The Daily - The Sunday Read: ‘How Danhausen Became Professional Wrestling’s Strangest Star’

Episode Date: March 26, 2023

Like a lot of people who get into professional wrestling, Donovan Danhausen had a vision of a different version of himself. Ten years ago, at age 21, he was living in Detroit, working as a nursing ass...istant at a hospital, watching a lot of “Adult Swim” and accumulating a collection of horror- and comedy-themed tattoos.At the suggestion of a friend, he took a 12-week training course at the House of Truth wrestling school in Center Line, Mich., and then entered the indie circuit as a hand: an unknown, unpaid wrestler who shows up at events and does what’s asked of him, typically setting up the ring or pretending to be a lawyer or another type of extra. When he ran out of momentum five years later, he developed the character of Danhausen. Originally supposed to be an evil demon, Danhausen found that the more elements of humor he incorporated into his performance, the more audiences responded.“I was just a bearded guy with the tattoos, trying to be a tough guy, and I’m not a tough guy naturally,” he said. “But I can be weird and charismatic, goofy. That’s easy. That’s also a role that most people don’t want to fill.”Over the next couple of years, the Danhausen gimmick became more funny than evil, eventually settling on the character he plays today — one that is bizarre even by the standards of 21st-century wrestling.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi, I'm Dan Brooks, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times Magazine. I live in Montana with my handsome dog. If you've ever seen professional wrestling, you're probably familiar with a concept called kayfabe. You could say that kayfabe is the fake part of pro wrestling. The characters, the storylines, the match outcomes. It's the world inside of wrestling, which, although planned and scripted, is presented as real to fans.
Starting point is 00:00:37 But fans absolutely understand that it is fake. One wrestler named Donovan Danhausen has an unusual gimmick in this world. His entire persona is this sort of comedic meta-commentary on kayfabe and on pro wrestling itself. It's a complicated stunt that, it turns out, hardcore wrestling fans love.
Starting point is 00:01:02 Introducing from someplace far away, claiming to stand 6 feet 7 inches tall and weigh over 300 pounds, he is very nice, very evil, Dan Housen! For this week's Sunday read, you'll hear the profile I wrote about Dan Housen and his rise as this face-painted, curse-wielding wrestling weirdo.
Starting point is 00:01:29 I think what really distinguishes Dan Housen from his peers is that he doesn't take himself too seriously. He has this white face of makeup with big black circles around the eyes, black lipstick, sort of evoking the band Kiss or the silent horror film Nosferatu. He enters the ring in a big cape and tights like a lot of wrestlers, but at 5'10 and roughly 175 pounds, he's not physically imposing. He speaks in a vaguely European accent, kind of partaking in the tradition of cartoon villains that way. Danhausen has a proposal for you. Many wrestlers have signature moves, their own way of finishing off an opponent or bringing
Starting point is 00:02:15 the match to a climax. Danhausen's move doesn't involve touching the other wrestler at all. He raises his hands, points his fingers, and curses them, which is a purely meta wrestling attack, like he's casting a spell. Dan Housen putting the curse on Slim J. And the crowd goes wild. It's Dan Housen! But I think what makes Dan Housen's act legitimate and so satisfying to watch is that he's actually a skilled technical athlete. He's also just a fundamentally likable character, which is reflected in his catchphrase, very nice, very evil. So to understand Dan Housen, you need to understand the world of
Starting point is 00:02:59 indie pro wrestling. Before the 1980s, American pro wrestling was organized around regional promotions that had local TV deals. This is Bill Stern speaking to you from ringside at Convention Hall, Wildwood, New Jersey. Main event, wrestling. This is going to be a real grudge match. Each territory had its own wrestlers, its own show, and its own storylines. That all changed in the 1980s when Vince McMahon purchased what is now known as WWE, or World Wrestling Entertainment. He started buying up talent from regional promotions and consolidating the wrestling audience into a single national market. That's when we saw breakout stars like Hulk Hogan, who crossed over from pro wrestling to mainstream entertainment. But that period also
Starting point is 00:03:45 destroyed the regional promotions. And in their absence, a sort of ecosystem of independent wrestling shows has taken hold. These shows happen in bars, American Legion halls, sometimes in backyards. They're rarely televised, but they do get bootlegged on the internet. And fans who go to these shows are extremely dedicated to pro wrestling. Guys like Dan Housen will travel the circuit of these shows the same way comedians travel nightclubs. And it's through this circuit that Dan Housen was signed to All Elite Wrestling, or AEW, in 2021. It's the second biggest wrestling promotion in America. When I met Dan Housen last year, he was going into this big event for AEW in Las Vegas. He had a lot of internet momentum behind him, but he had relatively little television exposure.
Starting point is 00:04:41 He'd also just recovered from an injury, so he was about to wrestle for the first time in six months in front of the largest audience of his career, about 14,000 people. Something that struck me then about Danhausen was how he planned out almost nothing in advance. Pro wrestling's outcomes are scripted, and yet it always seemed that Danhausen went into the ring with a vague sense of how things were actually going to go, which meant it could all get very messy. So here's my article, How Danhausen Became Professional Wrestling's Strangest Star, read by James Patrick Cronin. he was living in Detroit, working as a nursing assistant at a nearby hospital, watching a lot of adults swim and accumulating a collection of horror and comedy-themed tattoos.
Starting point is 00:05:50 He didn't know what he wanted to do with his life, but he knew that he liked to make short videos with his friends, the kind of outsider art that happens in basements and backyards across America. At the suggestion of one of those friends, he took a 12-week training course at the House of Truth Wrestling School in Centerline, Michigan, and then entered the indie circuit as a hand, an unknown, unpaid wrestler who shows up at events and does what's asked of him, typically setting up the ring, pretending to be a lawyer or other species of extra, maybe participating in a battle royale. of extra, maybe participating in a battle royale. For the next few years, he worked shows around the Great Lakes region, wrestling strangers or sometimes the guy he wrote up with, trying to figure out where he fit in. Danhausen climbed the ladder from hand to known amateur, then local headliner and traveling feature talent, but he remained firmly within the world of day jobs and inconsistently reimbursed expenses.
Starting point is 00:06:46 By 2017, he had moved to Florida and was plying the local indie circuit as Kid Gorgeous, surviving on a job at Starbucks and what little he earned wrestling at shows within driving distance of Miami. It was not working. Most weeks, he would clock in to Starbucks at 5 a.m., clock out at 1, and then travel to an event. One night, after what was supposed to be a chest kick caught him in the throat, a painful injury that briefly made him worry he might lose his ability to speak, he sat in his car and thought, I am not having fun. He was driving a lot, getting hurt, and not getting paid.
Starting point is 00:07:22 The struggle to sell himself to audiences as a physical specimen felt like skating uphill. I was just a bearded guy with the tattoos, trying to be a tough guy, and I'm not a tough guy, naturally, he told me. But I can be weird and charismatic, goofy, that's easy. That's also a role that most people don't want to fill. Five years into his wrestling career, Danhausen did what any serious artist does when he runs out of momentum. He looked for a new gimmick. He had fond memories of Halloween's when his father made him up as a zombie, so he put on black and white face paint. At first, the idea was serious. The character, also named Danhausen, was supposed to be an evil demon.
Starting point is 00:08:10 But Danhausen the man found that the more elements of humor he incorporated into his performance, the more audiences responded. He stopped growling with the agony of the damned and started ordering the crowd to clap and cheer for him. He made his physical movements less creepy and more awkward. These changes made the character more fun to play and brought it in line with his life outside wrestling, which did not include a background in competitive sports, much less fighting. The sole entry on his combat sports resume was one karate class he attended at age six, which he left when he learned they would have to be barefoot. Other than that, I have no background
Starting point is 00:08:45 in anything. I don't have a wrestling background, I'm not into sports, I don't have an improv background, I watched wrestling, and I watched The Simpsons. Over the next couple of years, the Danhausen gimmick became more funny than evil, eventually settling on the character he plays today, one that is bizarre even by the standards of 21st century wrestling. Danhausen is a ghoul, maybe, or some kind of gremlin. He wears makeup that looks as if he's in a silent film about Kiss, and he speaks in a kind of generally European accent. He may or may not have magic powers.
Starting point is 00:09:22 He refers to himself in the third person and punctuates many of his on-camera appearances by asking his co-stars for money, which he refers to as human money. His physical presence is somewhere between frail and confused. He tends to hold his hands at chest level, one on top of the other, like Zorak from Space Ghost, and his reactions are characterized by rapid head movements, as though he were continually startled by stage lights, objects being handed to him, etc. He also has what may be the first signature move in wrestling history that does not involve touching his opponents at all. He curses them, a metaphysical attack he executes by pointing both forefingers, one at arm's length and the other near his chin, while bugging out his eyes.
Starting point is 00:10:08 The crowd goes wild, but otherwise nothing really happens after he does it. At least, not at first. But a cursed opponent might subsequently swing a folding chair in such a way that it rebounds off the turnbuckle and hits him in the face. Or he might slip and fall as he climbs out of the ring. Or he may just get distracted at the critical moment and fail to see another wrestler charging in from behind. Danhausen's dubious command of occult forces
Starting point is 00:10:34 is only one aspect of his absurd presentation, which blurs the line between what is supposed to be real in the fictive world of pro wrestling and what is supposed to be his character's own delusion. He is not six'7", probably, as his self-reported measurements claim, nor does he weigh in at over 300 pounds. At 5'10", and roughly 175 pounds, the real Danhausen is physically unimposing. It was this final element, active denial of his own limitations as a wrestler, that turned his whole gimmick into a kind of commentary on wrestling itself.
Starting point is 00:11:11 And he has found that this commentary resonates deeply with the class of obsessive fans who attend indie shows and watch videos of indie wrestling on the internet. Wrestling is a parody of sports, it always was, RJ City, a fellow AEW wrestler and a longtime friend of Danhausen's told me. But this is now a parody of that parody. Late in 2021, Danhausen was approached by Tony Khan, the co-owner and chief executive of All Elite Wrestling, an upstart promotion carried by TBS and TNT that is disrupting a long period of industry stasis. Over the last two decades, the story of the wrestling business has been World Wrestling Entertainment, commonly known as WWE, exercising unchallenged dominance
Starting point is 00:11:58 over the industry. In September 2021, however, AEW's Dynamite drew a larger share of 18-49-year-olds than WWE's Raw for two consecutive weeks. This seemingly modest news, a temporary blip in the ratings, constituted a seismic event among hardcore wrestling fans, many of whom regard the WWE in roughly the way fans of indie rock regard major record labels. the WWE in roughly the way fans of indie rock regard major record labels. While WWE remains the larger promotion in both audience size and estimated value, there is now a number two. AEW tends to attract long-time enthusiasts, connoisseurs, what the culture sometimes refers to as marks. These are the people who shout, woo, the signature vocalization of Ric Flair when someone does a backhand chop, a signature move of Ric Flair. Marks love Danhausen. To them, he represents a different kind of star for a new era of pro wrestling, one who appeals to obsessive
Starting point is 00:13:00 consumers who feel underserved by what they perceive as the WWE's focus on capturing the largest audience possible. Now that he is a fan favorite, Danhausen's ostensible power to manipulate the outcomes of his matches has become the power to manipulate the industry itself. The curses aren't real, but the popularity that incentivizes AEW to make him a winner is. But the popularity that incentivizes AEW to make him a winner is. Dan Housen occupies a point of singularity in the manifold of artifice and truth that is the pro-wrestling universe. The place where the story and the show and the business intersect. It is true that pro-wrestling is fake.
Starting point is 00:13:46 While we're at it, so are movies, television, and a substantial portion of the internet. The show, however, is real. The experience of watching the fake wrestling match, in which performer-athletes playing exaggerated or downright invented versions of themselves engage in an improvised stage combat whose winner has been determined in advance,
Starting point is 00:14:02 and feeling either entertained or bored, is real. The fun of being a wrestling fan, especially at a live event, is that you get to boo the heels and cheer the faces, as the good guys are known, in accordance with your understanding of the fake world of the show. But you also get to express your own enjoyment of, or dissatisfaction with, that show in a way that is totally, viscerally real.
Starting point is 00:14:29 The business is also real. For many hardcore fans, it constitutes a kind of show beyond the show that is sometimes more interesting than any given match, the way draft picks and salary caps are occasionally of primary interest to fans of the NBA. The workings of the wrestling business are sometimes incorporated into the world of the show, as in the case of Vincent K. McMahon, the former chairman and chief executive of WWE, who for years played a heightened version of himself that antagonized wrestlers and audiences alike. This fictional character reflected actual resentments. Before the 1980s, televised professional wrestling was a patchwork of deals between local broadcasters and regional promotions, which operated in a kind of feudal system of defined,
Starting point is 00:15:17 albeit periodically contested, territories. In 1983, McMahon's World Wrestling Federation embarked on a period of aggressive expansion, snapping up talent and driving rival promotions out of business until the previously fractured wrestling audience became a single nationwide market that WWF could dominate through star power and superior capital outlay. The last meaningful challenge to this dominance came in 1995, when Ted Turner's World Championship Wrestling introduced Monday Nitro on TNT, directly opposite WWF's Monday Night Raw. After a ratings contest that lasted a little over a year, WCW's audience share began to falter, and WWF, which had changed its name to World Wrestling Federation Entertainment before shortening it to World Wrestling Entertainment purchased WCW's intellectual property and the contracts of its most popular wrestlers in 2001
Starting point is 00:16:12 In the two decades since WWE has enjoyed something like a monopoly on televised professional wrestling which allowed stars like The Rock and John Cena to cross over to a mainstream audience and now threatens to relieve the company of the need to please its most hardcore fans. In August 2021, WWE's president, Nick Khan, who is not related to Tony, caused a stir when he said that WWE was interested in looking beyond the normal indie wrestling channels to find new talent. In the wake of WWE's consolidation of the televised wrestling business,
Starting point is 00:16:49 the disappearance of territorial promotions created the conditions for a new ecosystem of untelevised independent wrestling shows to take hold, the way certain species of flora resurge after a forest fire. These promotions, which present shows in bars, backyards, and other venues that can be rented for relatively little money up front, rely on a churning roster
Starting point is 00:17:10 of amateur and semi-professional wrestlers who work their local circuits the way aspiring comics work showcases and open mics. While almost none of these promotions have a TV deal, there exists an avid community of indie wrestling fans online.
Starting point is 00:17:25 A bootleg video of a sufficiently interesting bar show can reach a significant audience, creating an indie-to-professional pipeline that is just plausible enough to entice young aspirants. Tony Khan has built AEW's roster around a combination of fan favorites from the indie circuit and older veterans of televised wrestling. A kind of Mark himself, he claims to have kept notebooks, since age 12, that detailed characters and storylines for shows that would eventually become Dynamite and Rampage, AEW's Wednesday and Friday night programs. Wednesday and Friday night programs. Kahn is 40, wears his hair bushy, and speaks in a fluent monotone, with the confidence and peculiar affect that signal generational wealth. His father, Shad Kahn, is an auto parts billionaire and co-owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars and Fulham Football Club.
Starting point is 00:18:18 There seems to be no aspect of AEW's operation in which Tony Kahn is not involved. Our formal interview backstage during Memorial Day weekend's Rampage event took place while he was on a headset with a production truck. The in-ring referee, the announcing team, and the veteran wrestler Dustin Rhodes, who assists with the live show in various ways, including by identifying each in-ring move for the broadcast announcers. Khan's role in this process is to ensure that the largely improvised show progresses according to the schedule determined by the television deal.
Starting point is 00:18:52 During our conversation, he repeatedly interrupted himself to give timing instructions to the referee, who then surreptitiously communicated them to the wrestlers in the ring. Partly because we were behind a curtain, to the wrestlers in the ring. Partly because we were behind a curtain and partly because of the subwoofer-reinforced booms of wrestlers slamming each other onto the mic'd up canvas, speaking to him was like meeting a less defensive but more distracted Wizard of Oz.
Starting point is 00:19:16 Khan regards the indie circuit as an invaluable source of talent. I like to take people's presentation once it's gotten over, once it's gotten popular and been accepted, he told me. Getting over is a term of art. Wrestlers are over when the audience starts enthusiastically responding to them, positively or negatively. If you find people that have gotten over with a smaller, hardcore audience, often if you give them a chance on national television, the hardcore audience will vouch for them.
Starting point is 00:19:45 He was placing a big bet on this strategy Memorial Day weekend. Khan had already kept Danhausen on the roster for months while an injury he sustained at an indie event in Knoxville, Tennessee, a broken tibia and fibula, left him unable to wrestle. Now, Khan had decided to make Danhausen's match the buy-in for AEW's annual Double or Nothing event in Las Vegas. The first match of the event, which airs on free TV as an enticement for ambivalent fans to buy the pay-per-view. So, not only would it be Danhausen's first major in-ring performance after returning from injury, in front of the largest crowd of his career. At that point, T-Mobile Arena had sold out at a little over 14,000 seats, but it would also be of crucial importance to his new employer
Starting point is 00:20:30 and set the tone for the biggest event in company history. Which would all be fine, Danhausen assured me, because the main lesson he had learned from wrestling was that you couldn't really control what happened to you, but you could maximize the opportunity in whatever did. If you get cut and you have a minute, he said, you just make the most of your minute. By 10.45 on Saturday morning,
Starting point is 00:20:54 the line to meet Hangman Adam Page at the Double or Nothing Fan Fest event in the Mandalay Bay Convention Center threatened to stretch past the logistically important center of the room. The line for the announcer and former wrestler Taz was the second longest, and Danhausen's was third. He stood at a cafe table at the end of a tension barrier shoot and steadily autographed a stack of playing card-themed promotional photos AEW created for the event. No cell phone pictures
Starting point is 00:21:22 were allowed, but a company photographer was on hand to snap one picture of him with each fan or group of fans. He made the curse gesture for just about every photo. Danhausen was in makeup, but not in character, a choice that seemed equally jarring and thrilling to his admirers. One fan brought him a copy of An American Werewolf in London on DVD, something Danhausen already had, but not on Blu-ray, which the fan insisted was hard to find, and they conversed briefly about the genius of David Naughton. Simpsons, to B-horror movies, to cartoons like The Venture Brothers and Space Ghost, and to the shared inheritance of wrestling history, creates a series of recognitions among fans who may not get what he is doing at first, but immediately understand that the person doing it is somehow like them. I think we're all weirdos, and they can connect with that,
Starting point is 00:22:21 Danhausen said. In a good way. Good weird. Diehard wrestling fans seem to have some quality in common that is hard to describe but easy to recognize. Over the course of the weekend, I approached any stranger who looked right and asked, are you in town for double or nothing? I was right 100% of the time. The business model's emphasis on t-shirts surely improved my average, but there were other factors at play. Many wrestling fans invoke signifiers from various subcultures, punk, goth, role-playing games,
Starting point is 00:22:55 the burlesque, rockabilly, roller derby triangle, without being definitively of any one of them. They wear a lot of ear gauges, and they exhibit the sweet diffidence of people who live some of the more meaningful portions of their lives in fictional worlds. The job of the professional wrestler is to make these people feel, a job that requires an enormous amount of physical exertion and training, but ultimately does not come down to athletic prowess so much as the ability to work a crowd.
Starting point is 00:23:30 The Rock, probably the biggest crossover star since Hulk Hogan, is an example of this principle. He was not considered an extraordinarily skilled technical wrestler, and his finishing move was an anticlimactic elbow drop. But he developed a funny and compelling character, coining phrases that appeared on t-shirts and wielding electrifying command of his audience. Eventually, he was so over with the fans that WWF seemed to have no choice but to make him champion. In addition to the predetermined outcomes of individual matches, pro wrestling follows storylines that are planned out in advance by writers or, in the case of AEW, via a collective effort by Khan, a handful of veteran hires and the wrestlers themselves. But wrestling is nonetheless a competitive sport because performers who consistently receive big responses from fans will find themselves in more and bigger events.
Starting point is 00:24:19 Generally speaking, wrestlers advance toward the championship on the size of their pop, the reaction they get from the crowd, which is real and ultimately beyond the control of promoters. Phil Brooks, who as CM Punk has held seven championships with four different promotions and was AEW world champion twice in 2022, described the process of developing a wrestling persona as being repeatedly surprised by the reactions of the crowd, a feeling he characterized as, I don't know why they like that, but they like it. Sometimes the interplay between wrestlers and crowd
Starting point is 00:24:54 can take a gimmick somewhere surprising to both. Dustin Rhodes, for example, got over to an astonishing degree in the late 1990s as the bizarre heel Goldust, an androgynous living Oscar who used wrestling as an opportunity to sexually harass other men. Rhodes solidified this gimmick midway through a circa 1995 match against Savio Vega, locking up with him and briefly caressing his chest before rolling out of the ring. Rhodes described the crowd's reaction as the most evil hate I've ever heard, a concentrated version of the heat it is a heel's job to generate.
Starting point is 00:25:32 As soon as he heard that response, he knew he had to commit to the character. That's the first reaction I had gotten in six months, he told me. It was hard, but once I did it, man, that night, it changed my life. Danhausen can't cite a single night that changed his life the way Rhodes can. He doesn't remember when the gimmick really clicked, but I keep thinking about a YouTube video from 2019 in which he appears opposite one Pretty Boy Smooth in an event billed as No Ring, No Rules, a wrestling match in a bar, from which some but not all of the tables have been removed, attended by about 30 people.
Starting point is 00:26:11 The room has that quiet sound that bedevils any show in front of a very small audience, but Danhausen is fully committed. Pretty Boy Smooth is the larger man, and at one point, Danhausen tries to pick him up and just can't. It's a pleasing gag. Not just the sight of Danhausen struggling to lift him, cartoon style, but also knowing that he is faking struggling, really selling it, heaving himself against the other man's weight with his hands immobile. Of all the unlikely things wrestlers do with their bodies, you never see them do anything like this. This Buster Keaton physical language of mundane frustration. You look at it and think, that's how it would go for me if I wound up in there. We may never know what it is about a
Starting point is 00:26:56 physically unimpressive misfit living in a fantasy world that appeals to wrestling fans, but coming into Double or Nothing Memorial Day weekend, Danhausen was finally, deliriously over. On Sunday afternoon, roughly 90 minutes before he was set to enter the ring, Danhausen was worried about his tights. The custom pair he had had shipped to the FedEx office at Mandalay Bay the day before turned out to be too small and made of some material intractable to AEW's team of traveling seamsters who were, at that moment, sewing frantically at a row of machines they had set up in the hallway.
Starting point is 00:27:56 Danhausen had commissioned another set of tights from a local tailor who promised they would be ready by showtime, but, that person had stopped answering his texts. In response to these conditions, as in seemingly all things, Danhausen tried to maintain a positive attitude. But even beneath the makeup, his face bore the expression of a man experiencing only limited success in assuring himself that, when he walked down the ramp to the biggest performance of his career, he would be fully clothed. Danhausen's friend and fellow AEW wrestler Orange Cassidy assured him that he was so over he could go out there in jeans.
Starting point is 00:28:33 But Danhausen was worried about crack. If a wrestler shows cleavage in the ring, the internet will not forget. He texted again and then released his phone a little too vigorously onto the road box around which we had gathered. His parents were in town, he observed. After what may have been ten of the longer minutes of his life, the man with the backup tights arrived, and Danhausen returned to normal, unfocused, pre-show jitters. For the last several weeks, he had been working a narrative in which he tried and failed to befriend another wrestler named Hook, a storyline dubbed in tabloid style, Hookhausen.
Starting point is 00:29:12 Hook's gimmick is essentially the same as that of my teenage son, brooding, with high-volume zoomer hair that hangs into his eyes and makes him seem either surly or deep, depending on your demographic. and makes him seem either surly or deep, depending on your demographic. He is a thrilling in-ring wrestler who combines judo-influenced throws with explosive speed and low body fat percentage, but his presentation is also deeply serious, in a way that risks shading over into unintentional comedy. Pairing him with Dan Housen was a genius move, for which no one at AEW seemed willing to take credit. Khan would divulge only that,
Starting point is 00:29:47 A very smart person suggested it to me. Shortly before Double or Nothing, Danhausen had finally secured Hook's approval in the form of a symbolically important handshake, bringing to a climax a series of events that not only bought Danhausen time to rehab his leg, but also set up the night's tag team match, which pit him and Hook against the premier athlete Tony Nese, a body guy who is not above kissing his own biceps to rile up the crowd, and smart Mark Sterling Esquire, whose improbable gimmick is that, even though he is a lawyer, he is not that smart. Danhausen's goal for this match was, putting it crassly, to live up to the hype.
Starting point is 00:30:27 He wanted to prove that he was not just a fan favorite with good mic skills, but also a talented wrestler who could work an audience from inside the ring. Beyond that, it seemed as though he was still pleasantly surprised to be there. He told me he had no interest in signing with WWE, the logical next step in any wrestler's career, because he felt AEW was better suited to his act. That was, of course, the correct thing to say, but it also seemed true. For him, AEW is not the minor league so much as a place where Danhausen can be Danhausen in front of an audience who appreciates what he is doing. When his entrance music came bumping out of the speakers at T-Mobile Arena, a kitschy riff on Saturday morning cartoon themes,
Starting point is 00:31:10 complete with a video package of hypnotic spirals and floating depictions of his own head, approximately 14,000 such people stood up and cheered. As he marched down the ramp in cape and mostly fitting tights, he seemed to take a moment to drink it all in. Minyag, he said, a sound of ghoulish delight. Then he climbed through the ropes and did what he had planned to do. Get thrown around the ring by Nice for the better part of four minutes, occasionally pulling off a spectacular move but mostly being manhandled as he tried and failed to tag in Hook
Starting point is 00:31:44 in a series of near misses that teased the audience into a frenzy. When he finally touched his younger partner's hand, the pop was enormous. Hook made short work of Nese, then dragged Sterling over the top rope and slammed him into catatonia. He was about to pin him and end the match when he turned and saw Danhausen frantically calling for the tag. After briefly consulting with the crowd, Hook tagged his partner in. Danhausen marched across the ring, his face a mixture of triumph and shock, and planted one foot on Sterling's chest. He raised his hands and shouted along with the fans as they roared their approval. The guy who stood
Starting point is 00:32:26 no chance of winning had won. It was exactly what was supposed to happen. Thank you.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.