How Danhausen Became Professional Wrestling’s Strangest Star

In addition to the predetermined outcomes of individual matches, pro wrestling follows story lines that are planned out in advance by writers or, in the case of A.E.W., 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. 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 A.E.W. 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 wrestler and crowd 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. 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. 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 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 A.E.W.’s team of traveling seamsters, who were at that moment sewing frantically at a row of machines they had set up in the hallway. Danhausen had commissioned another set of tights from a local tailor who promised they would be ready by showtime, but now 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.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/10/magazine/danhausen-wrestling.html