Rush and L.A. Park: Hate Transfigured

An unquestionable classic.

LLE

The first time I saw Rush wrestle, it was live at a lucha libre show in Norcross, Georgia. He was part of a tag team main event facing L.A. Park, who I was there to see, and his son. They weren’t cutting an amazing pace or battling with the seething hatred for each other that you’d probably get in an arena, not in a discotheque in a strip mall. Still though, you could feel something between them, a palpable sense that, at any moment, one man could choose to haul off and really batter the other, like a wrestling match could turn into a fight with the right spark.

Here it is, a struck match and a massive powderkeg, two men who hate each other so much that Arena Mexico’s rules against blood and wrestling’s tendency to begin and end with a bell mean nothing. At the end of this match, beginning with the first encore and continuing into the second, you hear a siren going off – it’s only just now hitting me that the siren is telling Park and Rush to wrap things up. I don’t know what the consequences would have been had they done so – do show feeds get cut off at 12:01am? do fire marshals force everybody to go home? – but here, for once in the godforsaken history of professional wrestling, is a match where it really does feel like both men could have fought forever. Not wrestled, fought.

I’ve poked around the Rush/L.A. Park canon here and there since that night in Norcross, but for the life of me I can’t remember seeing this one. When I tweeted a clip of the very famous shot of Rush hurling a footlocker at Park, and stalking him through the crowd to do so, Joseph tweeted, “Love to see my friends have a religious experience in real time.” Honestly? Yeah, it was pretty close to one.

Usually when one describes a wrestling match with meat-related metaphor, the word “lean” is invoked – a match that has no fat to trim, pure, effective professional wrestling. L.A. Park vs. Rush is not that. A few weeks ago I went to a Uzbekistani restaurant with some friends, and one of the skewers that hit the table was lamb fat. There was nothing fancy about it, but it felt and tasted decadent, and there was a whole skewer of it. That was my experience of this match. Every element on its own would make a match a classic, but Park and Rush never stop. They just keep delivering moment after moment until it is literally time to go home. It’s a delicacy, a feast, blood and sweat and beer and money. All fat. All good. 

I mean, do you know how much you have to hate somebody to hurl a footlocker at their face? Wrestling is too-frequently compared to cinema these days, but never for moments like this, where the camera quick pans and zooms in on Rush as he emerges from a tunnel with a footlocker in hand. With Park in the frame the whole time, you see Rush carry this thing down the stairs and through the crowd until he’s close enough to maim. Some of the nuance as to why Park gets disqualified for excessive violence as compared to Rush launching that footlocker and ripping up Park’s mask is lost to me, but Park’s two weapons shots, one with a chair and the other his own footlocker volley, are gross. In that situation, I’d probably DQ somebody, too.

Had they taken it home after that, this would still be one of my favorite BIG EGG matches to date. But it’s not. The referee declaring Rush the winner merely gives the two space, which is immediately filled with the passion of the incredible Arena Mexico crowd. I’ve been in some good crowds before. I’ve cried, lost my mind, and screamed myself hoarse  at shows. I’ve watched countless hours of professional wrestling. In all of that time and footage, I’ve rarely seen or heard a crowd like this. L.A. Park and Rush are not heralded to the ring by cheers and boos. The crowd isn’t popping, not even in the “boom-boom-boom” on signature strikes way that always causes tears to well up in my eyes. What this crowd does isn’t so much cheering as it is embracing. Ecstasy is the goal of professional wrestling, and ecstasy is where this match starts, two guys going “fuck you, motherfucker” before throwing haymakers. This match gets to do that three times. It has two encores. ENCORES. Those encores, far from being an afterthought, make the argument that Park and Rush are insatiable in their lust for each other’s destruction. They are at quite a distance from each other, but the crowd is rapturous, and they manage to get louder when they’re asked to. 

Oddly, it is in these two sequences that the two break out the wrestling moves, but there’s no wrestling match to win; they just create enough space between L.A. Park and Rush to allow them to charge at each other again like stupid, proud bulls.

The second encore break is, I swear to you, as beautiful a summation of professional wrestling as any. They put down their fight to soak in the adulation of the crowd, lock eyes, and start swinging at each other, under the eye of an overhead camera.The shot is so alien. It’s just the ring and the floor around it, bits of garbage strewn about a sea of blue canvas and matting. They look alone. They look lost at sea. Bodies moving across the ring, arms swinging in a blur, they look like brushstrokes across an undefined space. It is theirs to take and shape and present to the audience for them to accept or reject. Consider being Rush or L.A. Park in this moment. To have started that kind of fire. I’m imagining God after dude said “let there be light” and there was light, and it was good. Only the angels aren’t there to lose their minds about the cool thing God just made until later. L.A. Park and Rush have the Arena Mexico crowd the whole time.