Stalking the Iron Sheik

Last night I saw an advance screening of Darren Aronofsky's new movie, The Wrestler, starring Mickey Rourke as an aging, down-on-his-luck professional wrestler and Marisa Tomei as a local stripper who may or may not have a heart of gold. It's a very good movie that you should definitely go see when it's released in theaters next month. The Wrestler is a human drama first and foremost, but it's also about the cold reality of working life, the aesthetics of late-80s hair metal (musical and otherwise), and the strong bonds of subculture brotherhood. It was shot on a shoestring $6 million budget in hand-held documentary style, and the contrast with the precise, controlled visuals of Requiem for a Dream and the criminally-underrated The Fountain is pretty amazing. 

I'm not giving much of the plot away in revealing that the movie revolves, in part, around the possibility of the protagonist, one Randy "Ram" Robinson, participating in a 20th anniversary rematch of an epic 1989 pay-per-view showdown with a wrestler named "The Ayatollah." As we all know, this is a thinly-veiled reference to the classic 1984 title bout between Hulk Hogan (Randy basically looks what Hogan would have looked like if he'd spent the last 20 years on a crystal meth bender, or living the life that Mickey Rourke actually lived) and Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri, a.k.a The Iron Sheik. And this, in turn, is all the excuse I need to tell my Iron Sheik story.

The Sheik, now retired, was born in Iran and had real wrestling skills, competing on the national team (Iran has some of the best wrestlers in the world) in the late 1960s. By the 1970s he had moved to the U.S., where he wrestled under names like The Great Hussein Arab (insert joke about McCain campaign rallies here). Certain contemporaneous developments in geopolitics made his status as the designated "heel" or bad guy in the pro wrestling ring more or less inevitable, and he went on to a successful career, winning the heavyweight title before losing it to Hogan while awing fans in mid-sized regional municipal auditoriums across the land with the power of his patented finishing maneuver, the "camel clutch." 

Anyway, it was some time in the late 1990s, and I was in the Indianapolis airport waiting for an outbound flight. I was hungry so I went to the scary food court, grabbed something greasy and marginally edible, and went to find a table--only to see, sitting right in front of me, the Sheik himself, amiably chatting with another really large dude who was obviously a fellow wrestler. They'd been in town the previous night for a match at the since-demolished Market Square Arena (site of Elvis' last concert, fyi). I didn't want to interrupt them--the 12-year old in me still found him extremely scary--so I sat nearby to eavesdrop. Their conversation went something like this:

Another Really Large Dude: "Hey, did you hear that The Undertaker bought a place on a golf course in Myrtle Beach?"

Sheik: "Real estate is always a smart place to invest."

ARLD: "Yeah, Hacksaw Jim Duggan told me he cleared $100,000 on his place in Florida last year."

Sheik: "If Jake the Snake had at least put his money in T-bills like I told him to, he could have retired five years ago."

And so on and so forth, the most mundane conversation imaginable, except they referred to everyone, and each other, by their stage names. It was surreal. Eventually they finished their burgers and walked to airport security, at which point the security guys started jumping and down, pointing, and yelling "the Iron Sheik!" (airport security jobs were close to minimum wage gigs back then, as you'll recall). We ended up on the same plane, but the Sheik and ARLD were in first class so I didn't get a chance to hear more.

No real point to this story other than a brush with semi-greatness, and you should really go see The Wrestler.