Wrestling

Wrestling impresario Vince McMahon will never be confused with Mr. Rogers, but he sure wants to be. The chairman of World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. doesn't even like the word "wrestler" anymore. He prefers "performer" or "superstar" or "diva" to describe his stable of talent. Gone is much of the sexual innuendo, over-the-top trash talk, blood-splattering bouts and scantily clad female wrestlers that fueled the WWE's "Attitude Era" of 10 years ago when the company was locked in a death match with Ted Turner's rival wrestling outfit, World Championship Wrestling, which McMahon eventually bought out. Now McMahon, 64, is hawking a kinder, gentler, wrestling show, and that new approach was on display this past weekend when WWE took over L.A. Live as part of a massive promotional push.

Eddie "Iceberg" Chastain, a 385-pound wrestler with a shaved head and a red goatee, calls himself the Being of Inconceivable Horror. In the ring, he wields a fork -- just like his mentor, Abdullah the Butcher. He pummels his opponents with cross-face forearms, levels them with clotheslines and crushes them with avalanche splashes. But outside the ring he has begun to show a softer side. "You know, it's not actually my intent to hurt my opponent," he said in a telephone interview last week.

Mattel Inc. and Jakks Pacific Inc. on Wednesday announced new deals to make wrestling action figures, the latest chapter in a story that has all the acrimony and shifting alliances of professional wrestling. Mattel has teamed with World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. to make toys based on its popular wrestlers, and Jakks is matching up with WWE rival TNA Entertainment. Both deals -- which take effect in 2010 -- are for five years.

Once upon a time, pro wrestling helped save UPN. And now it's serving largely the same function for its successor network, MyNetworkTV. There's a larger message here somewhere, and it's not just that a lot of young men like to watch beefy guys in posing suits smash each other's heads with choreographed fight moves. A couple of years ago, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. launched MyNetwork with a full slate of low-cost telenovelas, such as the campy "Fashion House" with Bo Derek.

Welcome to Abdullah the Butcher's House of Ribs & Chinese Food, a few miles northwest of the Atlanta airport. Your eponymous host earned his fame as a professional wrestler -- "the Madman From Sudan," they called him. He started out in a fez, graduated to a kaffiyeh. Over time, he perfected a wild-eyed stare. He dismantled foes with his signature "Sudanese meat cleaver," a running elbow drop to the throat. He ate light bulbs and raw meat. He was, in short, a nightmare of political incorrectness.

Andy Moreno had his American opponent right where he wanted him: out of position and seemingly out of luck. But when Moreno moved in for the kill only 10 seconds from victory, Henry Cejudo stunned the Cuban wrestler by flipping him on his back. "Pretty incredible," said Kevin Jackson, coach of the U.S. wrestling team. "He was down twice and dug down deep to come back."

The days of wrestlers wearing rubber sweat suits in saunas, starving themselves for days, and exercising throughout the night in an effort to cut weight seem to be a thing of the past . The deaths of three wrestlers in 1997 scared such tactics out of the sport. And the National Federation of High Schools wants to make sure they stay out. That's why rules have been developed using a formula based on body fat percentage and hydration to dictate the minimum weight class for each wrestler.

TONIGHT'S main event will be a hair match: The victor will shave the loser's head in front of a packed house. Backstage, performers line up in the stairwell waiting for their moment. One by one they are called into the spotlight in front of 1,500 screaming fans at the Mayan Theatre downtown. The noise intensifies at this cross-cultural scream-fest. Pro wrestling in one form or another has existed in this country since the 1800s.

IT could almost qualify as good clean fun, were it not for the cuss words, and one very beauteous assistant in a mini miniskirt and not much on underneath. Macho men -- some looking like Jack Black in his stretchy pants -- do dropkicks and fly through the air to trample their opponents, egged on by the screams of an audience who knows them all on a first-name basis. And the most mind-blowing part of it all?

The old wrestler grapples with his conflicting emotions. As a UCLA alumnus and three-time football letterman, Jack Ellena laments the Bruins' failure to duplicate the success that he and his teammates enjoyed in 1954, when UCLA stormed through a nine-game schedule unbeaten and topped the United Press International coaches' poll at season's end.