were our own superheroes.
Even the superheroes seemed a little bewildered. One of them was the Hulk himself, who showed up on the set of the new American Gladiators with a self-help book called The Science of Success, and a couple of anecdotes about the strange turn his career took in the 1990s. For an entire decade, he'd been what professional wrestlers call a babyface: a good guy. Suddenly, moral flexibility was possible. Like fellow superstar Sgt. Slaughter, who shocked WWF audiences by sympathizing with Iraq during the first Gulf War, Hogan decided to turn villain.
"They were cheering the bad guys!" he told me at the press conference before I ascended the pyramid. "There was no good or bad guy in life anymore. I fell into that groove — I had to."
Not being a wrestling fan, I failed to notice the Hulk's dramatic transformation. But it was impossible to miss the show whose primetime slot, video games, action figures and trading cards helped usher a subtle nihilism into the lives of junior high schoolers.
I would be remiss not to point out the show's other attraction, which became clearer the afternoon my equally puny friend Kevin came over. Normally we played video games and stayed up until scrambled soft porn came on Cinemax, the occasional decipherable nipple sending us into idiotic convulsions. On that day, however, he wanted to watch Gladiators. I concealed my horror, curious as to what could possibly interest my friend in the show.
Then Zap, Sunny and Lace, the three ripped gladiatorettes appeared on the screen. Mystery solved.
"What do you think of them?" I asked.
"What about them?" Kevin replied.
"Do you think they're fine?"
We'd come to debate who was "fine" the way wine snobs debate terroir.
"Of course not," he replied in disgusted shock. "They look like men."
Until that moment, it hadn't occurred to me that an extraordinary physique was an unattractive trait.
Maybe that's the dilemma from which the new American Gladiators has come to rescue us. Contrary to rumors, the show was not resurrected as a result of the writer's strike. It was greenlighted almost a year ago, a perfect product for a country finally recognizing that even great power has its disadvantages.
It's no accident that the remake is hosted by two figures who could bench-press a pontoon boat, but who have also clumsily revealed their sensitive sides: Hogan as a daddy on reality TV, and Laila Ali, super middleweight champ and daughter of Muhammad, on Dancing with the Stars. It would be hard not root for them.
But the gladiators are another story. While more multi-cultural than the original cast — the new show features at least four races (and, as NBC recently confessed, a gay porn star) — the new gladiators are more replicant than human. "You want people who aren't already known as gladiators," says Ali. That way, she points out, they can be both David and Goliath — just like the rest of us.
All this may help explain why, even though I still won't watch American Gladiators, I am tempted to participate in this mock version of it. I want to laugh at the whole stupid contest, but I can't. I want to reach the top of the pyramid. I want to win.
At 135 pounds and five-foot-eight, Venom is far closer to my size than any of her male gladiator counterparts. She's less frightening now that I know her real name, Beth Horn, and that she's from Chicago, and about my age. It occurs to me that as a child, she was probably as much in thrall of this idiotic contest as I was.
But as we get closer, I stop thinking about any of that. I empty my head. I take a step up. She takes a step down. We repeat, until we are only one tier away from another. I lunge left, she screens me; I fake right, lunge left, and she leaps on my back. I start climbing toward the top of the pyramid, one fistful of fabric at a time, amazed I am making any progress. Each tier that I advance costs me breath and earns me courage.
I'm stronger than I thought.
Sort of. Just five feet from the top, Venom kicks powerfully off the side of the pyramid. Even before I lose my grip, I know it's over. I tumble all the way down to where I started. Thirty-five feet. When I finally look up at her grinning face, it hits me that she'd just been playing easy on me. I wonder if, in eighteen years, anything at all has changed.
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