Who’s to Blame for the Collision in Korea?
The superb documentary series Dark Side of the Ring recently covered the Collision in Korea — an historic collaboration between New Japan Pro Wrestling (NJPW) and World Championship Wrestling (WCW) that brought Japanese and American professional wrestling to the Stalinist dictatorship of North Korea in 1995 as part of political manoeuvrings by promoters.
In the years that followed, WCW would continue to make history as a legitimate threat to Vince McMahon’s WWF (now WWE), until McMahon eventually turned the tables and swallowed up WCW, going on to essentially monopolise the pro wrestling industry.
In 2019, as All Elite Wrestling was about to launch with its Pay-Per-View event Double of Nothing, I wrote a blog post about the importance of this potentially viable and much-needed alternative to WWE where I only briefly and superficially touched upon the significance of the Collision in Korea as a pro wrestling spectacle, pointing out parallels with WWE’s recent events in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The recent Dark Side of the Ring episode on the North Korea event, however, effectively shed some light on the true nature of the project.
If you’ve seen the episode, you’ll know about NJPW’s Antonio Inoki and his quest for success in the arena of electoral politics and global relations and how that led to him creating Collision in Korea, the performer and promoter having been trained by Japanese wrestling icon Rikidōzan, who was actually North Korean and was assassinated by the Yakuza. WCW’s Ric Flair played a crucial part in portraying the villainous American heel and provoking a response from well over a hundred thousand North Koreans in attendance at the demand of their government, finally daring to show emotion as Antonio Inoki, and his loose but useful North Korean connection, vanquished the flamboyant Flair. The documentary episode, of course, also told the stories of the pro wrestlers who made the trip having their passports taken away, as well as their telephone conversations listened to, and being escorted around by hostile armed soldiers, with the ordeal of the four-day trip contributing to raised tensions amongst the talent, too. As part of its deal with Antonio Inoki, the North Korean regime subjected the performers — particularly the North American wrestlers, it seems — to immense stress.
The issues raised by Dark Side of the Ring, though, also raise questions, and deserve further examination. Why were the pro wrestlers being used as pawns in a political game in the first place, and why were they subjected to such conditions?
At the time of Collision in Korea, WCW was, as mentioned, on the verge of challenging the WWF as the premier pro wrestling promotion in the United States, led by Eric Bischoff who had taken advantage of Hulk Hogan’s fall from grace in the WWF by signing him to a contract that proved to be just the beginning of a series of signings that took former WWF stars to WCW. According to Bischoff, Hogan (who, incredibly, had creative control in his contract) flat out refused to make the trip to North Korea as Bischoff planned for the show in collaboration with Inoki. Other stars, such as the Steiner Brothers, 2 Cold Scorpio, and the late Chris Benoit, likely had much less leverage or say in the matter. Bischoff had agreed with Inoki to provide Flair and other WCW stars for the purposes of the event, and that he did. Even if his performers had any idea of what they were getting themselves into, it’s unlikely that they had the power to reject the opportunity, as Hogan had. (Incidentally, actor, politician, and former pro wrestler Jesse Ventura has long cited Hogan as a key saboteur of pro wrestler unionisation in the 1980s).
With rights come responsibilities. So while Eric Bischoff ended this particular episode of Dark Side of the Ring bragging about his achievements of the event that — as the documentary demonstrated — caused such immense distress to his workers, perhaps instead it’s time to look at why the pro wrestlers were subjected to such conditions.
Much has been said of WWE’s recent relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where WWE events are bought and paid for by the brutal regime to provide propaganda for the country. Many of us were shocked by the incident where wrestlers were stuck for hours on a plane in Riyadh as some speculated the incident was a “hostage” situation due to Vince McMahon’s financial disagreements with the Saudis — an incredible series of events that will surely provide the basis for a future episode of Dark Side of the Ring. But to look at the recent episode on the Collision in Korea, greater parallels can be drawn between the two incidents.
It can be fair to say that Antonio Inoki and his NJPW colleagues appeared to be better prepared for the trip to neighbouring North Korea. He certainly went into the situation with a more informed mindset, having proposed the event in the first place while he was pursuing his political career and no doubt seeing this pro wrestling “summit” as an example of his diplomatic acumen. Meanwhile, Eric Bischoff — as he openly explains in Dark Side of the Ring — had his own agenda: strengthening WCW’s ties with NJPW so as to demonstrate his company’s international scope at a time when the WWF was still profiting from numerous successful overseas events. Far worse than leading his stars to pay homage to North Korea’s recently deceased “Supreme Leader” Kim Il-sung, Bischoff literally led them into harm’s way, where they feared for their lives as armed soldiers ordered them around and controlled their communications and their movements while in the country. Bischoff mentioned in Dark Side of the Ring that his personal attaché admonished him for going outside for a morning jog, but any unusual, inconvenient, or even unsafe situations for him were his choice — his wrestlers had much less say in the matter.
While some of those wrestlers may consider the Collision in Korea an unforgettable, if fairly frightening, experience, the entire debacle demonstrates how they are sometimes used as pawns by hierarchical powers in an often dangerous game of politics and pro wrestling, in this case a show in North Korea’s May Day Stadium, a tragically ironic name for a show where labour rights were nowhere to be seen. Eric Bischoff himself has, perhaps unsurprisingly, long expressed opposition to unionisation in the industry (and we can assume his old friend Hulk Hogan retains a similar position), but had the attempts at unionisation been successful, maybe those generators of pro wrestling profits — the wrestlers themselves — might have rejected the trip to North Korea. And if that had been the case, they may well have been rejecting the trips to Saudi Arabia today.
