“Kayfabe” or Everything Real is Fake

Grandpa Izzy Brodsky loved “the fights,” otherwise known as professional wrestling.  That’s the only thing that I ever saw him watch on television, when back in the 1960s  we lived in a two family house with my grandparents, who were tasked with watching me and my sisters after school while our parents were at work.  After homework time, was TV time.

My grandfather would sit with us while my grandmother fixed dinner.  Sometimes, if she was making chopped liver, a Jewish staple, she would direct Grandpa to a folding chair set up in front of the TV.  Grandma would hand him an ancient wooden chopping bowl, nicked and carved with the scratches of a thousand meals and heaped full of cooked chicken livers and onions.  Grandpa would obediently chop the mixture with an equally ancient red-handled blade.  Chuckling gleefully while watching the professional wrestlers contort on the black-and-white screen, he would shout my Grandma’s name, “Rae, Rae,” whenever he saw a dangerous looking maneuver.  With each thundering slap on the wrestling mats, my grandpa would chop harder and faster.  As the fight escalated, so did the chopping. Grandma Rae couldn’t care less, she was oblivious.

To us kids, it looked disgusting; the chicken livers, greenish, slimy, the smelly onions and the wrestlers, with their bloody noses and buckets of spit, black bulging briefs, gross mouth guards and ominous sounding names.  We watched my grandfather watching, and were slightly terrified and totally entertained.  This was full-circle evisceration!

Short and stout with a heavy Yiddish accent, Grandpa Izzy seemed perpetually happy.  To me, he looked like a Jewish Louis Armstrong, bald shiny head, round face and the widest of smiles.  He radiated joy, so I was naturally confused as to why he would watch a seemingly violent activity on television and laugh hysterically. His only other entertainment was reading The Jewish Daily Forward, gambling a little on the ponies, and weekly Saturday synagogue always followed by a shot of Slivovitz with the other old men. Watching professional wrestling was a highlight.

As the eldest child, I recognized some turbulent days in our family and the world, conflict at home and constant talk on th6 o’clock news of the Cold War.  Duck and cover, life was more than a little scary. But, each day when Izzy would pick us up from school in his Dodge Dart, stopping to honk at every intersection in our Brooklyn neighborhood to warn the other drivers that he was carrying precious cargo, we felt safe and loved, even if it took forever to get home.

The television wrestlers were a spectacle.  They were pretending that professional wrestling was a true sport.  We kids didn’t know.  But Izzy knew, and he loved it anyway. There’s even a word for it in wrestling.    KAYFABE, That’s – “K A Y F A B E.”  The suspension of disbelief. Pretending something is real when it’s not. Izzy, once a 17-year-old immigrant from a little village in Ukraine had fought a war, lost family members, built a business, lost a business, found a wife, lost a child. Why remember the sad things in life when you could decide to remember to forget.  That’s Kayfabe!

Maybe we were ahead of the times. When we watched Gorilla Monsoon wrestling on TV in the 1960s, who knew he would be the one to fight in the legendary match against Andre the Giant in 1977?  Or that superstar Billy Graham’s style would be an inspiration for the now infamous Hulk Hogan.   I don’t remember every feeling moved by a professional baseball or football game (except maybe those first Mets and Yankees games after 9/11).  But, the memory of my grandfather chopping chicken livers in an old wooden bowl while watching the antics of professional wrestlers on Channel 5, brings a little mist to my eyes.  Or maybe it’s the onions.

* Kayfabe – (noun) – the agreement between professional wrestlers and their fans to pretend that overtly staged wrestling events are genuine.