The Voluntary Heel and the Problem of Heat
I. Preface on Misidentification
It is tempting to treat the Voluntary Heel as an outlier and therefore dismiss him as comedy.
This temptation is the first misreading.
The Voluntary Heel is not a comedian who wandered into a wrestling ring. He is a technician who wandered into a public hunger and refused to feed it. He does not parody the form. He follows it with such literal precision that the expected pleasures fail to arrive, and the absence begins to behave like an injury.
In most surviving accounts, his name is not stable.
This is not unusual. Territories erase names the way highways erase towns.
But the confusion here persists even in records that otherwise exhibit obsessive specificity (timestamps, gate numbers, camera angles, referee shirt colors). There are posters with no last name. There are programs with misspellings. There are audio recordings in which announcers change what they call him mid-sentence, as if the syllables themselves will not hold.
This instability has been mistaken for myth-making.
It is more accurate to describe it as organizational refusal.
The business did not know what category to place him in, and so it filed him under joke, because joke is what men call anything that makes them feel uncertain.
II. On Heat, and the Error of Thinking It Is One Thing
“Heat” is the term the business uses when it is trying not to say “control.”
Heat is not applause. Heat is not volume. Heat is not the chant.
Heat is obedience without coercion.
When heat is real, a room does what it is told without knowing it has been instructed: it rises, it leans, it hushes, it forgets itself and becomes a single body with many mouths. This is why heat has always been treated as magic. Magic is simply the word we use for technique that does not announce itself.
For the purposes of this study, heat will be divided into five types, not because five is correct, but because the archive requires partitions in order to hold what it cannot resolve.
Type I — Participatory Heat
The audience agrees to play. It boos when asked. It cheers when asked. It learns the rhythm and likes the rhythm.
Type II — Protective Heat
The audience believes a performer belongs to them. It will defend him from authority, from outsiders, sometimes from the performer’s own mistakes.
Type III — Predatory Heat
The audience attends as if attending an accident. It does not want a story. It wants evidence of a body failing.
Type IV — Inconvenient Heat
The audience becomes angry not at a character, but at the experience of being managed. This is the heat of a crowd realizing the strings exist.
Type V — Containment Heat
The audience is kept in a state of tension without release. It becomes louder, not because it is being fed, but because it is being starved.
The Voluntary Heel specializes in Type V.
He does not injure performers.
He injures pacing.
III. Economic Irrationality (Why He Could Afford to Do This)
Most wrestlers comply with the crowd because the crowd is money.
A wrestler who refuses the crowd is not making an artistic choice. He is making a financial one, whether he admits it or not. The business is structured so that “art” is the name given to survival strategies that happen to look beautiful.
The Voluntary Heel appears, repeatedly, in contexts where economic pressure should have corrected him.
And it does not.
There are three plausible explanations:
He is already paid elsewhere.
He is paid here, but not in the usual currency.
He is not here for payment.
The third possibility is the one most often mocked, because it suggests a person can enter the business without needing the business. This is insulting to men who are destroying their bodies for gas money.
A surviving locker-room note (handwritten, unsigned) reads:
“He doesn’t need the pop. That’s what’s creepy.”
Economic irrationality makes a man unreadable. Unreadability is mistaken for arrogance. It is often, instead, a kind of freedom that does not know how to behave politely around captivity.
IV. The Inter-Gender Problem (Not the One You Think)
The Voluntary Heel is most commonly remembered for wrestling women.
This phrasing is already contaminated with the wrong expectation.
The audience expects an inter-gender match to contain one of two offerings:
Comedy that absolves the crowd of feeling implicated.
Violence that absolves the crowd of having to think.
The Voluntary Heel offers neither.
The audience waits for a slap. A hair pull. A shove into the corner.
He applies a wristlock.
This is not gentleness. It is not respect. It is banality.
Banality is what makes the room uneasy.
Because a wristlock is not a spectacle, and therefore the audience cannot hide inside the spectacle. A wristlock asks the crowd to attend to pressure, to timing, to the quiet collaboration that wrestling depends on. It is the opposite of what they arrived expecting, which is permission to behave badly under the cover of entertainment.
Multiple recollections describe the same sequence, with minor variations (a hallmark of reliable folklore):
He enters to loud boos.
He does not acknowledge them.
He takes the hold.
He keeps it.
The opponent speaks to him inside the hold and can be heard on ringside audio.
The crowd grows louder, not because something is happening, but because nothing is happening.
One account adds:
“It felt like he was making us watch ourselves.”
This is close to the truth.
He is not humiliating the woman. He is humiliating the audience’s appetite.
This is why the hostility escalates.
Not because they believe he is cruel.
Because they cannot locate the moment that would allow them to feel clean again.
V. Voluntary Kayfabe (Refusal as Performance)
Kayfabe is typically described as the lie everyone agrees to maintain.
This definition is incomplete.
Kayfabe is also a system of mutual protection: it limits the audience’s demands, and it limits the performer’s need to prove pain as sincerity.
Most modern exposures attack kayfabe by revealing mechanics.
The Voluntary Heel attacks the post-kayfabe world by reintroducing a boundary the audience forgot it needed:
He does not “break character” because he does not acknowledge character as something separate from behavior.
He treats the ring as a room with rules.
He behaves as if the crowd cannot vote on those rules.
This is why he is felt as authoritarian even when he is technically doing nothing aggressive.
He is reasserting ritual without offering the crowd the modern consolation prize of participation.
The crowd has been trained to believe that if it can chant, it is in control.
He demonstrates that the chant can exist and still be irrelevant.
That demonstration is unbearable to a room that has come to rely on noise as a form of agency.
VI. The Locker Room Response (Law Without Courts)
The business tolerated him because he drew.
The locker room disliked him because he did not belong to the shared economy of shame.
Wrestlers regulate each other through embarrassment, through stories, through “ribs,” through the quiet threat of being labeled difficult. The system works because most men cannot afford isolation.
The Voluntary Heel does not respond correctly to regulation.
He does not laugh at the rib.
He does not get angry at the insult.
He does not argue about the finish.
He treats the backstage world as if it is not the real stage.
This is interpreted as disrespect.
A promoter’s note (typed, unsigned, folded into a booking ledger) reads:
“Nobody can get a read on him. The boys hate that.”
A veteran performer statement appears in a later oral history project, recorded years after the territory’s decline. The speaker is unnamed. The phrasing is familiar to anyone who learned the business by touch, not theory:
“It’s like wrestling a mirror that won’t fog up.
You keep waiting for it to breathe with you, and it never does.
You start working harder just to make it admit you exist.”
This is the correct description.
The Voluntary Heel is not “working” his opponent.
He is working the need.
And the need is not located in the ring.
It is located in the room.
VII. Relationship to the New Economy of Proof
In the years following his appearances, the business changes the way it earns belief.
It stops asking the crowd to cooperate.
It starts asking the performers to demonstrate.
Pain becomes currency.
Documentation becomes legitimacy.
The Voluntary Heel produces neither.
He creates no GIF-able proof.
He creates no violent punctuation.
He creates no moment that can circulate out of context and still make sense.
He produces atmosphere.
This is the worst possible product for a system that has begun to monetize fragments.
A modern fan, trained by clips, does not know how to watch containment.
Containment is not a highlight. It is a sustained pressure.
This is why later online discussions frame him as “boring,” “trolling,” or “performance art,” as if those labels solve the discomfort.
They do not.
They simply relocate it into language, where it can be mocked and therefore neutralized.
VIII. The Small Crack (What It Cost Him)
There is a tendency, when describing the Voluntary Heel, to treat him as immune.
To treat him as above the economy of bodies.
This is convenient, because it allows the reader to admire him without feeling implicated.
But a body is still a body, even when it refuses spectacle.
Two small details recur across accounts:
After matches, he does not stay in the locker room.
He is seen alone in parking lots, sitting in cars that are not expensive but are clean.
In one version, he is smoking.
In another, he is not.
In all versions, he is not speaking.
The room does not describe him as lonely.
The room describes him as “weird.”
Weird is the word the business uses when it is trying not to say: unprotected.
A performer who refuses the crowd’s contract also refuses the locker room’s protection.
He contains the audience, yes.
But containment is a long-term exertion.
It is a muscle held flexed for too long.
Eventually the muscle shakes.
No one clapped for that shaking.
No one even knew it was happening, because it was not happening under lights.
IX. Conclusion (Why This Matters to the Archive)
The archive prefers escalation because escalation leaves marks.
Blood photographs cleanly.
Bruises hold timestamps.
Bodies breaking produce evidence.
Containment is harder to preserve.
Containment does not leave a wound.
It leaves an argument that cannot be settled.
This is why the Voluntary Heel is valuable to this record.
He proves that the collapse was not inevitable.
Restraint existed as a viable technique.
It was simply less profitable than injury.
And in a business that eventually learned to sell proof, the man who sold only tension could not be integrated.
He could be booked.
He could be hated.
He could be remembered as a story people tell when they want to sound smarter than they feel.
But he could not be absorbed.
Which is another way of saying:
He remained a boundary.
And boundaries, once visible, are what the crowd comes to tear down.