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It's easy to take the Undertaker for granted. The guy controls lightning and dresses like an extra in a John Wayne movie in a day and age when it's not exactly in vogue to be a gimmick wrestler. Also, he's been wrestling in WWE more-or-less consistently since 1990, making him arguably more of a fixture in the company character-wise than even Vince McMahon. But even if he's only wrestling a single big match per year, Undertaker is still an incredibly important piece of WWE's DNA, owing largely to his status as wrestling's greatest throwback.
The most obvious way in which Undertaker harks back to an earlier ear is, of course, his gimmick. Used to be that pretty much everyone had a gimmick - even many main eventers - but for better or worse, those days are largely over. Sure, there are WWE wrestlers with full-on gimmicks, but they typically fall in one of two categories: Either guys who use the gimmick to get over initially, but gravitate away from them as they move up the card (John Cena rapping less, Cody Rhodes losing the mask), or comedy acts (Santino Marella, "Funkasaurus" Brodus Clay). Outside of Undertaker, the only other gimmicky main eventer currently in WWE is Kane, who comes with a big asterisk for his persona's substantial, insoluble link to that of Undertaker.
While other WWE wrestlers hit the ring in trunks, boots and whatever t-shirt they're currently hawking, Undertaker comes out in a lengthy black coat and hat. Other grapplers might get welcomed to the arena by pyro, but Taker walks out slowly amidst rolling fog and plumes of smoke. He appears magically with the sound of a gong, he raises the lights with a simple hand motion and he dispatches foes with a move that clearly never connects but remains threatening in large part because of the way it's sold, with him crossing an opponent's arms and sticking out his tongue, like the world's oldest, creepiest Texas biker vampire.
Undertaker and Shawn Michaels post-Tombstone Piledriver.
But the best part about Undertaker's gimmick? That it's been largely consistent since 1990. Sure, Taker kept rollin', rollin', rollin' through his American Bad Ass full-on biker schtick in the early 2000s, but that was more a rap-rock detour that anything else, with the wrestler returning to his Deadman gimmick by 2004. If someone showed up in WWE tomorrow with a gimmick as heavy and all-encompassing as Undertaker's, there would be pretty much zero chance that he'd be taken seriously by fans or WWE. But because Undertaker's now-kind-of-ridiculous character stretches back over two decades, it's lent an unshakeable legitimacy, even in a more reality-based age, where most wrestlers tend to look like relatively normal - albeit hella muscley - dudes.
Outside of the Undertaker, what wrestling gimmick has held on longer into the present-day? Taker and Shawn Michaels were both on the first-ever episode of Monday Night Raw, and HBK wrestled up into 2010, but he did so largely gimmickless. You could possibly argue that Michaels had a "god-fearing hunter" gimmick, but not only did that appear to be basically what that guy is in real life, it's also a far cry from his days as a Rocker, a Boy Toy, or even first-run D-Generation X. Both Ric Flair and Hulk Hogan have hung on with their signature gimmicks longer than Undertaker, but amped up, hyperbolic, bleached blonde versions of yourself aren't quite on the same gimmick-level as pretending you're an old west mortician with magic powers.
Undertaker's gimmick also links him to another somewhat outdated notion: Professional wrestling as spectacle. It's never not going to be impressive watching humongously muscular guys tossing one another around, but for a number of reasons, WWE has toned down it's spectacularness in the past decade or so. The shows are in high-definition and loaded with pyro and second-to-none lighting and sound rigs, but they are nowhere near as fantastic as they once were. As much as I love CM Punk and Daniel Bryan (your WWE and World Heavyweight Champions as of this writing), they look and act like normal dudes. It makes them more relatable, sure, but they have nothing of the spectacle embodied by wrestlers like Undertaker.
World Heavyweight Champion Daniel Bryan and WWE Champion CM Punk
Not to get all college-boy on you, but the best thing ever written about professional wrestling didn't show up in Wrestling Observer or your favorite dirt sheet - it was by French structralist writer Roland Barthes. Originally published in a book of essays in 1957, but now available for free online, "The World of Wrestling" is an incredible write-up of what's truly great about professional wrestling. The piece informs much of my thinking about professional wrestling and should be required reading for anyone who writes or even thinks seriously about the genre.
Right up front, Barthes lays it all out: "The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess," going on to compare the unique form of entertainment to the circus, Greek dramas and even bullfights. To paraphrase Barthes, what makes wrestling great is how over-the-top it is, embodying struggles of good and evil, righteous and unjust, with displays that are excessive in absolutely every conceivable fashion. The late 1950s wasn't the heyday for gimmicks that would come later in wrestling's history, but Barthes effectively honed in on one of the genre's greatest strengths: Spectacle. And in professional wrestling today, there's no one was spectacular as Undertaker.
Roland Barthes
One of the most lamented, fussed-about ongoing changes in professional wrestling has been the dissolution of the "territory system," and the lack of competition for WWE as a promotion. How this came about and whether it's ultimately been a good or a bad thing is a topic for a much larger, much different article, but the end result has been this: Aside from certain exceptions, the majority of wrestlers coming into WWE today began their wrestling career with the company or one of its development territories. In this way too, Undertaker differs from most wrestlers currently on WWE's roster.
There are guys like Chris Jericho who wrestled in more and varied places during his journey to WWE, and there are wrestlers like Punk and Bryan who fought their way through the indies to get where they are, but by and large, those are outliers in the current WWE landscape. Unlike wrestler's whose resume stretches back only so far as FCW or OVW, Undertaker began his career for the legendary World Class Championship Wrestling, where he benefited from multiple generations of wrestling talent, men who had to suss out ways to pop the same crowd, sometimes with the same match, night-after-night, week-after-week. He even had a chance to learn directly from Bruiser Brody, a man who did more than absolutely anyone to define the now omnipresent "big man" style. Eventually, he moved on to Memphis' United States Wrestling Association and WCW before finally settling in WWE.
The late, great Bruiser Brody
While he wasn't exactly walking the Earth like Caine in Kung Fu, Undertaker's early experiences in the industry did an immense amount to shape the type of wrestler he would later become. To most younger wrestlers, professional wrestling is defined by WWE, and maybe WCW and ECW to a lesser extent, which means that the genre is approached and treated as largely an entertainment industry. Sure, there are remnants of the old, traveling carnival tough guy traditions like using specific wrestling terminology, calling people "brother," and shaking hands lightly, but increasingly those things are done with a winking irony if they're done at all. Young guys working for WWE know that they're television stars above everything else, and they've started acting like it.
Things are different with the Undertaker though, because while you might see The Miz or Alberto Del Rio or even Kane on talk shows or local news reports, that shit just doesn't fly with the Demon of Death Valley. While he doesn't exactly stay "in-gimmick" like the Sheik throwing fireballs on the mean streets of central Michigan, Undertaker is still reasonably consistent when showing up to UFC matches and you only really see him fully breaking character in wacky candid shots of him with Michelle McCool.
The Undertaker with wife Michelle McCool
Taker's early background links him not only to a tendency to stay in-gimmick, but also more general ways of "protecting the business." We're moving steadily into the arena of possibly-bullshit dirt sheet conjecture here, but try and stay with me, as even if the specifics of these stories aren't true, there's enough truth in them to make my point. First up are the numerous tales of Undertaker presiding over "Wrestler's Court" in the WWE locker room. It's been mentioned in countless shoot interviews, wrestler autobiographies and dirt sheet reports, and was basically a way that wrestlers self-policed themselves for breaches of protocol and etiquette, with the most respected veterans in the locker-room lording over the proceedings . Though numerous men have allegedly sat in judgment in "Wrestler's Court," the most notable and frequently mentioned is Undertaker.
As WWE became less a wrestling promotion and more a television and live event production company, "Wrestler's Court" was a way to preserve the old ways of doing things, when respect and hierarchy were of the utmost importance. There are numerous stories about wrestlers having the Deadman's judgment cast upon them, but one of the more recent, and more illuminating ones, involved CM Punk. The story was all over the dirt sheets in early 2010 and held that Punk got serious heat with the Undertaker during a European tour because of his failure to hold the World Heavyweight Title with the level of respect that Undertaker thought it was due. The specifics vary according to the account, but most seem to think it had something to do with how Punk dressed when he was out with the title, and the subsequent explanation he gave of John Cena being allowed to wear jean shorts.
If true, this was a serious breach of etiquette and protocol for Punk, as he not only defied the most respected veteran in WWE, but he also tried to explain his actions by comparing himself to the company's top face. Even as a guy who loves CM Punk, I'd have to agree that there's no comparing him and Cena in terms of draw, influence or ability in 2010, and for Punk to do so was nothing less than insolent. Rumor has it that it was this run-in that led to the rather quick and unceremonious end to what was shaping up to be an incredible feud between Punk and Taker.
Undertaker squares off with CM Punk in 2010
What's so instructive about the story between Punk and Taker is where things in WWE are now: Punk is the WWE Champion and one of the company's top faces, while Undertaker is returning as a nostalgia act for a follow-up match with another WWE veteran. Things have moved on from the days of tough men with wacky gimmicks holding court in the locker room, with Punk's rise to the top of the card a signifier of the new state of WWE. But while WWE might be very different from what it was in the 1990s or even early 2000s, one important piece remains to provide a link and reference point for what came before: The Undertaker.
Undertaker is one of the best of all time whether you're talking about in-ring performances, charisma, microphone skills or pretty much any other metric you could judge a wrestler by. Furthermore, he's almost without-a-doubt the finest "big man" wrestler to ever step into the ring, with an agility and ease of motion that seems to be in direct opposition to his hulking frame. But what makes Undertaker truly incredible in the year 2012 is his role as WWE's elder statesman and an ambassador from an earlier age of professional wrestling.
Despite having a gimmick that sounds completely absurd on paper, Undertaker never veers into self-parody, delivering crisp, awe-inspiring performances that will make you believe a 40-something Texas closet-redhead can control the elements. Even if he only wrestles a single match a year - and it too-often ends up being against Triple H - Undertaker's mere presence in WWE lends the proceedings the legitimacy, danger and spectacle of an earlier era that would otherwise be near impossible to attain.
