In Search of Left Wrestling
By Tom Williams
Pro wrestling is often associated with the Right, but a new character has become popular for championing solidarity and workers’ rights, reflecting the growing economic precarity of its fanbase.
World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) — the industry powerhouse that has been unrivalled since buying out World Championship Wrestling, its former competitor, in the early 2000s — is fairly openly aligned with Donald Trump’s administration. Recently, they rehired Brock Lesnar, who is implicated in the Vince McMahon sex trafficking scandal; WWE has close relationships with Logan Paul and the Saudi Arabian regime; its top star of the last ten years, Roman Reigns, has expressed support for Donald Trump; and co-founder Linda McMahon is a member of Trump’s cabinet. Recently, WWE television has featured a masked wrestler ‘from the Gulf of America’, reflecting the organisation’s increasingly open MAGA sympathies.
Meanwhile, upstart alternative All Elite Wrestling (AEW) is increasingly leaning the other way. Their version of the world title is now held by ‘Hangman’ Adam Page, an ‘anxious millennial cowboy’ (who in real life is a guy called Steven Woltz), a former media studies teacher and and teachers union shop steward whose hobby is gardening, hero is David Attenborough, and whose preferred presidential candidate in 2020 was Bernie Sanders, who he made a series of small donations to. (On the filing form, he listed his profession as ‘thuggin and buggin’.)
Page’s title win in July was emotional; I know of at least three full-grown adults who wept as he finally held the title belt in his hands. This was partly because, as the lines between reality and fiction are more blurred than ever, the fans relate to both the character and the person behind it. Page’s title victory came at the end of a well-worn tale of tragedy and redemption not uncommon in professional wrestling. But what made it so emotionally resonant is that Page reacted to all the typically preposterous things that happened to him as if they were indeed real. As such, he became perhaps the most relatable, most human character in wrestling.
The key angle (wrestling parlance for storyline) was an incident in which his rival Swerve Strickland broke into Page’s family home and loomed menacingly over his infant son’s cot. As ridiculous as this may seem, the home invasion angle is a standard pro wrestling trope, designed to escalate a feud and get more ‘heat’ (anger from fans), and lead to the babyface (good guy) taking violent revenge. ‘Hangman’ did eventually get back at Strickland, but while also spiralling towards a traumatised breakdown. The matches between the two were violent; one managed to incur the wrath of the famously reactionary Daily Mail after Page stapled one of his child’s paintings to Strickland’s cheek and drank his blood.
The Hangman character — insecure, plagued by feelings of inadequacy and addiction — is an avatar for political subjects, especially younger ones, who understand themselves through the prism of their oppressions and their traumas. Woltz is now a multi-millionaire, but his relatively humble beginnings make him part of a liminal class of younger people who often encounter glass ceilings and have their horizons limited by economic inequality.
There is a stark contrast between the Hangman redemption arc and WWE’s most recent feel-good saga, in which Cody Rhodes — who, when not wrestling, appears suited and booted and has a tattoo of the American flag on his neck — finished his story by winning WWE’s version of the world title. The whole idea underpinning this seemed to be that because his father, blue-collar wrestling icon Dusty Rhodes, was a champion (albeit not in WWE or the WWF, as it was then known), he should be one too.
The Cody Rhodes character entered history through a heavily individuated quest, and by the time he left for WWE, where he is seen as a hero, Rhodes was loathed by AEW fans. AEW seems to have a more socially liberal fan base (the company’s second women’s world champion was a trans woman), and their perception of Rhodes was of an entitled, vulgar, nouveau riche nepo baby. He was supposed to be a babyface, but was booed out of the building at every event.
The apparently more progressive politics of the fans also factored into the beginning of the war between Page and Strickland. It began with Strickland interrupting Page during an in-ring interview, body-shaming him, and telling Page that he would use him as a stepping stone to the top. However, in the same breath, Strickland also proclaimed that he would become the first black AEW champion. Despite Strickland being the villain of the piece, the crowd went nuts. They wanted to see a black champion. Even Page (or perhaps Woltz, breaking character) nodded along.
From that point onwards, the fans wanted Strickland to ascend to the championship, even at the expense of the beloved Page. Nothing Strickland did in the storyline got him booed, because modern wrestling fans know that it’s all a ‘work’ — it’s fake. They enjoyed Swerve Strickland, the antihero — especially his Run-DMC-inspired call-and-response ‘Whose house?’ ‘Swerve’s house!’ catchphrase — but they also wanted Stefon Strickland, the person behind the character, to write an important chapter in the company’s history (perhaps in part because rival WWE’s record with black wrestlers is chequered, to say the least).
The Hangman character spent almost two years in a depression, alienating his friends through often violent outbursts and drinking heavily. In wrestling terms, two years is a very slow-burning story arc. The sentimental impact of his eventual salvation and triumph was enhanced by Page learning to forge solidarities, becoming part of a sort of rainbow coalition of characters, including but not limited to: the bubbly, hippyish woman of colour Willow Nightingale; loveable, redneck chicken farmer Mark Briscoe; NHS-loving Essex boy Will Ospreay (currently the best in-ring performer in the world); and eventually Strickland. This was a grouping of people with intersecting struggles who ultimately just wanted a nicer workplace.
The joy at Page’s fictional vindication was to some extent coterminous with Woltz’s actual career, which provides an insight into the man behind the protagonist. He first reached the pinnacle of AEW in 2021, at the end of another compelling story in which he overcame his imposter syndrome and problem drinking to win the title from real-life friend and all-time in-ring great Kenny Omega. Woltz’s career soon hit a roadblock, though, after an on-and-off-screen row with AEW’s biggest star at the time, CM Punk (Phil Brooks). Intriguingly, the disagreement was about workers’ rights.
Woltz believed that Brooks had used his backstage clout to carry out petty vendettas against wrestlers with whom he had beef, and with art imitating life, told him how disgusted he was while in character as Hangman. Brooks was furious and ‘went into business for himself’ (went off-script) to damage Woltz, after which Woltz found himself treading water.
His career at a crossroads, Woltz and three friends — Omega (Tyson Smith) and preeminent tag team the Young Bucks (Matthew and Nicholas Massey) — did something almost unheard of in the ultra-competitive and individuated world of pro wrestling: they effectively collective bargained to secure improved terms and conditions. ‘The four guys had made a pact that they were gonna stick together, whether it would be in WWE or AEW,’ reported esteemed wrestling journalist and historian Dave Meltzer. ‘They basically had made an agreement that it was [going to] be majority rules.’
Two years on, AEW ran a hot show at the illustrious Arena Mexico in Mexico City. Opening the show, a visibly nervous Woltz surprised and delighted the mostly Latinx audience by delivering a sincere promo in decent Spanish in which he told them about working on a farm with Mexican migrant workers in his youth, melting the hearts of those in attendance as he advocated for togetherness and support of migrant workers (later on that night, the mammoth former IATSE union member Brody King barrelled towards the ring in an ‘ABOLISH ICE’ t-shirt).
‘Hola,’ he began as he took the house mic. ‘Me nombre es Hangman’. Arena Mexico fell in love.
‘When I was young, my family had a tobacco farm,’ he continued. ‘And every summer, six men would come from Ruiz, Nayarit, to work… Every year I worked with them, and they taught me about Mexico. They were hard workers, honest, and cared for their families. They taught me that we are all better when we work together.’
Workers’ rights, collective bargaining, and pro-migrant sentiments are not commonly associated with top wrestlers. The late Hulk Hogan was a union-busting racist, and while ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin became the biggest star in wrestling by punching his boss — the aforementioned Vince McMahon, whose real-life personality has turned out to be even more loathsome than his on-screen persona — in the face, Austin was a rugged individual who looked after himself. Page can be seen as a 2020s analogue to Austin. A key part of the character is his consciousness that community, commonality, and collectivism are necessary for survival. What makes Page unique is not superhuman attributes, but that he is a vulnerable, flawed, and still a fundamentally decent, well-intentioned person.
Perhaps even more unusually, AEW were at pains to make this fairly explicit. As Page walked the aisle before his title victory over the dastardly Jon Moxley — whose toxic masculinity and brutal hazing of the roster had infuriated fans for months — AEW’s lead commentator told viewers that Page (and in reality, Woltz too) was the son of a tobacco farmer, ‘who learned the value of hard work, collective action, and respect for his fellow man’. After an epic, blood-drenched brawl with Moxley, the sensitive Bernie partisan sobbed as he clutched the world championship belt.
All of this is, of course, likely to be an example of the typically cynical pro wrestling ploy of trying to engage fans by pandering to their prejudices, even if it is happening in line with the wishes and politics of the talent (in Woltz’s case, there can be little doubt that he is at least a left-leaning liberal). They wouldn’t be doing this if there weren’t a market for it. The fact that there is a market for it, however, is demonstrative of the groundswell of support for the values of Page/Woltz. That a value-producing company owned by a billionaire has chosen a character like Page as its standard bearer is significant.
Wrestling is a work, and Hangman Page is a fictional character. But as ever, the issues and balance of forces underlying all this are real. Ultimately, wrestling is about stories. Often, the stories that capture our imaginations do so by tapping into the zeitgeist. The reaction of wrestling fans to Hangman Page overcoming trauma and alienation via solidarity shows that what hundreds of thousands of wrestling fans and millions of people worldwide crave is not just success, but connection and togetherness.
