About the professional wrestler Undertaker

This article is about the professional wrestler. For other uses, see Undertaker (disambiguation).

Mark William Calaway (born March 24, 1965),^[6] better known by his ring name The Undertaker (sometimes simply Taker), is an Americanprofessional wrestler signed to WWE. He is the company's most tenured performer, and is the only remaining active competitor from the very first episode of WWE Raw in 1993. Calaway began his wrestling career with World Class Championship Wrestling (WCCW) in 1984. He joined World Championship Wrestling (WCW) as "Mean" Mark Callous in 1989. When WCW did not renew Calaway's contract in 1990, Calaway signed with theWorld Wrestling Federation. After debuting as Kane the Undertaker, the name was shortened to The Undertaker and he has remained with the company since.

The Undertaker gimmick has two polar opposite identities. The first is the "Deadman", an undead and macabre entity full of scare tactics. "The Deadman" has come in several different versions. The Undertaker's on-camera debut at Survivor Series 1990 saw the introduction of the first version. Here, he portrayed a Western mortician—a pain-impervious zombie donned in black attire with gray accessories. By SummerSlam 1994, he began appearing as a mystic, chilling superhuman represented by cool colors, replacing the gray with purple and utilizing blue fog for the first time. AtSurvivor Series 1996, the Deadman was reborn, this time as the gothic "Lord of Darkness". By January 1999, he began appearing as the ritual-performing dark priest of a stable called the Ministry of Darkness. The Undertaker's alternate identity is a biker dubbed the "American Bad-Ass", which he portrayed from May 2000 to November 2003. Since WrestleMania XX, Undertaker has appeared as a hybrid of all of his previous incarnations. At the same time, the hybrid has seen sharp contrasts, most notably appearing while shirtless and sporting a shaven head/mohawk.^[8]

The Undertaker is connected with various specialty matches, including the Casket match, the Buried Alive match, the Hell in a Cell match, and theLast Ride match. In 1997, The Undertaker gimmick was embellished with a dramatic pre-WWF/WWE personal life that enhanced the character with a youth backstory. A key part of this backstory is the character's half-brother, Kane, who was introduced in 1997 and has both feuded and allied (as a tag team called the Brothers of Destruction) with Undertaker.

The Undertaker holds an unrivaled record of being undefeated at WrestleMania, WWE's premier pay-per-view event, with a 21–0 record (with no appearances at WrestleMania X and 2000).^[9] Another similar achievement was from December 1991 to September 1993, when he did not lose a single match, marking the longest undefeated streak in WWF in the 90s.^[10] Calaway is an eight-time World Champion having won the WWF/E Championship four times and the World Heavyweight Championship three times as The Undertaker, and the USWA Unified World Heavyweight Championship once under the Master of Pain character. The Undertaker is also a seven-time Tag Team champion: a six-time World Tag Team Champion and one-time WCW World Tag Team Champion. The Undertaker was the winner of the 2007 Royal Rumble and became the first man to enter the annual event last and win.