Some people say the Maniac was the first wrestler to switch. They remember the day he traded his overalls for a suit, striding into the ring with a fresh crew cut and a new set of teeth. But that was actually two weeks after the Seamonster peeled off his scales, took to the mic and announced that he had emerged from the ocean, never to return. And was that before or after Udell the Undead transitioned seamlessly into Larry the Living? It didn’t really matter who did it first, because everybody joined in eventually. Soon there were no more masked heroes and villains, no supernatural creatures, no allusions to the underworld. Just Joe Average and Johnny Sixpack, battling it out in sensible black briefs. Well, good for them. Good for those guys with jawlines and charisma, who’d talk about the old days with a glint in their eyes and then go home to their wives and children. Good for Mike and Steve and Brad. But what about the Bear?
Eight feet tall, six hundred pounds, hailing from The Forest (Wisconsin). Black leathery snout, blood red eyes, thick brown pelt matted with the blood, sweat and tears of every man he’d ever fought. The Bear snorted and grunted as he heaved his huge body from one end of the ring to the other. He thrashed his limbs and ground his teeth and howled into leather and fur. You take the mask off a monster and he’s still a monster underneath. So the Bear stood by as his peers disrobed, shedding their spandex leotards and latex masks. He watched as the audience cheered the new crop of regular guys, relatable characters. When the Bear’s entrance music played, swathes of men in baseball caps rose from their chairs en masse. Time to go to the toilet, to get a hotdog.
The Bear had just finished an untelevised match against the Project Manager, a young upstart in blue jeans and a grey polo shirt, when he was given the news. The unmasking was scheduled for the following night in Providence, Rhode Island. Second billing. You choose how to play it, said the boss. You choose what’s underneath. But this can’t continue. Could he have a bit longer maybe, a few weeks to prepare, to figure out who he was if he wasn’t a bear? But he’d already had such a long time, he’d had years. He’d worn the mask for so long that now he didn’t feel like he could ever take it off. The boss knew, everybody knew. Dave, the current champion, liked to talk about paradigm shifts. Dave, who used to be a gremlin, crawling into the ring on his hands and knees, leaving a trail of green paint behind him. People don’t want gimmicks anymore, Bear. It’s embarrassing. Time to rip it off.
He was the last one remaining, but not everybody had taken off their masks, some just hadn’t made it this far. Stunts gone wrong. Steroid induced heart attacks. Early onset dementia from too many knocks to the head. Suicides. No man was supposed to be eight feet tall. A few survived only to have the indignity of being unceremoniously dropped from the roster, forced to join a small promotion and spend their final years getting beaten up by twenty year olds who hadn’t learned how to safely bodyslam their opponents. The clever ones retired as soon as the first long term injuries set in, spotted the early signs of a chronic knee problem and planned their next move carefully. A desk job in the company, brand management or entertainment relations. A podcast, an autobiography, an energy drink (pending FDA approval). Marry the boss’s daughter, run for state senator.
The Bear hadn’t done any of that. He stayed until the bitter end, showed up every night in his bear suit and bear mask, did his job, took on whatever they threw at him. But nobody ever really knew what to do with an eight foot colossus. Sure it’s fake, the outcomes are decided in advance, but it still needs to look plausible. So what do you do with a Bear who towers over everybody else, who makes everybody he faces look small and weak? You keep him away from the top guys, of course, the champions. You don’t want to invite the comparisons, because the Bear’s not a champion, never will be. So you put him on the roster against the mid-card fighters instead, but that’s no good for them because they’re trying to be taken seriously. You can’t demonstrate your technical prowess in a fight against a bear, you can’t suplex a bear. A man can’t legitimately win against a bear, nobody’s buying that, so out come the steel chairs, the sledgehammers, the interference when the referee’s not looking. It becomes a joke – how is the Bear going to be defeated today? And once you’re a joke that’s all you’ll ever be. Pitted against dwarves, skinny guys, women. A steel chair to the face, night after night after night.
The blood is real. People think it’s fake but it’s real. Sometimes it happens naturally, you hit a guy in the right spot just above the eyebrow and he’ll get busted open. But it’s hard to get the right spot first time, and nobody wants to get hit in the head over and over. So what the pros do is, before the match, they wrap a little razor blade in their wrist tape. And then when it’s time, they fall to the ground and they put their head in their hands, and they take out the blade and give themselves a little cut on the head. The trick is to apply the least amount of damage for the greatest amount of results. It should look a lot worse than it feels. That’s how you know you’ve done it right.
The guys kept talking about Frogman that night. Somebody had found a video, a compilation of the entire Princess and the Frog storyline, they had it playing on a loop in the bar. Frogman made the switch fifteen years ago, back when the audience still had an appetite for absurdity, when you could make a story of it. A month of promos, artfully-shot videos alluding to a mysterious past, a pink child, a murky pond. And finally, live in Arlington, Texas, a kiss from the reigning women’s champion, Lovely Linda, which transformed the frog into a prince. They rode out of the ring on a white horse and the Prince won the intercontinental title the following week. So it could be done, you see, once upon a time.
That wasn’t the same though, everybody knew it wasn’t the same. Frogman’s mask only covered his eyes, Frogman spoke in a human voice. Frogman was six foot five and two hundred and eighty pounds. Where is he now, somebody asked, but they’d agreed not to talk about that. Sandra the Beautician tried to change the subject, she was good at that. Well how about you do something similar, Bear, you fight The Magician, and then if you win he’s gotta lift the curse, turn you back into a man? Back when Sandra was an Untamed Lioness, she’d won the Women’s Championship from the Magician’s Assistant in a caged bra and panties match. In retaliation, the Magician cast a nudity spell on her. But of course there was no Magician anymore. He’d long since hung up his cloak and successfully run for mayor of Greensboro, North Carolina. That wasn’t the point though, the Magician wasn’t the problem.
He’d been a bear for twenty five years, he’d been a bear since he first stepped in that ring, he’d been a bear his whole life. There’s a term in wrestling called kayfabe. It means maintaining the illusion that everything is real, committing to the persona, never breaking character. It means that if you’re a bear then you’re a bear and there’s nothing behind the mask except blood and bones.
You take it off though, right? You know, at night, you take it off? The Bear growled. It was meant to be lewd, for the men, and playful, for the women, but it didn’t land. Everybody backed off. The Adjunct Professor brought him a shot of whiskey. Nobody wants to fuck a bear, he whispered. The Bear drank his shot through a tiny straw, lodged into his bear face. One time he’d slept with four women in the same night. New Year’s Eve, 1987. Sandra gave him a pitying look and went home with the Professor.
Nobody ever used to break kayfabe. That was the number one rule, back when the Bear was starting out, that was the only thing that really mattered. If you let something slip, called your opponent by their real name, that was a career-ending offence. But these days, it happened more and more. People liked it, the boss liked it. A little wink to the audience, everybody was in on it. Taking away the gimmicks didn’t make things more serious, it just changed the nature of the joke. The Bear had never wanted to be a joke.
The following afternoon, kids lined up outside the Dunkin’ Donuts Center in Providence, Rhode Island, waiting to have their photos taken with the Software Developer. Lone thirty-something men rifled through Gary’s vinyl collection, hoping to be the one to select his entrance music for the night. Shy teenage girls requested autographs from the current tag team champions, two young men with nice faces. The Bear scampered past, clutching a bag of tools in his paws. He’d been given a private dressing room in Providence, as close as possible to the main arena. On his request, for one night only, for his last match as a bear. They were usually good about stuff like that, especially for the older guys. After all those years, it wasn’t a big ask was it, the least they could do for him. You don’t get to make that many decisions in this business, you don’t decide whether you’ll fight or stay home, whether you’ll win or lose. They tell you what city you’ll be in, how long the match should last, who your enemy is that week. You go along with it, and you improvise where you can. They make the decisions but you add the flair.
You can tell a man to take off his mask, but only he gets to decide what’s underneath it. If you’re a bear then you’re a bear, and that’s all you are.
If it was televised they’d have cut the broadcast. But it wasn’t. Only six thousand people watched the Bear’s final match, against the Project Manager, at the Dunkin Donuts Center in Providence, Rhode Island. Six thousand people saw the Bear mask come off, but no human face underneath. Six thousand people watched the Project Manager vomit over his grey polo shirt. Six thousand people knew it wasn’t real, it couldn’t be real. They wouldn’t find out until afterwards. And even then, they wouldn’t know for sure what they’d seen. They’d never know, because the Project Manager disappeared from wrestling after that night, moved into the children’s entertainment business, took on a new persona as a bashful squirrel and left his past behind him. And of course the Bear was unable to tell his story.
He never made it into the Hall of Fame, he never received the superstar treatment. In official channels it was as if the Bear had never existed. But he was a legend in the true sense, a mythical tale passed down through the oral tradition. He was hushed whispers and knowing looks. He was eerie and thrilling and unsettling. He was unsolved. Because if you’re good at what you do, if you’re a true pro, then you make sure to leave behind a bit of mystery. A spotless dressing room, for example. Keep the punters guessing.
The Bear was shortlisted for the 2026 Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize, judged by Ottessa Moshfegh, Claire-Louise Bennett and Joanna Walsh.
11 Stories, including Imogen’s story and the rest of the shortlist, is available now. More details here.
Imogen Clarke is a writer in Manchester, UK. Her short stories have been published in Electric Literature and shortlisted in the Bridport Prize and Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize. IG: @imogenclrk
