The Undertaker’s grand ending at Wrestlemania has left me feeling bereaved

Bowing out: The Undertaker's defeat to Roman Reigns
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Dan Jones4 April 2017

The old man takes off his black coat, looks around at the crowd and prepares to leave the stadium for the last time. He has been here, and in arenas like here, for more than 20 years.

There have been times of glory, times of defeat. He has ridden all of them out. But now, after a loss too far, this man, too, must go.

He looks at the faces of the people who have cheered him all these years, growing old with him. They will return, but he will not. One last look. He takes it in, raises a hand and slowly walks away, into the belly of the stadium, into history. It is, at last, goodbye.

I was going to use all that as a requiem for Arsene Wenger, when the time came, but events have intervened, as this week a different creaking old legend of the athletic world left the stage.

His name is Mark Calaway. He is the better part of 7ft tall and, on his debut in televised competition, he was introduced by a commentator bellowing: “Look at the size of that ham hock! Check out them drumsticks, baby!” Today he is better known as The Undertaker, and even if you don’t care about professional wrestling, Calaway’s retirement from the game at the age of 52 still marks the culmination of an extraordinary sporting career.

Sporting? Really? Well, now is probably not the time to get into exactly how we categorise pro wrestling. But let me just say this. Choreographed? Yes, but so is ballroom dancing. Fake? Well, there are certain cricket matches I wouldn’t trust any more than the outcome of a Royal Rumble.

The Undertaker certainly spent much of his long time in wrestling pretending to hit people, pretending to wrench people’s arms out of their sockets, actually leaping off ladders and really performing feats of gymnastic contortion that would not shame Max Whitlock or Simone Biles. In doing so he brought a great many people a great deal of pleasure.

The Tombstone Piledriver, his signature finishing move, was an act borrowed from both the circus and the fetish club: Calaway would hoist his ringmate upside down, nose to perineum, clench his head between his knees and, after ensuring the crowd was suitably hyped, drop suddenly to a prayer position, releasing the unfortunate recipient on his back and rendering him prone for the count-out.

This wonderful pantomime would be followed (and often preceded) by a period of tongue waggling and eye rolling, a la Alice Cooper or Gene Simmons. It was all supremely daft and dazzlingly popular. Which matters. For all its absurdities, wrestling is a brazenly commercial product, from which losers and dullards are ejected without sentiment. Sports entertainment means what it says, and whether you consider its participants actors first or athletes, all of them are there at the pleasure of the crowd.

There is a purity in that and something to admire in a man who survived a quarter-century of shifting public tastes to leave the business still on top.

What comes next I am not sure I care. My relationship with wrestling is like my relationship with smoking: I enjoyed it enthusiastically and too much as a teenager and now only go back when very drunk or yearning for a taste of lost youth.

Scoff as much as you like, but when The Undertaker left his coat folded in the ring at Wrestlemania 33, his hat and gloves on top of it, and walked off into the night, I felt a pang of loss. The sense of an ending, as they say. But perhaps I just need to get more vitamin D.

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