Fuck Warrior

Pictured: A gassed-up bigot
Photo Credit: WWE.com

When Ultimate Warrior died, I didn’t write a flowery eulogy to him. While I kept my feelings low key for the most part, I didn’t hide that I didn’t think he was worthy of the hagiography that had been written to him, both in his last act of life being inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame or during his death. The man was a bigot and a spiteful, hateful man interpersonally. Of course, even though my words were tame in their truth, I was accosted by people online who didn’t agree with what I wrote on Twitter or even here. MMA “journalists” named Bloodstain Lane and Front Row Brian among others decided to attack me because I didn’t have the temerity to honor a mediocre performer who turned out to be an exponentially worse human being. While I held back because I didn’t want any vitriol to seep to the people mourning him, my point remains. You shouldn’t be forgiven for your heinous acts in death if you didn’t atone or at least apologize for them in life.

Warrior may have made up with Vince McMahon over his interpersonal tensions that sent him away from WWE for years at a time, but really, why should anyone but McMahon or his inner circle care about that reconciliation? Did Warrior ever reach out to Bobby Heenan after he made comments wishing that the cancer that took his jaw also would take his life? Of course, Heenan ended up outliving Warrior anyway, though I’m not sure I’d classify years of declining health and pain as having a “last laugh,” but that’s neither here nor there. Furthermore, did Warrior ever atone for his grotesquely homophobic remarks time and time again? No. He reconciled with one man, and while I am not privy to Warrior’s thoughts, I can safely assume that it had more to do with money and attention rather than anything worth praising.

So excuse me if I don’t buy the continual whitewashing of his legacy, including now, where he’s the company’s public face for this year’s breast cancer awareness campaign during October. One could jest that Warrior and Susan G. Komen are a perfect match for each other. Warrior was a rotten person, and Komen is a “charity” only in the sense that it collects money to make people aware the breast cancer exists. Whether it be its laughably low percentage of funds going to actual research even compared to other high-overhead charities or its questionable political ties or to the impossible barricades it puts up to common-person donations, Komen basically is a charity for corporations to use to pat themselves on the back for doing “something,” no matter how minimal that “something” is. In a way, it’s the perfect charity for Stephanie McMahon’s brand of hollow feminism, but I digress.

Still, despite Komen’s awful track record, WWE and its wrestlers either present or pretend to present it as its own way of doing good by a marginalized people. It’s ostensibly a good deed, which now is fronted with Warrior’s iconography as the standard borne. Last night on RAW saw that push go even further as every babyface wrestler as well as select heels like Alexa Bliss wore the Komen-affiliated shirt branded with Warrior’s facepaint on the front and the slogan exhorting breast cancer victims and survivors to “Unleash Your Warrior.” The intent is clear for these brave women to fight their disease with the kayfabe intensity that Warrior displayed as an active wrestler. However, I cannot divorce Warrior from his bigotry, so when WWE and Komen rally women to unleash their “Warrior” on breast cancer, I imagine them belittling the tumors with homophobic slurs and pseudointellectual barbs on why gayness is wrong.

Still, this action is par for the course from a tone-deaf company at the very least when it comes to social matters. It only has scrubbed persons from its association if it meant bad publicity, like with Chris Benoit and Hulk Hogan. With Hogan filtering his way back into WWE, he'll be welcomed back once people mostly forget that he's a racist goblin. The company has celebrated Jimmy Snuka, Pete Rose, and Fabulous Moolah. Hell, Donald Trump didn't become a grotesque monster overnight after announcing his candidacy for President. However, WWE isn't using its associations with Trump or Snuka or anyone else to put over how charitable and kind it is. Warrior may not have allegedly killed someone like Snuka did, but his presence in the WWE pantheon is far more toxic than his or anyone but possibly Trump because of how publicly and vitriolically hateful he was at almost all times. And not once did he ever ask for attrition from the *extremely AJ Styles voice* GAY COMMUNITY!?!?!

WWE is trash for co-opting the image, but one could argue it's only adopting just an image, a character that it housed and that it's using with permission of Warrior's survivors and estate. It's extremely gross, but it's still theoretically defensible. "Queering don't make the world work" taken to the grave is abhorrent. Fuck Warrior. Fuck his legacy. It's a legacy of hate, and not one that I'm sure I want to be glancingly exposed to while watching the rest of my problematic-as-fuck three hour wrestling program.