On a scorching hot 25th of June I was linked to the news that an Egyptian strongman, Al Sayed al Essawy, would prove his physical prowess by killing a lion with his bare hands. As someone who can appreciate hunting and the operatic death of an afternoon bullfight, and certainly someone who saw the fox hunting issue as purely political as opposed to some sort of “right to life” discussion for ginger vermin, I was immediately intrigued. I watched the attached video from Time Magazine Online with great interest and concluded that the man was little more than some sort of David Blaine, that the event in itself would be pure hokum.
Of course even the strongest man in the world would be mauled to death by a lion fighting for its life. Somehow driving it away would be the sort of miracle that would become a feature in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, just like those guys who got lucky and only had their face tore off by an angry Brown Bear that was rummaging through their garbage. The notion that he could overpower it was absurd, let alone kill it. I don’t care how much footage you have showing you pulling trucks with rope attached to your backs… Man is only a match for nature, red in tooth and claw, through invention, brains over brawn.
Immediately the question became “what’s the trick” because it was clear something would be up, it was just trying to figure out how far it would go. Would the lion be laced with a low acting poision, keeling over dead halfway through the bout leaving Essawy to talk about how he applied some sort of ancient technique to it… Would the lion have been defanged and declawed ahead of the bout meaning damage would be kept to bone-crushing swipes? Could it not be that the lion would be some fake, another, more passive animal made to appear as something it wasn’t? Certainly there was no way he was going to go through with it as described… Unless.
Perhaps we were simply witnessing the breakdown of a man addled by steroids, who simply decided to commit suicide by lion as a macabre showpiece finale to his underwhelming career of exhibitionism. It was his lion as well… He’d paid a handsome sum for it from an anonymous source, even had the cage built himself and had wasted no time in trying to hype the event, desperate to get as many people watching as possible. There was nothing final in the quote from one source, which read:
“I have a whole series of shows planned in my head. I will pull an airplane with my teeth, and I will pull an airplane with my hair. I will also be run over by an airplane. In between each of these acts, there will be lion battles.”
Incredibly, it seemed to have worked. The world’s media watched and those that couldn’t sat glued to Twitter awaiting developments coming in the form of some sort of psychotic teletext. People who were there sent in their messages using the tag #deathmatch and through this the word spread like wildfire. Animal rights groups had their dander up and were already preparing a eulogy for the noble lion. Mental health charities were too alerted, their eulogy written for the soon to be deceased Essawy.
It became clear that the event itself was more about drawing a spotlight on Egypt than anything as simplistic as a debate about man versus beast. Sure, there was some posteuring as Essawy entered the cage armed with a shield he had crafted from an old satellite dish, showing that the phrase “bare hands” had obviously been lost in translation. “Who is the lion?” he asked when he made his first tentative steps to be enclosed with the beast.
If the answer to the question seemed easy on paper, those witnessing the event may have been a little confused. The Lion, reported to weigh 660 pounds, looked knackered, lolling in the sun and disinterested in the man intruding on its space. It would later be revealed the lion had been starved for days before the bout then fed a whole donkey that morning to ensure it was at its most docile. If anything went wrong, Essawy’s aides stood close to the cage armed with makeshift tridents. They would not be necessary.
A publicity stunt then, one designed to boost the ailing tourist industry in Egypt. Always a popular destination given its status as the cradle of civilisation, since the violent clashes that saw the Egyptian government overthrown tourism has dipped significantly. Here though was the perfect advert to try and rekindle interest… In Egypt you can see a madman kill a lion with his bare hands, while onlookers cheer themselves into a state of heat exhaustion. Even the Egyptian Minister for Tourism could see this was a bad idea and wanted the fight stopped.
Once in the cage though the scene shifted. Clearly without the intent or the means to murder the lion, and possibly grasping that many would see this only as portraying the Egyptians as barbarians, Essawy decided at the last minute to make it a somehow political statement. It had gone unnoticed at first but there was a pro-Palestinian slogan written on his vest and there was a traditional Palestinian headdress wrapped around his neck like a scarf. Some onlookers also reported that he after the fight he adorned the Lion with an Israeli flag, although there was no photographic evidence to corroborate this.
You see, all along he had never planned to kill the lion, despite the very public statements to the contrary. No, this was about making the lion (Israel?) surrender through peaceful means. He said that he would never attacked the lion first lest that the Westerners used it as some kind of metaphor for Islam not being a religion of peace. He also maintained that he had won, that the lion had indeed surrendered by refusing to act. It was, in short, a garbled afterthought for what had been a sham from start to finish.
Indeed, the only thing that it was akin to in the Western world would be wrestling, the illusion of violence married to an undercurrent of drama that reflects the current zeitgeist. When thought of in this manner and compared directly to the most recent efforts of the WWE to rejuvenate their ailing brand, it actually isn’t all that bad. It even eclipses TNA. One has to wonder if Vince Russo had a hand in this fiasco somewhere along the line.
Half those who had kept track of the event were disappointed, the other half relieved. All were thoroughly confused and left asking questions as to what it had been about. Essawy vowed to continue with his plans. It is doubtful that the world will care as much the next time round, this day being remembered for little other than the day that Essawy became the boy who cried lion.