Rule the World

After and before he went by the last name Vicious, and before he was just Sid, Sycho (sic) Sid, he went by Sid Justice. His WWF catchphrase: I’m Sid Justice. And I rule the world.

As absurd as the idea of success in professional wrestling equating to world domination might sound, the words fit their context. Wrestling is nothing if not insular. The wrestling ring has its own physics, with laws like a wrestler continuing to run and bounce off the ring ropes once he’s thrown into them, or the never-explained, yet near-universally accepted rule that regardless of how angry a good guy might be, he’ll only pummel a bad guy until he’s run away, outside the wrestling ring, at which point the former will only point and mouth warnings. It’s a world with a wide cast of characters and matches contested under diverse rules. A world in which referees may get conveniently concussed—knocked unconscious long enough for elaborate shenanigans outside the normal rules to take place. And in this world, different from any other, is it such a reach for a wrestler to seek to rule that world. And indeed, if that world were real, what better world could one hope to rule?

In the real world, Tony Halme, who’d played Finnish monster heel Ludvig Borga and terrorized American hero Lex Luger and Native American warrior Tatanka throughout 1993, went on to serve in the real Finnish Parliament. Soviet heel Nikolai Volkoff would go on to a career in Maryland politics in his latter years before he passed in 2018. In 2019, Kane—The Undertaker’s little brother who’d alternately played a monster heel and been an oversized source of muscle-bound justice for twenty years in the WWE landscape--was elected the mayor of Knox County in Tennessee. Jesse Ventura—who played a bodybuilder heel wrestler, then served for years as a color commentator in the WWF and later WCW--was elected to a term as Minnesota’s governor.

So wrestlers have ruled, and ruled well beyond the so-called squared circle where they work pre-planned fights in front of thousands of likeminded onlookers.

In the late 2000s, the verbiage the WWE Universe came into play, encompassing WWE lore not unlike the Marvel or DC Universes for its history, mythology, and cast of characters. Announcers also direct the term at the audience, no longer referencing fans or crowds cheering or booing, but rather citing the WWE Universe’s approval, admiration, condemnation, confusion, etc.

It may be an innocuous enough turn of phrase. But critics—Jesse Ventura among them--have suggested another reading. Ventura is uniquely situated to posit a theory.Yes, he's a wrestling veteran, a political leader, and a conspiracy theorist, but also a wrestler whose behind the scenes legacy may be best defined by his attempts to organize something like a labor union of wrestling talent, before owner Vince McMahon and top star Hulk Hogan formed an unbeatable tag team to crush his plan.

The theory goes that McMahon—resentful of a world that looks down on the wrestling enterprise, and frustrated with the middling success to outright failure of his outside ventures like a bodybuilding promotion, a football league, and a movie studio—has gone so far as to create his own version of not just a planet, but a universe, in which he is exalted, beyond reproach, and omnipotent. McMahon is the god of his universe, make no mistake, deciding who wins, loses, turns villainous or heroic, becomes immortalized as a legend. He’s in his mid-seventies now, and hasn’t taken a meaningful step back since he took the reins of wrestling from his father over thirty years ago.

How does one come to truly rule a world?

One creates it.

One holds on.

One makes it so.