The Undertaker

A basketball player becomes a wrestler

Mark Calaway played basketball in college in Texas before turning to wrestling in the late 1980s. He worked under several names in World Class Championship Wrestling and in WCW, where he was Mean Mark Callous. Standing about six foot ten and moving like a much smaller man, he caught the eye of WWF, which introduced him as The Undertaker at Survivor Series in November 1990.

Building a character that lasted

The original Undertaker was a slow-walking, spooky mortician figure with a gong, dimmed lights and a manager, Paul Bearer, who carried an urn. The presentation was pure theatre, and it worked because Calaway committed to every detail, from never blinking on camera to sitting straight up after taking a big move. In 2000 he changed into a motorcycle-riding biker character, then returned to the darker look in 2004.

He held the WWF and WWE titles several times and was a respected locker room leader, but his real fame came from what happened once a year.

The WrestleMania streak

From his first WrestleMania in 1991 to WrestleMania 29 in 2013, The Undertaker won every match he had at the event, a run of 21 straight wins. The streak turned into a storyline of its own, and his matches against Shawn Michaels at WrestleMania 25 and 26 and against Triple H at WrestleMania 27 and 28 are often ranked among the best in the show's history.

At WrestleMania XXX in New Orleans in 2014, Brock Lesnar pinned him. The silence in the Superdome became one of the most famous crowd reactions in wrestling, because almost nobody believed the streak would ever end.

Matches and retirement

He took part in the first Hell in a Cell match in 1997 and the famous 1998 cell match with Mankind. His later WrestleMania matches included the Boneyard Match with AJ Styles, filmed without a crowd in 2020. That November, at Survivor Series, WWE held a farewell for the character, exactly 30 years after his debut. He entered the WWE Hall of Fame in 2022.

Behind the scenes, Calaway was known as a quiet leader who helped settle disputes in the locker room and mentored younger performers. His long career also shows how a wrestler can adapt as the body ages: in later years he wrestled fewer matches, used more submission holds and relied on atmosphere and timing. Few characters in any form of entertainment have been played by the same performer for three decades, which is a big part of why his farewell drew such emotion.

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