How Professional Wrestling Explains Mark Robinson (2024)

Kayfabe (noun) kay-fabe: The tacit agreement between professional wrestlers and their fans to pretend that overtly staged wrestling events, stories, characters, etc., are genuine.

When the wheels began to come off Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s gubernatorial campaign last month, it shocked many North Carolina political observers. Since his meteoric rise in GOP politics in 2018, Robinson had shrugged off myriad controversies that would have torpedoed most political careers.

But after an Assembly investigation into Robinson’s years as a regular in Greensboro porn shops and a bombshell CNN report on lewd and offensive comments on a porn site, the ad dollars dried up, endorsements disappeared, and staff quit en masse. Polls showed Robinson slipping more than 10 points behind his Democratic opponent, Attorney General Josh Stein.

As it all came apart for Robinson, veteran Democratic political consultant Pope “Mac” McCorkle had a thought.

“The narrative’s slipping,” he said. “The kayfabe is breaking down.”

McCorkle now teaches at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. But he grew up in Memphis in the 1960s and ‘70s, where professional wrestling was church. Stars like Jackie Fargo, Eddie Gilbert, and Jerry “The King” Lawler brought the gospel to capacity crowds and had higher TV ratings than the televangelists.

Among the faithful, “kayfabe” was a shibboleth spoken in whispers.

The term originates in professional wrestling’s early, carny days. It refers to the perpetual suspension of disbelief that allows Minnesota bodybuilders to become Russian supervillains and ex-basketball players undead monsters. It lets wrestlers change names and identities as easily as their ring attire and pop up from the canvas unharmed after multiple shots to the head with a metal chair.

Of course it’s all “a work”—staged, predetermined, a performance more than a genuine athletic contest. But whether in the ring or in the audience, kayfabe’s adherents know it has more power when everyone pretends it’s all real.

“Kayfabe is about the importance of the public performance,” McCorkle said in a recent interview with The Assembly. “It’s something the performers do, but it’s also something the audience is doing. You see it in wrestling and you see it in politics. You can definitely see it in Robinson. The performer creates the reality, but it only works as long as the audience goes along.”

It’s a fitting analogy. Pro wrestling has been a key part of Robinson’s life. He devotes an entire chapter to it in his 2022 autobiography, calling it “an extremely important, perhaps crucial, part of my formative years” and “a lifelong passion.”

Wrestling’s creation and defense of imaginary worlds and alter egos, its willingness to say or do anything that will capture an audience, and the belief that perception is reality—all of that shaped Robinson’s personality, worldview, and perspective on politics. Today it seems to guide his public response to mounting scandals that threaten to end his political career.

“When we were kids, the kayfabe was what mattered to us,” Robinson wrote in his book. “And it still does.”

The Most Real Unreal Thing

Robinson’s hometown of Greensboro was one of the most important cities to the old-school, Southern-dominated National Wrestling Alliance. For decades, the Greensboro Coliseum was the site of some of the biggest events in the regional wrestling territory known as “The Bloody Mid-Atlantic.” Fans shut down I-40, creating highway gridlock for miles as they flocked to see epics they still talk about.

Dusty Rhodes vs. Ric Flair in a steel cage.

The first Starrcade, a precursor to Wrestlemania.

The Great American Bash.

The Clash of Champions.

“This was the place,” said John Hitchcock, a Greensboro native and wrestling historian whose book, Front Row, Section D, chronicles the glory days from the 1960s to the ‘90s. “If you were in Greensboro you could see all the biggest names in wrestling for five or six bucks at the Coliseum.”

Jim Crockett Promotions, the regional company that came to dominate the NWA, was based in Charlotte. But the Greensboro Coliseum held more people than any venue in Charlotte or Raleigh. In those years, it was the biggest venue for wrestling between Atlanta and Washington, D.C. That made it the most important building in the territory.

Robinson, born in 1968, was deeply embedded in pro wrestling culture from an early age. He wrote he and his family would sit transfixed for hours before the family television watching matches, poring over wrestling magazines, and debating favorite wrestlers, gimmicks, and storylines. They were contemptuous of “real” sports like basketball, football, and especially baseball, because it would sometimes preempt wrestling on television.

Robinson and his older siblings would walk the three and a half miles from their home on Logan Street to the Coliseum to cheer the hero “babyface” wrestlers and boo the evil “heels.”

“The first time I went to wrestling live, I remember walking into that vast (to me) space and looking at that blue ring with NWA on the side,” Robinson wrote in his memoir. “And I was so excited. Nothing like it.”

“We didn’t just watch wrestling,” Robinson wrote. “We lived it. It became part of the way my family viewed the world, practically a secret language we shared.”

Robinson writes about wrestling more rapturously and in far greater detail than he does his conversion to Christianity or his conservative political awakening. It came into his life before religion or politics and was far simpler—thrilling in its violence and its myth-creation, comforting in its black-and-white simplicity. He never wavered in his devotion to it.

“To this day, it remains the most real ‘unreal’ thing I’ve ever experienced,” Robinson wrote. “And I’m in political office!”

Growing up in their two-bedroom rental house, Robinson and his four siblings needed an imaginary world to which they could escape. They all shared one bedroom. The sound of snapping rat traps was a constant, as was the crying of their mother on weekends and holidays when their father would get drunk and beat her.

“I remember thinking to myself as a child that it simply was not fair that a man as big and muscular as my dad should hit my much smaller mother,” Robinson wrote.

In pro wrestling, Robinson wrote, he saw not just a world more glamorous and exciting than his own but one more just. “When you think about it seriously, our code of beliefs can be observed in how we saw wrestling,” he wrote. “It always had an underlying morality, that sense of right and wrong. Justice, even.”

“The storylines were practically Biblical,” he wrote.

Robinson loved wrestlers like “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes and Bruno Sammartino—one the Texan “son of a plumber,” the other an Italian immigrant whose family escaped fascism for the land of opportunity. Both were larger-than-life populist heroes whose personas emphasized honor, fair play, and toughness.

“There was good and there was evil,” Robinson wrote. “Sometimes evil seemed to triumph over good, but good would always come back and whoop evil’s butt.”

Robinson’s real life was much more complicated.

His father, Dayson Johnelle Robinson, was already in his mid-60s when Robinson was born —or so he and his siblings believe. There are few documents nailing down the real details of his father’s life, even his date of birth. The family believes even those that exist, including a draft card and his death certificate, may be inaccurate because his father lied about his age to dodge military service in World War II.

What Robinson knew of his father’s life before he came to North Carolina is almost entirely family lore. Like a wrestler deep in kayfabe, Dayson seems to have changed his life story to suit the audience. His mother may have been a Blackfoot Indian and his father half Black, half Irish. He was in prison at one point and worked on a chain gang. His deafness in one ear may have come from a gun being fired near that side of his head, or it could have been from a sheriff hitting him there during an arrest. He may have fled his home state of Florida after killing two sheriff’s deputies.

“None of this is substantiated,” Robinson wrote. “I know very little.”

Robinson did know his father’s strength and anger firsthand. He writes of once seeing him use one arm to throw a push lawn mower across the yard in frustration.

Dayson’s drunken rages usually focused on Robinson’s mother. But his older brother Michael still has a scar from the time his father hit him in the head with a can as a toddler as punishment for crying too much. The one time his father tried to give Robinson a beating, he writes, his mother intervened to save him.

Though they feared their father, Robinson wrote, he could also be generous. He would bring the kids small gifts or build them bicycles out of spare parts. He once fashioned wings out of cardboard for Robinson and his older brother Tony, impressing them with his creativity and imagination. But he grew scared when his father insisted they get on the roof and jump off to see if they worked.

In his book, Robinson grapples with the various contradictory parts of his father’s character like a wrestling fan whose babyface hero makes a heel turn and then switches back again. After declaring Dayson a violent alcoholic, he then writes he doubts his father actually had an addiction. He describes his mother as completely innocent in the violence she experienced, but points out she reminded his father of his own failings and “may even have taunted him with them on occasion.”

In the end, Robinson concludes, his father was an intelligent Black man whose race was a barrier to greater success. His frustration and resentment over that boiled over throughout his life. “I often think that if he had been born when I was born, it might be my dad sitting in the North Carolina lieutenant governor’s position instead of me,” Robinson writes.

It’s a statement difficult to square with Robinson’s more recent political rhetoric. He has insisted that groups like the NAACP exaggerate the actual impact of both historical and modern-day racism, called the Civil Rights Movement a communist plot to subvert capitalism, and disparaged the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as an “ersatz pastor.”

Throughout his life, Robinson has struggled with his feelings for his father, who died when he was 12. He has frequently described his drunken violence as an obstacle he overcame and something against which he defined himself. He also named his first born child after him in tribute.

Robinson’s mother, Eva Mae, was 40 when he was born. She had already left a previous marriage where she had five other children. She was strong willed but childlike, he writes, dependent on his father. Robinson recalls just one instance in which she called the police on her husband, after he brutally beat her with the butt of a gun. Dayson was arrested and the children were taken into foster care for a time. But before long, Eva Mae took Dayson back and the family was reunited.

Their chaotic homelife brought Robinson and his siblings together. They created their own worlds from their imaginations, their love of television shows, and—most of all—wrestling.

‘Heels Are More Fun’

While the young Mark Robinson gravitated to heroic babyfaces, the Mid-Atlantic was heel territory. Robinson came to appreciate and identify with the more colorful, trash talking villains of the ‘70s and ‘80s.

“Ric Flair was maybe the most famous wrestler of my youth,” Robinson recalled in his book. “The best thing about Ric Flair was his mouth, and the way he could sell a hit.”

Flair, the cocky heel who bragged about cars, women, Rolex watches, and private airplanes, was on the rise. He won the prestigious NWA World Heavyweight Championship for the first time in 1981, when Robinson was 13.

Ian Williams is a UNC-Chapel Hill Department of Communication instructor who has covered wrestling for VICE and written extensively about its intersection with politics. Robinson’s evolution from a fan of the populist Dusty Rhodes to the elitist Ric Flair over this period isn’t an unusual one, he said.

“These guys represented different strands of American masculinity in the ‘80s,” he said. “Dusty Rhodes had his ‘Hard Times’ promo—this populist, lefty speech where he’s representing the factory workers and the common man, the people struggling to feed their families when jobs in manufacturing and textiles were disappearing.”

“And Flair, he’s the opposite,” Williams said. “He’s bragging about custom-made clothes and luxury cars, talking about all the beautiful women he’s with and calling local women in the audience ugly.”

Some cheered heels like Flair and booed his good-guy opponents semi-ironically. “Heels are more fun,” said Hitchcock, the historian. “They’re funnier, snarkier, they hurl insults at the babyfaces, who can come off kind of sappy. But that’s wrestling. That’s kayfabe. That’s not how you live your life.”

But for a certain type of young man in that period, Williams said, Flair was an aspirational figure.

Robinson, who suffered from low self-esteem and was frequently the target of bullies as a child, grew physically and became more confident as a teen. He began working out and dressing in the outsized, dramatic manner of his wrestling idols.

“I thought of myself as a snappy dresser back then,” Robinson wrote. “What I usually had on was a pair of jeans, brown cowboy boots with gold tips on the toes, a polo shirt or a button down shirt, and a blue blazer with brass buttons. And I had the sleeves rolled up on the blazer, of course.”

Robinson met new and different role models through the church the family attended, including active duty military and veterans. He admired their bearing and gravitas—and especially their uniforms. Robinson decided to join the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps at Grimsley High School. “When I wore that ROTC uniform—don’t bump into me because I was sharp,” he wrote. “Brass shined. Shoes gleamed.”

Throughout his autobiography, Robinson recounts people being impressed by his singing voice, his jokes and impressions, his physique. He seems always to have been looking for a stage, finding an audience anywhere he could. In later years, managers and customers at the Greensboro porn shops he frequented remembered Robinson as someone who would bring them free pizza and then launch into dirty comedy bits reminiscent of Andrew “Dice” Clay.

He began to dream of joining the Army, becoming an action hero like Sylvester Stallone in the blockbuster Rambo movies. Pro-wrestlers like Sgt. Slaughter played up the drama of the uniform and the macho bombast of the military persona. Those things appealed to Robinson. But as an Army Reservist, he found his argumentative nature and sense of superiority made him a bad fit for military life.

“In the Army, I couldn’t do what I wanted to do,” Robinson wrote.“I know that may sound like pride or hubris. After all, you might say that’s what the Army does; it gives you orders. But there was so much I would see in the Army–methods of doing things, ways of behaving–and I could imagine a better way, a more efficient way, to do these things, and I knew I would have to spend years being told I had to do this or that in a specific way when I knew there was a superior technique, a better method.”

Though Robinson enlisted in the active Army, he reneged on that commitment as the time approached to ship out. The Army let him serve out the rest of his reserve stint in the Individual Ready Reserves, without further training or pay.

The episode is reminiscent of Donald Trump, a political idol of Robinson’s who has also borrowed heavily from professional wrestling. Trump attended a military-themed boarding school and said that made him feel like he was in the U.S. military. But he received several deferments from the draft, avoiding service during the Vietnam War. Later, he would say he knew more about the conduct of war than generals.

Robinson’s personality getting in the way of his goals became a pattern.

He made several aborted attempts at college, where he would tell professors their lessons and teaching methods were stupid. His decades-long cycle of enrolling and dropping out only ended after he became lieutenant governor, when he finally earned his bachelor’s degree in history from UNC Greensboro in 2022. He would remain contemptuous of higher education, however, calling people with advanced degrees “eggheads,” blaming them for weakening both politics and the church. He believed his life experience made him smarter and more capable.

When he worked in manufacturing, Robinson would assert he knew better than the people who owned the companies. He pronounced their working methods inferior and insisted he knew how people should be running their businesses.

His embrace of heelish egotism also made his personal life difficult.

‘M-A-N!’

Robinson characterizes himself as a young lothario who spent a lot of time chasing women. But he was privately insecure, thinking no one worthy of a long-term relationship would actually want him.

This led to a combative, domineering attitude toward women reminiscent of heel wrestlers like Flair, “Macho Man” Randy Savage, and The Sheik, who worked with beautiful female “valets” they would performatively dominate and mistreat.

Valets may help heels out in small ways, like slipping them a concealed weapon or distracting a referee. But ultimately, they were kept in their place.

“I have found that women in general don’t like to be out-talked,” Robinson wrote. “Often women would get quite angry. They love to be able to talk a man into submission. And with me, it never happens. They can’t do it.”

Robinson was 21 when he met his future wife, Yolanda Hill, in 1989. She was different, he writes—attracted to his outsized personality and domineering nature.

“Unlike every other woman I’d dated, my wife and I got along,” Robinson wrote. “I remember my relationships with the women before Yolanda as one long argument.”

Hill grew up in Ramseur, the child of teen mother Cassaundra Brown and Alfonzo Hill, an infamous gambler, drug dealer and pimp whose street name was “Slim Goody.” Her grandparents never approved of Alfonzo and her parents never married. Hill was raised by her grandparents but maintained a romantic image of her flamboyant, roguish father.

They stayed in contact, even after he was arrested and convicted for manslaughter in the late ‘70s, serving more than 30 years in prison.“It may sound crazy, but my relationship with my dad was truly close,” Hill wrote in her own chapter in Robinson’s autobiography. “Our personalities were a lot alike, although certainly not our activities.”

Hill also upset her family by getting pregnant while young, unmarried, and living with Robinson. She had an abortion, a decision both she and her husband say they deeply regret. But she was soon pregnant again. Their families weren’t pleased.

“Yes, we knew we shouldn’t do that,” Robinson wrote. “So the marriage was more like, ‘We need to fix this.’”

Robinson’s public persona has leaned into the performative misogyny of his wrestling idols. In a 2022 speech full of macho bravado reminiscent of Flair’s best wrestling promos, Robinson told a Charlotte church God intends men, not women, to lead. “My God tells me that when I face adversity that, number one, I am to stand up like a man! M-A-N!” Robinson said. “We are called to be led by men.”

While that sort of rhetoric may not play well with women voters, it’s classic heel stuff, said Williams, the UNC-Chapel Hill instructor and wrestling expert.

“When Andy Kauffman famously did his version of a heel wrestler, he wrestled women to prove they were inferior,” Williams said. “His speeches were all about women being made for cooking and raising children.”

Again, the contrast between the kayfabe opinion Robinson espouses publicly and his private life is instructive.

Throughout their lives together, Robinson’s wife has taken on leadership roles in both their business and personal lives. Hill provided ambition, follow-through and stability. She was steadily employed in periods Robinson was laid off or working in low-paying food service jobs, earned multiple degrees before her husband completed his bachelor’s, and started her own businesses that would employ other family members, including her husband.

Off stage and away from the roaring political crowds, Robinson acknowledges her as a leader without whom he would be lost.

“Before you came along, I was drifting through life without a purpose or a goal,” Robinson wrote to her in the dedication of his book. “You always know what is right and help keep me straight along the way.”

Bigg Smoke

Robinson was 28 when a friend recommended a book, The Way Things Ought to Be, by conservative radio provocateur Rush Limbaugh. It was 1996. Bill Clinton was president and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was leading a combative Republican Revolution.

Limbaugh built his brand on pushing conservative rhetoric well beyond that of the mainstream Republican Party. Like a professional wrestler, his trash-talking monologues took socially conservative ideas and blew them up to play to the back row of the coliseum. Limbaugh said feminism’s goal was to bring unattractive women into mainstream society, told a Black caller to take the bone out of his nose and call back, denigrated LGBTQ people, and used insulting mock-foreign accents when talking about Asian people.

“I thought, ‘This is crazy. It’s like this guy is inside my head,’” Robinson wrote. “It really felt that way. ‘This jerk is stealing my ideas!’”

Robinson didn’t actually get involved in politics until the early 2000s. In the early days of the George W. Bush administration, Robinson writes, he attended some meetings of the Guilford County Republican Party. Again, he felt he knew better than leadership. He became disillusioned, he wrote, when the local party wouldn’t listen to him and become more combative.

Guilford party leaders from that period say they have no memory of him coming to meetings. Nor was Robinson involved with the Tea Party-inspired Conservatives For Guilford County group, which launched several political careers in the ‘00s and early ‘10s. The local GOP flipped both the Greensboro City Council and Guilford County Commissioners from Democratic to Republican majorities in that period.

Robinson turned to social media.

When Robinson joined Facebook in 2007, it wasn’t for politics. It was for his first love: wrestling. He would post photos and videos of old-school NWA matches and talk about his shared passion with friends. But after a few tense political exchanges online, Robinson found he enjoyed arguing with people there. The more colorful and outrageous he became, the more attention his wrestling-promo level rhetoric attracted, the more he enjoyed it.

“I wanted people to come at me,” Robinson wrote in his book. “I wanted to be as in their faces as possible. I wanted people to read my page and go ‘What did he say? Did he really say that?’”

On social media, Robinson finally found a forum that satisfied his desire to perform without having to work with others or within established systems. He began building a personal brand around outrageous statements, conspiracy theories, and insulting memes that he signed to be sure everyone knew where they were coming from.

“That definitely comes from wrestling,” said Williams, the UNC-Chapel Hill instructor. “In wrestling, the main thing is—can you get attention, can you get heat, can you draw money by putting butts in seats? Almost anything is acceptable or excusable if it gets that attention.”

The internet, and especially social media, has helped push politics more toward that ethos, Williams said. Like wrestlers trying to find the right gimmick or storyline, people can experiment with alter egos and personas. They can be confrontational without consequence, never coming face to face with the people they insult.

At around this time, Robinson created a separate Facebook account for an alter ego that had long been gestating: an imaginary pro-wrestler he called “Bigg Smoke.” The name came from the slang phrase “wanting smoke,” which means looking forward to a fight. The persona was pure heel.

As Bigg Smoke, Robinson posted photos of himself in costume, adorned in the flashy watches and jewelry he watched Ric Flair flaunt in his childhood. In one 2012 photo, he poses with a replica of the NWA Heavyweight Championship belt—the “Ten Pounds of Gold”—slung proudly over his shoulder.

He also made mock wrestling magazine covers with himself as the star and posted wrestling promos taunting imaginary enemies.

“I took this bum OUT,” Robinson wrote in 2014. “And I don’t mean on a date. I even took that BUMS shirt off his back and left him all beat and half naked on the floor. I AM the champion AND THERE AINT NO QUESTION ABOUT IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

In roughly the same period, according to the recent CNN report, Robinson was also posting on the forums of the porn website Nude Africa under the username “minisoldr.” There, as in Greensboro porn shops, he brought caustic politics and insulting humor to an incongruous venue. Along with stories about spying on girls in showers as a teenager and graphic sexual tales involving his sister-in-law, he expressed admiration for Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf and said he wished he could own slaves.

“It’s an extreme example, but part of wrestling is taking on new identities,” said Williams. “Not just to freshen a gimmick or wrestle in new territories, but to try new things and see what works for them. The wrestler Mick Foley became different people—Cactus Jack, Mankind, Dude Love. They were different aspects of his personality.”

By 2018, Robinson was forging a new identity—one he could take offline and into reality.

When the Greensboro City Council considered canceling a planned gun show at the coliseum in the wake of the mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, Robinson gave a fiery pro-gun speech before the council. He would go on to disparage the young survivors of the Parkland shooting, who advocated for stronger gun laws, as “spoiled little bastards” and “media prosti-tots.”

With help from then-Rep. Mark Walker, video of the speech went viral. The NRA invited Robinson to speak at their national convention. Other conservative groups, churches, and activist organizations reached out. People began to suggest he should run for office.

Robinson had never run for any office. He knew little about how government actually worked, at the local or state level. He had never been vetted or tested as a candidate. But in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as president, Republican candidates with outrageous personalities but few political credentials were winning all over the country.

“It was that perfect moment for an ‘outsider’ candidate,” said McCorkle. “It was like, having credentials was a negative. You didn’t need to run for local office, learn how things work, work your way up. That was almost counted against you.”

Anyone skeptical of his ambitions just didn’t understand his true credentials and superiority.

“I had been whetted and honed through the rough and tumble environment of social media,” Robinson wrote. “I had put in years of Facebook argumentation and meme making. I had been in the fire, getting ready. And let me tell you, there are no fires hotter than the fires of social media.”

Squash Matches

Robinson dismissed running for local office or even for a seat in the N.C. House or Senate. They weren’t big enough stages and came with too many responsibilities.

“I don’t think I have the right temperament,” Robinson wrote. “I particularly don’t think I’d be suited to be mayor of Greensboro, given the situation of the city council. It would be an ongoing, contentious relationship with a bunch of left-wing nutcases until some other people could run and replace them. There are other people better suited for that task.”

That passage is telling, McCorkle said.

“I think what he’s describing is actually governing with other people,” McCorkle said. “If you’re on a city council, board of education, county commissioners, the General Assembly, you actually have to do that.”

Robbie Perkins, a long-time city councilman and former mayor of Greensboro, said he didn’t have trouble serving in local government as a Republican. Neither did a lot of other prominent Republicans who served on the officially non-partisan city council or the partisan Guilford County Board of Commissioners, from Mike Barber and Trudy Wade to Jeff Phillips and Alan Branson.

“There’s no Republican or Democratic way to fix a pothole,” Perkins said. “Local government touches peoples’ lives and it’s important. You just have to be willing to work with people to get things done. I’ve done the thing and I can tell you, if you want to do the work you can do it.”

Instead, Robinson set his sights on the office of lieutenant governor, a position that files no bills, sets no policies, and has few concrete responsibilities. Even the few official duties he did have—presiding over the state senate, sitting on several boards—he regularly shirked in favor of traveling the state giving speeches before friendly audiences as he eyed the governor’s mansion.

Robinson was especially at home in conservative churches. He became a frequent headliner for The American Renewal Project, an explicitly Christian nationalist group working to put more conservative clergy in office. Working a circuit of churches across the state for the group, Robinson was able to give speeches officially closed to the media. There he would stalk the stage like his wrestling heroes, thundering about his enemies and even dropping in a few borrowed lines from famous promos.

“I don’t care if you like it or you don’t like it,” he said at one such event in 2022, an echo of a famous Flair line. “Learn to love it.”

Fellow Republicans bristled at his absenteeism and joked about his inability to grasp basic procedural rules in the senate. But Robinson wasn’t concerned. Between committee meetings or after a long day in Raleigh he didn’t brush up on legislation or work to understand the intricacies of state government. Instead, he wrote, he would pull up old wrestling videos featuring The Road Warriors.

A tag team of bodybuilders dressed in spiked, post-apocalyptic gear inspired by the Mad Max films, The Road Warriors are still Robinson’s favorite wrestlers of all time. They were not known as the greatest technical wrestlers in the business, nor the greatest talkers. But they created a great spectacle—wrestling fast and rough, often in short “squash” matches that made them look invincible.

“I could see that appealing to Robinson,” said Chris Lea, a sports anchor at WRAL and lifelong wrestling fan who recently produced a documentary about the golden age of wrestling at Raleigh’s Dorton Arena. He’s done some professional wrestling himself in regional promotions and is now working with ASÉ Wrestling, an innovative all-Black promotion based in Charlotte. “He likes the spectacle, the pop of the audience. Like with Trump, it’s not about the details. It’s not about being the best. It’s about looking strong, seeming invincible. That perception-is-reality thing.”

Goldberg, a former NFL player whose early wrestling career was built around exciting entrances and quick squash matches to hide his inexperience and limited abilities, is another Robinson favorite.

“The thing about Goldberg and wrestlers like that is, you can book them to go over everyone, don’t sell anything, do all these squash matches that make them look like monsters,” Hitchcock explained. “But if you don’t learn to actually do it, if you don’t get good enough to do more than that, people see through you and they get tired of it.”

Goldberg was also infamous for badly injuring other wrestlers, a serious black mark in a business where true professionals take pride in being safe while making matches look brutal.

“You can get a lot of attention going out there and calling people names, saying a lot of outrageous things,” McCorkle said. “You can win a primary like that. But when you’re running statewide, when you have to appeal to everyone, you have to have more than that … The question for Robinson is, is there a majority in North Carolina who wants their governor to act like a professional wrestler?”

Joe Killian is The Assembly’s Greensboro editor. He joined us from NC Newsline, where he was senior investigative reporter.

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