The Women of the Year Series #1
For: Herald de Paris
By: Hubert O'Hearn
In a very real, visceral way it pains me to do this, however I know I need to make the case for this woman’s profession before profiling the woman herself. Why? Because I know from personal experience that if the title of this article read as it properly should, April Hunter: Wrestler, it’s highly likely you would have not read it. You have a clear conception that professional wrestling is low-rent, uncultured entertainment suitable only for trailer park boys and girls who serve in diners; the people for whom The Education System Has Failed. To which I reply: bollocks.
Like a newly-appointed diplomat in a Henry James novel, please allow me to present my credentials. In my past live theatre career I have had precisely 108 Opening Nights as an actor, Director, Writer and/or Producer. I have trained who knows how many dozen actors, some of whom have gone on to juicy and profitable careers. I have studied Stanislvasky and Sandy Meisner, directed works by Anton Chekhov and Noel Coward, and yes indeed I played Hamlet. And played him damn well. I know of what I speak. Here is my bottom line: Professional wrestlers are the greatest live actors of them all. It’s not even close.
I well recall my first year acting class at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. We were all sat cross-legged on the grey all-weather carpeting in the studio and the professor, Bud Burkom, asked everyone what role they would most like to play and what actor’s career they would most like to emulate. The women had a variety of parts, although their ideal actress became a recurring musical theme. Katharine Hepburn. Katharine Hepburn. Katharine Hepburn. Finally Bud said, in delicately, ‘If anyone else mentions that broad’s name I’m gonna scream!’
I can’t remember a professional wrestler ever referring to a woman as a ‘broad’. (Lauren Bacall did, and does, but she of course is not a professional wrestler.) All bracketed humour points aside, here are the points of evidence:
- Katharine Hepburn never had to perform in high school gyms or Legion halls
- Katharine Hepburn never had to take a chair shot
- Katharine Hepburn never had to perform with a broken nose
- Katharine Hepburn never had to tell an entire story with no scripted words,
just her body to work with to convey meaning
Katharine Hepburn never had bones broken by a fellow actor, never had to take painkillers, and had a union to protect her.
Take the worst case scenario of any or all of the above, and April Hunter has been there, done that, and she’s coming back for more Brother. She is Katharine Hepburn with muscles.
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| April in Paris |
I watched a series of April’s matches on YouTube in preparation for this profile; not watching them as a mark (the wrestling term for a hardcore fan who pretends to be an insider to this carnival-borne world), but as a theatre director. What is the message? What is the technique? How successful is the execution?
April Hunter approaches the ring in a calm, confident, sexual swagger. Hers is an energy of supreme confidence, yet not isolated but rather self-contained. She makes eye contact, she acknowledges fan support, she high-fives, hand slaps, hugs, points and smiles. She is on the side of those in the audience who are on her side. With the slow roll of her toned torso she lets the room in on her secret: ‘Oh, I’m gorgeous. You know it. I like that you know it. But you can’t have it. Unless I say you can have it.’ Nobody’s fool. Nobody’s tool.
I can’t say as I have lost friends over my fascination with professional wrestling; I do however know that I’ve lost admirers. What is perhaps my most treasured email was sent by a former student who became a friend. It began, ‘I’ve lost all respect for you’ and carried on from there. I loved its honesty. You can’t teach understanding until someone admits that he doesn’t understand.
Besides, Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer both loved bullfighting. You tell me how the public, ritual slaughter of cattle is a higher calling than the enjoyment of wrestling and I’m willing to listen. You won’t win the argument; I am simply willing to listen to it.
Back to April. I watch as she calls out, in what is called an ‘in-ring promo’ a rather skinny, frightfully bleached young woman named Talia Madison. Talia would later achieve fame as Velvet Sky in the TNA Impact promotion, known for wriggling her ass over the middle rope of the three-rope ring while the camera zooms in for a shot of tight-covered pudenda.
Why has there never been a band called Tight Covered Pudenda? Lost opportunity.
Thankfully, that was only a brief digression. Coming back to the ring, set in what looks like a high school gymn-atorium with a whiter audience than a Tea Party rally, April continues her promo. I am impressed.
Here’s the Dirty Truth about acting. I’m not the first to have noticed this. Michael Shurtleff in the best single volume on acting I’ve ever read (Audition) devotes a chapter to it; and every casting director knows it, although few are loathe to comment as it is nearly impossible to define the abstract. The Dirty Truth is that some have it, and It can be refined; others don’t. We’re talking about charisma.
Charisma is the Great Unteachable. Speaking for myself as an acting coach, I can teach timing, energy, listening, stage movement, even how to read a script for nuance and meaning … I can’t teach charisma. In all of the arts, that may be the one skill that one is either born with (and enjoys); or isn’t born with (which isn’t to say you can’t have a nice career anyway).
Leave us face it - there are people on stage or on screen that you enjoy watching more than others. That little innocuous ‘more’ speaks shelves of volumes. Shurtleff talks about it in his book: there are people that the eye naturally tracks; you want to know what this person is going to do next.
I continue watching April’s matches on YouTube. The more I watch, the more I realize that she has the quality of charisma. In some forty years of an on-and-off relationship between me and wrestling, I have never seen a better female wrestler.
Now, why I was catching up on these old matches - done for the most part for regional promotions that pop up, have a run of two or three years then morph into something else - is that she has never worked for Vince McMahon’s WWE. No Monday Night Raw, no Smackdown, no national exposure since she broke into the business with WCW during its death throes in 2000. These aspects of her career would be major topics when I interviewed April.
So the question must be in your mind: If I hadn’t actually seen April Hunter work, why was I profiling her? Why not Trish Stratus, likely the best-known woman wrestler in the world who is now a successful TV presenter on a variety on non-wrestling shows? Why not Sunny, or Sable, or George Clooney’s squeeze du jour Stacy Keibler?
The answer is that journalism operates a lot like horse race betting: you go with hot tips. I knew that I wanted to profile a wrestler as part of this Women of the Year series. If part of my purpose is to learn how women are striving and thriving in what still is, in James Brown’s words, A Man’s Man’s Man’s World, there aren’t many more male-dominated professions than the wrestling world. I asked three people whose opinions I trust; a wrestling manager, a writer, and a friend who is a devoted fan: Who would you like to see me interview? They all said April Hunter because she has a story to tell and she deserves the push. Good enough for me.
I do want to comment further on April’s in-ring work. The good part about the smaller promotions as compared to WWE is that the former actually let the women wrestle for a time longer than a beer commercial. That has been a long-standing gripe of mine and I used to write about it when I used to do a weekly column for a major wrestling website (pwtorch.com). My theory on management in general is to hire the best people you can, then get out of the way and let them do their jobs. In WWE (and to a slightly lesser extent in its chirpy, smaller competitor TNA Impact) women’s matches have an average length from bell to bell of about a minute. Strange. We’ll come back to that.
Anyway, April is a masterful worker. She goes from move to move with tremendous pace, uses her strength - she is built like an Olympic pentathlete - and remembers to sell for her opponent. (You likely have no idea what that means. Selling means that when your opponent hits you, remember to show that it hurts. If your opponent has mashed your leg in a chair early in the match, don’t be skipping along like nothing happened two minutes later. You would be amazed at how many professionals forget about this one. Hulk Hogan for one has made a career out of it.)
Work rate is hugely important, yet it isn’t everything. It is that charismatic quality that separates April Hunter from the pack. She communicates her story with imagination and the full shelf of the emotional toolbox. When working as a heel (villain) she mocks her opponent with humorous disdain. When working as a babyface (hero), especially when wrestling men, she creates a pastel of fear, pain and determination while never ever wandering off into the cartoon-land of pulling faces and swooning like Sarah Bernhardt.
To be completely honest with you, if I was still in the theatre business I’d cast her in a heartbeat. Given three weeks’ rehearsal she’d be phenomenal as Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.
Beyond wrestling, there were two other aspects of April’s career I needed to catch up on before our conversation. One is her work as a Fitness model and a titleholder in professional Form and Fitness competitions. To say the minimum, at five foot nine in height with long red hair framing brilliant hazel eyes and a strong yet supple figure that would make a valkyrie weep in envy, she has the necessary equipment. She has won the Ms. Fitness Philadelphia competition and medaled at the NPC Junior Nationals. An international spokesperson for various nutritional supplements, she has also featured regularly in fitness and bodybuilding magazines. In other words, the girl’s ripped.
The final part of April Hunter’s career and the one that I suspect will generate the most hits for the on-line version of this profile, is that she is also a nude model, with her own website www.aprilhunter.com . Yes, if you would like to see what this astoundingly beautiful woman, who lappears a good ten years younger than her actual thirty-seven years, looks like without her clothes on, you can do that for a small membership fee. And because you’re going to ask anyway I’ll tell you yes, of course I looked. I am utterly devoted to my fiancee, who sadly is disabled with a loss of short-term memory (that may come in handy here), however research is my life.
We must digress for a paragraph or three. I would ask April about the nude modeling in our interview; it is after all a substantial contributor to her income and she was in Playboy before she was in WCW. Nudity actually led to wrestling; a combination of which I’m quite sure D. H. Lawrence would have approved. If you don’t get the reference, do look up Sons and Lovers. It’s very good.
It would be disingenuous of me to ignore the nudity issue. You and I have known each other for at least five or ten minutes now, so we’ve established an honest relationship. (Well actually, you know a lot more about me while I know not a thing about you; but why let accuracy stand in our way?) The nude modeling was the one thing about April’s career that made me hesitate in choosing her for this profile. What would the neighbours think? (The house next door is currently vacant. Next.) What would the prospective in-laws think? (A larger issue, hopefully ignorable. Next.) What would my editor think?
Yes, that was the potential sticking point. While I’d been given the luxurious go-ahead to write about whatever I wanted it might not be the prudent move to test the rippability of the envelope quite so soon. Here we are though, some two thousand words in and I’m not turning back now.
If journalism is about anything it needs to be about asking questions that others might not ask. For all the sniggering about the internet being a money machine built on porn, who ever asks the models in a serious way how they feel about being part of that industry? Additionally, in watching April Hunter’s video updates I had also discovered that she knows a wealth of information about health, fitness and lifestyle issues that would inform this paper’s readers and improve their lives. It would be the height of hypocrisy and shabby ethics to ignore all that just because April gets her kit off for the cameras.
As the brilliant French General Ferdinand Foch said in the midst of World War One’s Battle of the Marne, ‘Hard pressed on my right; center is yielding; impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I shall attack!’ I was ready for the interview.
The Interview
I began our Skype interview by asking April how her Mom was doing. April had actually retired from wrestling after 2007, then returned to it in 2009 after her Mom was diagnosed with Stage Four lung cancer. That sadly reminded me of Christopher Hitchens’ laconic statement when he was diagnosed with Stage Four esophegeal cancer, ‘The bad part is that there is no Stage Five.’
April, who lives now in Clearwater Florida with her husband, the wrestler known as J. D. Maverick, travels regularly back to Pennsylvania where her mother is receiving treatment in a hospice. She said, ‘That’s why I came back to wrestling. I needed the money to help her out and to be able to get back as often as possible, at least once a month.’
Related to that, I’d noticed some comments April had made about the Japanese health cares system in relation to the American. As a Canadian I was curious as to the Japanese variant to the single-payer system. ‘Well, just one comparison, an MRI in Japan costs $160. Here in the US it’s over $1500. They have a combination of public and private health care that I like. You do pay something, like $25 for an exam, which I think is good because that stops people from just coming in for nothing and filling up the system.’
With that as an ice-breaker - I wanted her to know that this wasn’t just another wrestling interview - I of course then asked the standard question of all wrestling interviews. how did she get into the business? She had been in Playboy before WCW, so how did that transition work?
‘It was really easy. They came to me. People had said to me before that I should go into wrestling, because I’m five nine and I’m athletic. Plus I was getting old for modeling at that time.’ Interruption - she was 26. If 26 is old then I am an Egyptian Pharaoh. ‘ WCW approached me after the Playboy shoot and asked me to join so I did.’
April studied wrestling with a true legend, Wladek ‘Killer’ Kowalski. If you think that wrestling is all make-believe and no one ever gets hurt, I invite you to Google ‘Kowalski + Yukon Eric + ear’. If you don’t want to Google that, I think you can fill in the blanks yourself. So how did April come to learn wrestling with the trainer of Triple H and Chyna (Joanie Laurer)? He did not take on many students.
‘I’d been in WCW for nine months and I actually left WCW when they said they didn't really know what was going on for us girls and then had the interview with WWE and their writers...which is how I was referred into Killer Kowalski's school. Kowalski was really hard to track down, so WWE tracked him down for me. He was in Boston so I packed up and moved to Boston the first week of September, just when all the students were arriving. It was crazy. Let me tell you,don't move to any university town during that time!!’
It surprised me more than slightly that April had been with a major wrestling company (at its peak, WCW’s Monday Nitro drew ratings in the 6.0-7.0 category which if replicated would put it in the Top Ten in 2012) for nine months when on her own volition she decided to learn how to actually wrestle. You’d like to think that would be a prerequisite if only for safety’s sake. Did anyone mentor her in WCW, say, ‘Hey kid let me help you with this’?
‘No, not really. Not at all actually. The girls really don’t help one another. They’re all just concerned about themselves.’ And yes, I found that to be sad.
So why had she never been signed by WWE? I think I’ve made it clear in this article that April Hunter is the best female wrestler I have ever seen. My only speculation was that Vince McMahon seems to sign women who do not look like athletes (q.v. Kelly Kelly, Maryse, Maria Kanelis, it’s a long and dubious list). Was that it?
‘No one’s ever really told me, but what I’ve heard is that because I’m tall they didn’t want me standing next to some of the male wrestlers because I’d make them look short.’
What about TNA Impact? April has done a couple of appearances for them and the rumour is that they offered, and she turned down, a contract offer. Is that true?
‘Yeah, it is. Here’s why I turned it down. One, they only offered $300 a show -’
Wait. What!?! A lousy three hundred bucks? Was that the same for TV tapings?
‘That was for TV. But what really stopped me was there was no health care coverage. In order to hire me, I had to sign a waiver that would not have them responsible for any injury I might get on the job. AND the pay was lousy, with no healthcare or benefits. So even though lots of people, friends even said, “Hey are you sure?”, there was just no way.’
Now that was really appalling to me, particularly as TNA is that rarest of wrestling promotions, one owned by a woman - Dixie Carter of Panda Oil. No, not Dixie Carter of Designing Women. Three hundred dollars is a lousy reward for the risk wrestlers take every time they enter the ring, where quite literally their health and life is in the hands of their competitor.
Speaking of which, there was an experience I was curious about. Wrestlers do not have long life spans. WWE needs to rush people into its Hall of Fame before they are age 60, because not too many wrestlers live to see 60. As Bret Hart said in his brilliant autobiography Hitman (one of the 10 best autobiographies I have ever read by anyone in any profession), ‘Is wrestling real? The outcome is pre-determined but the pain is real.’ So how is it being married to a wrestler and watching J. D. in the ring, knowing all the things that can go horribly wrong?
‘You watch it differently. You’re watching it for their forms, are they right? You know the spots so you’re watching for that. Like, “Hey the manager’s supposed to be there! Why’s he late?” Then at home we’re always checking our forms and criticizing one another. “What’s this look like?” “No that’s wrong.” It gets pretty interesting. (laughs)’
My other point of curiosity related to the death of WCW. I have read many, many accounts of how that company fell apart - 1996, top of the ratings; 2001, dead. I have never read a woman’s perspective on the implosion. So how much of a mess was it?
‘We used to use a phrase in the industry. It was indie-rrific. Honestly, you’d arrive at one o’clock for a TV show, to get into your gear and make-up and you’d sit around and at six o’clock there still wouldn’t be a match order taped to the wall. The show would be on at eight o’clock and stuff would still be being torn off the wall and changed. You never knew what you were doing.
‘Then there was the travel. You’d get this FedEx envelope and it would tell you to get to the airport to go to wherever and you’d go. Then there would be no ticket there, but eventually there would be a ticket for like eleven hundred dollars, in coach, which was a lot of money in 2000, while for another fifty bucks you could have traveled first class. Then you'd get in after midnight and have to drive another 2-3 hours to get to the hotel near the venue...because WCW didn't play many big cities. We did outer areas. ’ Clearly, a smooth-running operation.
On to the ‘nudity issue’. Feminists would undoubtedly decry April for objectifying women, so how does she react?
‘" I don't hurt others with what I do, and it allows me freedom with my time. These things matter to me. Sure I end up working all day and night half the time and hurting MYSELF, since people can't tell the difference between being a centerfold and being a porn star, but hey...I don’t apologize to anyone for doing what I have to do to take care of my Mom, put a roof over my head and food on the table. I don’t care. I’m doing what I need to do. My Mom never cared about the nude modeling. She can’t watch me wrestle though. I had to wrestle a lot of men in my career and my Mom came to one show where I was in a battle royal with a bunch of men and one of them was giving me chops in the corner and she just couldn’t watch.’
What about fitness? April Hunter’s career and income depends on keeping herself in fine tune. What are her tips for others?
‘OK, the first one is a no brainer: Avoid soda. Duh. There's zero nutritional value in it and nothing but harmful chemicals to be gained.
2. Get more sleep. You probably need it.
3. Use smaller plates and eat less. As we get older, we need less food.
4. At restaurants, take home 40%.
5. What you eat matters far more than going to a gym. Diet is 80% of what you look like. Eat clean 6 days a week, then have a nice cheat meal.
6. If you're over 30, cut back/cut out your starchy carbs. You probably don't need them & they cause excess weight gain.
7. If you're drinking, stick to vodkas and wine.
8. Realize that on some days you just can't do it all. That you need time for yourself...and don't feel guilty about it. You need to recharge yourself to be at your best for those around you. "Should the airplane cabin pressure drop, put your own mask on first, before helping those around you." ‘
Last but in no way least to me, give my ‘regular’ career as a book reviewer, I knew that wrestlers are massive readers. They are constantly en route here and there and crossword puzzles get boring. So what books would April recommend to readers?
‘ I read so much and love so many books. OK, I've found a few to be really helpful:
1. The Art of Non Conformity by Chris Guillebeau. If you've ever been told to "Get a real job!", you may want to read this book.
2. Bonjour, Happiness! by Jamie Cat Callan. How to age gracefully and the tips and tricks that French women do to achieve this, compared to American women who tend to just give up and fall apart.
3. Eat Right 4 Your Blood Type by Dr Peter D'Adamo. Most of us are eating wrong for our types, which is part of the reason there's so much chronic disease. For example, type A's are very evolved and cant handle meat. They tend to have softer teeth (more dental problems) and don't produce enough stomach acid to break down meat. They are meant to be vegetarians. If you're type A and don't know this, you may be inadvertently causing yourself stomach issues. Type O's are hunter/gatherers. They do well with protein, fats and produce. They are not meant to eat starchy carbs or dairy, both cause weight gain and they're predisposed to diabetes. It sounds a little insane, but after seeing my family battle so many chronic illnesses, I gave it a shot and found that I dropped weight without trying and had more energy.’
In summary? I can’t think of an interview subject I’ve enjoyed more.
Be seeing you.
( If you enjoyed this article and would like to learn more about the remarkable April Hunter, please visit her home page: www.aprilhunter.com )
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