Mark of KANE
One moment you're sitting
in your arena seat, cold soda pop in your hand, excitement
dancing on your spine, waiting for that next match. The miasma of
beer and sweat is about, and your ears ring from the cheering and
jeering
Lights out! and the next moment you're plunged into darkness.
From the place where dread lives deep in the bottom of your mind,
organ music swells. It sounds like those pipes are being played
from the grave.
In an explosion of fire and ice, illumination flashes on the
entrance ramp. A figure thumps through the swelling fog and
ohmygod he's huge! Who is it? The Frankenstein monster? The
Mummy? The Golem? What mythic figure is slouching towards the
Squared Circle to be born?
It's Kane!
squawks announcer Jerry Lawler. The Big Red Machine.
And, Oh dear, the shivers up your back say.
It is indeed Kane. Storming up from the dark of wrestlings
unconscious to grapple with forces beyond good and evil.
He is now in the ring, all seven feet of him, looking even
taller, broad shoulders, narrow waist a giant in a red suit with
a mask to cover his scars and thick Gothic hair tumbling down.
His dark eyes seem to burn in the gloom and he reaches out his
hands to either side as though to tap into some preternatural
cosmic force.
Crack! Flash! The turnbuckles belch fire.
Kane turns to his opponent as though to say, How deep do you want
to be buried?
You'd better get your heart started again.
Never in the history of
the WWF (or, for that matter, any wrestling franchise) has any
character risen up into contention with the thrill and excitement
and yes, the mental disturbance of the creature known as Kane.
Stalking up as though from Hades itself, on October 5, 1997 he
literally tore the door off the cage of Hell in the Cell to
confront his brother, The Undertaker, thus complicating and
enriching the deepest and strangest story line in pro wrestling.
Kane, at 326 pounds, had issues with The Man from the Darkside.
Kane wanted revenge!
The masked creature - a man who seemed to have absolutely no
emotions no, not pity, nor remorse, nor a speck of love - was
there for one purpose. He battled The Undertaker and slammed him
into the mat with a move that was to become his signature: The
Tombstone Piledriver.
No heart-warming family reunion, this!
To understand Kane,
though, you have to know about The Undertaker.
The Undertaker formerly Mark Callaway, known at one time in the
NWA as Mean Mark Callous is another monster - one of the biggest
wrestlers in the business. In fact a triple tag-team of The
Undertaker, The Big Show, and Kane could probably take on the
rest of the WWF's rosters. The Undertaker is from The Other Side
or Beyond. The Undertaker does not sing and dance in the ring. He
glares at his opponent, intimidates, rips them apart. And then,
as though to show his true nature, his eyes turn up to show just
white, and a demonic tongue snakes out of his mouth.
The Undertaker is generally accompanied by his manager, the wide,
wide Paul Bearer a spooky spectacle clearly from the same gothic
environment as his client. Used to be that Paul Bearer, in their
unholy progression, would walk down holding an urn. Following
him, attendants wheeled a coffin towards the ring. Out would
come, taking his sweet time by the way, The Undertaker.
The Undertaker took the WWF championship twice.
But a darker and a far more popular chapter of his career came
with the arrival of Kane.
Paul Bearer, you see (now pay close attention, there will be a
quiz afterwards) had enlisted another client. Paul Bearer knew
the back story of these two giant wrestlers.
Kane, Paul Bearer announced, was none other than the brother of
The Undertaker.
The story goes like so:
In the beginning was a funeral-parlor operator and his wife. This
couple had two boys. The operator also had an assistant by the
name of Paul. Paul Bearer, to be exact.
These were strange boys, though, as you can imagine, growing up
with strangeness and death. They liked to play, and far too often
they played with fire and embaling chemicals. One day and
explosion wrecked the parlor. It and the enjoyning house burned
and burned some more. Killed in this fire were the boys parents.
The boys, of course, were The Undertaker and Kane.
The Undertaker escaped the flames, presuming that his younger
brother had died as well. But as Paul Bearer tells the tale, when
he came home from a school he had been at, he was in time to
rescue Kane - and in time to see the guilty Undertaker escaping,
a look of satisfaction on his face.
Paul Bearer secretly raised the scarred Kane and unleashed him on
the WWF and the world a little over two years ago.
Since that point, Kane had torn up the ranks of the WWF, always
seeking an ultimate goal: a match before the world, where he
would obtain his revenge upon his brother.
After first locking The Undertaker in a fiery casket and then
fighting the resurrected Mysterious One at Wrestlemania XIV,
things became more murky. Kane, as it turned out, was only a
half-brother. Other strange and mysterious things had been going
on at that fabled funeral parlor.
The result of all this: Occasionally Kane teamed with his big
brother. Occasionally they fought.
Whatever the case, all the proceedings with these guys were very
strange, very weird and something altogether different than the
wrestling world had seen before.
At first, Kane could not speak. Now he does speak, albeit
infrequently- with the use of a vocal box, which makes his voice
an odd, chilling, electronic thing indeed.
However, the man who is
Kane has not always been Kane.
And unlike The Big Red Machine who storms from Gehenna itself
into our imagination, that man who is Kane can speak quite
clearly.
Kane's real name is Glenn Jacobs.
There's a mystery about Glenn's birth. WWF sources claim his
birthplace was Knoxville, Tennessee; however, sources closer to
Glenn say it was actually Madrid, Spain. Seems that Glenn's
father was in the Air Force and he was stationed there. In any
case, Glenn moved around a lot with his family, but lived for a
good portion of his youth near St. Louis, Missouri.
Always tall for his age, he earned a basketball scholarship at
Northeast Missouri State. There he obtained a degree in English.
For a few years he worked at a home for the retarded.
One of the guys he worked with had set his sights on a pro
wrestling career. With Glenn's hugeness nearby, he couldn't help
but suggest that Glenn should try it as well.
He lost his first match in front of 150 people, but there was
something about the sport he really liked. He went on, learning
his trade. While he worked at the group home during the week, on
weekends he wrestled as Doomsday.
Fate took Doomsday to the small circuit wrestling biz, then
suggested gently that Glenn go down to a Florida school and learn
all the stuff he needed to know.
When Glenn Jacobs began his wrestling career in the late 1980's
he was known as Jim Powers.
Certainly you'd think that a guy his size would be an immediate
success, but wrestling, of course, isn't just about size and
ability, and clearly Glenn hadn't found those yet.
Glenn's low point?
Well, he wasn't making very much, even though he worked hard. But
the worst point, according to Terry Morrow of the News Sentinal,
was early on in his pro career.
The worst point, Glenn is quoted, was when this promoter flew me
to the Dominican Republic and he didn't show up. "It was my
first time in a foreign country, and I was nervous, I didn't even
get paid. We had to fend for ourselves. On that one, I almost
gave up altogether."
Good thing Glenn was proto-Kane at that time. Kane would have
come looking for him!
Next up for Glenn, though, was something entirely different- and
far, far better. He joined Smoky Mountain Wrestling. In Tennessee
he met his current wife, Maurisa. (Sorry, Kaneaholics- when the
Big Red Machine isn't wiping the mat with Viscera, he's taking
out the garbage from a house holding two stepdaughters and five
dogs in a town called Shady Grove). And guess what? The guy who
got them together was none other than D'Lo Brown.
Glenn wrestled for Smoky Mountain as The Unibomb. One of his
fellow wrestlers was Al Snow, another client of their agent, Jim
Cornette.
Pretty soon these great guys made the move to WWF.
At first, Glenn Jacobs was known as a Wrestling Dentist called
Isaac Yankem. However, dental stuff was not a big hit with fans.
Next up, the wrestling powers-that-were took a good hard look at
Glenn and asked, How would you like to be one of the scariest
wrestlers in history? Glenn reached deep down into himself and
found a startling counter-past!
KANE!
Of course, the name Kane resonates with the biblical tale of Cain
and Abel, the sons of Adam and Eve. It was Cain, after all, who
gave brotherhood a bad name by killing Abel.
However, the name Kane itself has other interesting branches,
including the name of a famous barbarian character created by
Karl Edward Wagner in the 70s. (Wagner, deceased now, was a huge
wrestling fan, and would have probably approved of Kane.)
In private life, Kane is reportedly hooked on the role-playing
game Might and Magic 6. His dream has just come true with the
introduction of Kane in a video game.
However, as Kane, he's supposed to be invincible.
The sad truth is that Kane has gotten injured quite a bit.
Once on a television cage match, the door slammed him on the head
and he was way out of it.
"It also opened a pretty deep cut, 'bout four inches on top
of my head. There was a lot of blood. I've had matches where I've
had cuts to my face, thanks to some headbutts. They've required
stitches."
Kane is fairly happy with all this, however. Its only been
recently that he's started feeling the pain.
First, he had a friendship with X-Pac, who betrayed him, but
stirred up feelings in him before pride took him to a place where
bad-boys D-Generation X could get him.
Then he fell in love with a woman named Tori. Their romance had
been threatened by the machinations of the evil Viscera - a guy
big enough and nasty enough to truly give Kane a challenge.
You get the feeling, though, that ultimately Kane will get back
together with The Undertaker and Paul Bearer.
The result?
Something really exciting, and something very, very bizarre.
Kane's a wrestling character whose action figure is popular among
the kids because, Kane says, they think of him as a superhero.
The very thought kind of gives me nightmares!
Up Gothic organ-music, please!
By: Winchell Dredge of Rampage - March 2000