RIP to a Great One
We recently lost two legends in wrestling: the great Terry Funk and Windham Rotunda, AKA Bray Wyatt. For all of the great personalities who have stepped into the ring, there is no wrestler who has ever walked this Earth with a better creative mind than Bray Wyatt. Not one.
I’ve been watching wrestling for almost 30 years now, and I’ve had my share of favorites: The Rock, Stone Cold, CM Punk and others. But none of them reached me the way Bray did. I remember the first time I saw him, WWE was running their standard introductory vignettes before a character debuts, but the content was nothing close to standard. This character inhabited the swamps in a decrepit house, sitting in a rocking chair and speaking in riddles. It was unlike anything we’d ever seen.
This isn’t a career retrospective… This is a thank you from one creative to another.
Character is Key
The speaking is the important part, because Bray had a voice unlike anyone else: a gravely, southern accent with preacher-like affectations and a conviction that made you stop. He spoke not like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders, but that he WAS the weight of the world. In professional wrestling, the ability to speak is more than half the battle.
You have to sell your character, the match, the stakes. How you come across with your words is just as important as what you do in the ring. Bray would come out with his Wyatt Family (Brodie Lee, AKA Luke Harper, who passed away in 2020, and Erick Rowan) and grab the microphone. For the next 3-5 minutes, he would captivate the audience by speaking in riddles, somehow always making sense and when it came back around, you knew why the match mattered.
More Than Wrestling
This isn’t a career retrospective, as it would take far too long to perfectly touch on everything that needs to be brought up. Rather, this is a thank you from one creative to another.
As a writer and storyteller, I’ve always gravitated towards those who show a significant aptitude in those areas: Kobe Bryant, Michael Jackson, and Weird Al Yankovic to name a few. Bray Wyatt falls in that category in every conceivable way. I found inspiration in his creativity, his willingness to push his character in different directions, to stretch what it meant to tell a story. Everything was carefully cultivated to be, as Kobe himself put it, “a different animal and the same beast”. From the early Bray Wyatt character to his work as The Fiend, right to the end where he showed us a beautiful combination of the man Windham and the character Bray, he was constantly working to give us something new to latch on to.
Michael Jackson famously said, “Study the greats, and become greater.” I would watch Bray work and incorporate what he did into my own writing, always looking for that one angle I could take that would add a new layer to what I was doing. I loved his in-ring work as a wrestler, but his creativity is what made me a fan for life.
To me the height of his creativity was his work on The Firefly Funhouse, a Pee-Wee Herman/Mr. Rogers event with a horror movie twist that led to the debut of The Fiend character. I loved every second of this because to me it was everything great about pro wrestling: wacky, innovative, funny, gripping. I strongly encourage anyone to check out his work in general, but especially with that particular story and how it led to one of the most incredible Wrestlemania matches ever with John Cena.
I hope people will continue to discover Bray’s work and see him for the legend and creative genius that he was. He meant something to wrestling, to creatives, and to those of us who just might be a little out there. As he once said in one of his infamous promos, “What would the world be without its heroes?” Now that he’s gone, we’re gonna find out.
