PROLOGUE
Geeky men of the world unite and follow me on a journey past, to a happier time of yore, where manly men were manly men, wrestling matches were wrestling matches and soap opera antics were left to Joan Collins and Linda Evans and kept OUT of the wrestling ring… sometimes.
So let’s reset the chronambulator dial clock to March 29, 1987. The place, Pontiac, Michigan. The event… Wrestlemania III.
Come on, think hard. Squint, screw your faces up, scratch your heads… whatever you need to do to cast your ever deteriorating minds back. Can you remember watching this?
I sure can. A squeaky voiced 12-year-old, crouched on his bedroom floor playing with his one developed pubic hair through the hole of his summer pajamas, squinting in a desperate attempt to make out the flamboyant figures on the 10 inch screen of his grandfather’s Pye black and white. This was ground zero for me. Year dot. Prime meridian. The day I became a wrestling fan.
And it was all down to two hunky men in one fantastically epic match. Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat versus the late, great Randy “Macho Man” Savage.
With my eyes fixed on the impending battle and my mind fixed firmly on the topless picture of Samantha Fox I had swapped my school lunch for two days prior, how could I know that what was about to take place would go down as the greatest wrestling bout in history?
The match had everything. Just pick a superlative (insert superlative here). But what got me hooked was Ricky Steamboat’s athleticism and immense fitness. He was unstoppable in this match, pulling off a non-stop succession of now-extinct moves that would put the Chinese Olympic gymnastics team to shame. Inventive, contortionistic, sexy moves that would eventually render Macho Man bamboozled and useless. Never had I been this excited about half-naked men touching each other and for at least the next two days, I was wrestling’s number one fan. Then marble season started.
Of course, all of this has absolutely nothing to do with the following article, so… whatever.
LUCHAS LOCAS: THE BAD GIRLS OF CHOLITA WRESTLING
So here I am. Slumped on the cold concrete, knocked clean out of my plastic, primary school style chair. I’m soaking wet and covered in flour and eggs.
To get here, I spent the past three hours slinking through the cold El Alto evening – the dodgiest part of Bolivia’s largest city, La Paz – through a labyrinthine, behemoth of a market that can only be described as “THEE” Black Market. All at over 4,000 metres above sea level.
So with a bag full of fried cow ovaries for sustenance (no joke) and a mouthful of fresh coca leaves to help combat altitude sickness, I forge through the quagmire of stolen car parts, fireworks, fortune telling canaries and automatic weapons; accidentally bumping into, and sincerely apologising to, every single South American criminal on the planet as I nervously um… forge. Yep, I’m a fucking modern day warrior.
Three hours of this and I have somehow magically tracked my destination; a converted tin shed of a basketball stadium shining dimly over one of the highest shanty towns on Earth. The only indication that I’m in the right place comes down to the fact that the main door to the stadium is blue, with red paint markings and is corrugated-ironed to the max. This is what a local told me to look for. He was correct. A hand-painted sign would be too easy, wouldn’t it? So I hand over my 14 Boliviano ($2) ticket to the 7-year-old boy-bouncer and stupidly pick a seat in the front row.
It only took 20 minutes into the program to get into this position; on the floor, back hurting, saturated in water and food product. I look like I’m well and truly into stage 2 of being turned into a schnitzel. Plus I’m pretty certain I have a serious bout of food poisoning coming on. Damn ovaries.
Now some may call me naive. Some may even call me thick, but I was assured only days before by a lovely Bolivian woman of Incan heritage, that Cholita wrestling is steeped in Incan tradition and was a communal way for ancient Incan women to show their strength and worth to the men of their villages dating as far back as the 1500s.
So I bought a ticket from her.
Didn’t I feel foolish – after I bought my ticket, mind you – when I looked up Cholita wrestling online, only to find through some serious fact-checking, that the sport was actually started by a local businessman in 2005. Who would’ve thought that scams exist in South America? Go figure.
Cholita wrestling is this: two hefty Bolivian women of Incan heritage (derogatorily called “Cholas” or “Cholitas”), dressed in traditional Andean clothing (hooped long skirts, endless layers of silk and petticoats, slippers, braided hair and $2000 bowler hats) umm… wrestle each other. In a ring. American style. Chairs, plywood, ampy music, dodgy stage names… the works. Oh, and a shitload of food product is used.
This particular fight that saw me and several other poor saps end up semi-comatose on the cold concrete was actually between a male wrestler named “El Diablo” and the most badass woman I have ever laid eyes on, “Maldita”. In Latino street slang, “Maldita” translates to “The Bitch” or “Bad Girl”. Now this ain’t your Donna Summer mirror ball type “Bad Girl”, this is your New York Dolls glammed up ripped clothing smeared makeup lock up your sons type “Bad Girl”. With some serious stage presence.
Maldita enters the arena.
SMACK! The door to the ring kicks down and shatters into toothpicks like a cannonball tearing through balsa wood. SQUEAL! The stereo speakers above the ring blow their tweeters in orgasmic frenzy as Maldita storms into the arena and Kiss’ “Detroit Rock City” ransacks the airwaves. SPLASH! Stiff shit to the crowd close to the ring because Maldita has a bucket of water for you… I’m almost hiding behind my chair already.
Maldita enters the ring and kicks the referee square in the nuts.
El Diablo immediately jumps into the ring and smacks Maldita’s head into a turnbuckle. It’s on. From the get go he is all over her; choker holds, full Nelsons, tittie twisters, even a 360 degree 4 turnbuckle face smash. He is well on top, but then he goes too far. He grabs her crotch and twists. With tears still in his eyes, the referee staggers to his feet and breaks it up.
Now, perhaps it was some supernatural force channeled from the mighty, unforgiving Andes or just some angry woman all pissed off because some skinny guy in Lycra just grabbed her crotch. I’m not sure, but, what happened next was a mental institution soup of cartoon Tasmanian devil hurricane chaos mashed in a blender with Rocky-Horror-food-fight and the most blatant disregard for human-kind since Genghis Khan went a little silly all those years ago.
Maldita rose from her knees as if bursting through the canvas, stuck her arms out at 90 degrees and twirled 3 times like an activating Wonder Twin. “Form of a complete bitch” I’m sure she was saying as she howled into the cold mountain air. It worked.
From out of nowhere a bucket of eggs appear.
CRACK! An egg hits some poor girl in the face as Maldita laughs and squeals. WHISK! Maldita lets fly with her middle fingers in my general direction. RIP! Opens a bag of flour as me and others are splattered with egg missiles and covered in flour and water… I’m out of breath.
I’m still trying to take in what the hell is going on when CRASH! down come the barricades separating mortal audience from rampaging nutcase and SWOOP! the ever-present Maldita whisks my chair from under me in a very successful attempt to steal my bottled water from behind me in order to further drown the audience.
Everyone’s fucking laughing!
From my foetal position I can see Maldita back in the ring smashing El Diablo’s face into a turnbuckle. Then from out of nowhere the referee grabs a plastic chair and collects Maldita in the back. This, to me, is justified. I’m back on my feet. “Get her!” Justice.
It’s all in good fun of course. Through an amazing twist of fate where El Diablo and the referee both simultaneously slipped on the same banana peel that had carelessly been left in middle of the ring, proceeded to knock heads on the way to the canvas thus knocking each other out, Maldita won. But not before one final coup de grâce, allowing an audience member the liberty to kick the referee in the nuts, one last time.
And this was only match two.
What was to follow was two hours of similar hijinks where as an audience member, it may have been safer in the ring. At one stage of the evening, inexplicably, the commentator – looking like a Bolivian Peter Landy with a Zapata moustache and an even worse 1980s suit – put an immediate, yet temporary, halt to proceedings early in match 6 (between a Cholita named Carmen Rosa and a very pretty drag Cholita named Yolanda The Loving). Later, I was to find out that the commentator in question needed to buy his nagging son some chips from a food stall outside. Can’t argue with that.
One thing’s for certain though, the locals here really seem to lap this stuff up. The 100 strong crowd know who to cheer, who to boo, how to laugh at idiot tourists and all the kids seem to have a particular Cholita hero. Bolivia may not yet have won an Olympic medal, but…
Now, how the hell do I get back to my hostel?
