Shooters

by Jonathan Snowden

  True to his word, Lewis caught Sorakichi in a vicious leglock, nearly breaking the smaller man’s leg. The crowd was riotous when Sorakichi finally rolled over and allowed himself to be pinned. This was commonplace at the time, since tapping out, the universal symbol of submission in modern martial arts, didn’t really exist yet. When caught in a painful hold, a wrestler would usually cede defeat by turning to his back and allowing a pinfall.

  Not understanding submission locks and considering them unsportsmanlike, some in the crowd called for Lewis’s head. Promoter Parson Davies feared the worst and asked newspaperman R.L. Carey to calm the crowd. He explained such potentially dangerous holds were allowed in the catch-as-catch-can style and that both competitors had undertaken the risk of potential injury. Lewis was awarded the first fall, and when Sorakichi couldn’t continue, the match.

  An article in the New York Times claimed the hold broke Sorakichi’s leg, but it was actually only badly sprained. Although it swelled up to twice its normal size, the Japanese star was right back on the mats in less than a month. Lewis, too, took right back up where he left off. Now a bad guy in much of the Midwest for what they perceived as cruel treatment of Sorakichi, Lewis was booed the next month in Milwaukee. The local Sentinel proclaimed, “His brutal treatment of the Jap will not soon be forgiven.”

  THE ORIGINAL “STRANGLER” LEWIS

  SPECIAL COLLECTIONS OF THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES OF NOTRE DAME

  A week later, Lewis wrestled Edwin Bibby in St. Louis, securing three of five falls against the Brit. The great Muldoon himself challenged him to a match in Minnesota later in the year. In his preferred Greco-Roman style, the Solid Man could only pin the Strangler once within the 60-minute time limit. He had promised two pinfalls in the allotted time, making Lewis the winner of their handicap bout. His opponent’s tactics did not amuse Muldoon, who blamed Lewis’s manager Davies for the Wisconsinite’s evasive strategy.

  “Mr. Lewis fully carried out his instructions,” Muldoon wrote in an open letter. “And proved to the audience that he could run backwards further in one hour than any man they had ever paid admission to see.”

  A rematch was scheduled for June in Chicago with the two men splitting falls before Muldoon was too tired to continue. The crowd booed loudly when Muldoon didn’t return for a final fall and the great Greco-Roman star would never again agree to meet Lewis in the increasingly popular catch-as-catch-can style, despite the two regularly appearing as part of the same touring group.

  Part of a growing nationalism, catch was seen as an American style, a homegrown sport founded in the heartland. Greco-Roman, based on its name alone was inherently foreign. Never mind that catch had its roots in England. Sometimes perception is more important than truth — and in this case it helped propel catch wrestling to forefront of the grappling world.

  To further Americanize catch wrestling, Lewis would have to dispatch with two longstanding British stars, Joe Acton and Tom Connors. He took his first shot at Acton in February 1887 in front of 4,000 fans in Chicago. He lost the match, but was able to take a fall from the Brit. On April 12 in Chicago, again before a large crowd, he defeated Acton and laid claim to the catch-as-catch-can championship.

  Two months later, Lewis would meet Acton’s countryman Tom Connors in a wild match in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Lewis was his usual self — ultra aggressive. He had raised the ire of the fans in the Midwest with his use of the chokehold and crippling holds against Sorakichi. With the stakes even higher, and the opponent even more talented, it seemed there were no limits to which Lewis might not sink.

  It was a foul-filled affair that included head butts, kicks, and the occasional punch. When Lewis secured his dreaded stranglehold, Connors defended by grabbing the American’s fingers, causing the Strangler to cry out in pain. He eventually secured a strangle that caused Connors’ brother Jim to call foul, rushing into the ring and punching Lewis.

  When order was restored, the match continued on into the night. Lewis continued to kick Connors and attempted to smother him, another example of the kind of poor sportsmanship that made him the most feared man on the grappling circuit. Connors defended with a head butt or three and was disqualified, losing the fall.

  Connors rebounded strongly to take the second fall via pinfall and was awarded the match when the referee determined a Lewis stranglehold, using a thumb and finger to grab an opponent’s windpipe, was an illegal hold in the third. Connors was proclaimed the champion of America. Parson Davies, for once, was powerless and fumed over the decision. Lewis proclaimed the match was a farce and he couldn’t get a fair shake in Connors’ homebase of Pennsylvania. The Pittsburgh Dispatch report makes it clear Lewis was known for his foul play: “It is a well known fact that Lewis is noted for this, and in every square contest in which he has ever been engaged, there had been kicking and a claim of fouls. Connors knew this and went in to give as good as was sent, consequently the affair descended into a bloody struggle.”

  While Lewis and Connors would occasionally exchange barbs back and forth, the two never met again on the mats. The negotiations before a Lewis bout were often as contentious as the matches themselves, as Connors learned to his dismay. Lewis insisted that the Police Gazette rules that prevented strangleholds didn’t apply to his own favored hold — a hold he claimed was legal under the rules. Because there was no single style of wrestling and no agreed upon standard set of rules, there was much to discuss before any significant wrestling bout.

  Not only did the men have to settle on rules and a style, but they also had to negotiate how to split the gate receipts and the amount and terms of a side bet. Money was required upfront and the stakes were given over to a third party to await dispensation to the winner. Most prominent wrestlers didn’t have to front their own money — rich fans and businessmen often did that for them, sometimes to their detriment if the two wrestlers had their own prearranged idea of how the match would go. In some cases, large side bets were announced to attract a crowd, but in actuality, there was no personal stake of any kind — the wrestlers were just building up a crowd and splitting the gate receipts, letting the betting action decide who won the fixed bout. It was a complicated and often dirty business.

  Frustrated with a lack of progress in their negotiations, Connors challenged Lewis to a rough-and-tumble fight, essentially a no-holds-barred contest similar to today’s Ultimate Fighting Championship. “I am no fighter of that sort, and do not care to engage in it,” Lewis told the Milwaukee Sentinel. “But if Mr. Connors insists upon it, all right, I’m his huckleberry.”

  The proposed match never took place. Lewis became ill before the match could be booked and upon regaining his health went on tour with Muldoon for Davies. It was on these long nationwide tours that mat men made their real money, and Davies knew Lewis could still draw fans to the box office. Despite the Connors loss in 1887, Lewis again claimed the mantle of America’s champion. After defeating an overmatched Jack Wannop, a phony claimant to the British title, Lewis was declared world champion.

  But some fans had not forgotten Connors. Both men continued to wrestle throughout the Midwest with each accused of faking matches. Lewis accused Connors of hippodroming a match with Jack Carkeek, a Davies and Lewis associate who was later arrested for his part in various scams around the country. Carkeek was once arrested after he and his associates built up his reputation in Chicago as a great runner. They wrangled a saloonkeeper into betting $400 on Carkeek in a race. The wrestler took an early lead but mysteriously came up lame. These kinds of hijinks went on everywhere the wrestlers went. Of course, the Strangler was no choirboy. A typical Lewis match was so questionable the Sentinel thought it worth remarking that his match with Charles Green was on the level.

  Accusations of fraud weren’t unique to wrestling in this era. All professional sports were suspect at the time, including horse racing and boxing. While skepticism was warranted, historian Melvin Adel
man believes crowds were likely too quick to call foul. Almost any upset was greeted with howls of derision in the late 1800s and as wrestling historian Lee Casebolt pointed out, wrestling was a particularly hard sport to parse. Two men could work an audience subtly if they did it right, often with no one knowing the difference: “Sham wrestling, though, is a difficult thing for even an experienced observer to detect when practiced by skilled performers, and ‘losing a fall was unproblematic when friends could back the winner, and the winner might share the prize money.’”

  The same kinds of troubles were plaguing the Greco-Roman scene as well. By this point it was speculated most of Muldoon’s matches were more show than contest. He was a star and an attraction. Whether he was a better wrestler than the other members of his troupe was inconsequential. He was the meal ticket for his entire sport and was carefully protected. Even so, credibility could only be stretched so far. As he approached 40, Muldoon looked for an out. He would still tour some, but would no longer compete for championship honors. Ernest Roeber, Muldoon’s handpicked successor when the great man retired in the early 1890s, didn’t have Muldoon’s personal charisma or steady stream of challengers. As a result, interest waned. Many attribute his initial lack of success at the box office to a problem that would go on to plague Frank Gotch’s successors in years to come — Roeber didn’t earn his sucession in the field of combat. Roeber bristled at the critique: “He told them he was passing the title on to another, and one whom he knew he could trust to defend it with honesty and sportsmanship and that he knew of no better man to pass it over to. ‘The new champion,’ [Muldoon] said, ‘is Ernest Roeber.’ There were some who questioned Muldoon’s right to pass his crown to me, but I stood ready at all times to meet all comers.”

  Roeber was put up against the always-exciting Lewis, but the bout failed to pick business up off the mat. They wrestled in New Orleans, to mild interest. The local paper was skeptical from the get-go, declaring, “Wrestling has fallen into disrepute because it became impossible to distinguish between genuine matches and exhibitions.” Despite these admonitions, the two did manage to draw 2,000 fans for the contest that would see the winner take home a $2,000 purse.

  Roeber came into the bout in top form. Lewis on the other hand had been ill and also had been mourning his first wife, who had passed away earlier in the year. Despite this, he was willing to give it a go. A coin toss may have decided the best of five falls match. The winner would choose his favored style to lead off, meaning the two would grapple in his chosen art for three of the five falls. The winner was Lewis who, of course, led things off with catch-as-catch-can.

  Lewis won the two falls decided by catch rules easily in around 20 minutes total. Roeber also won the Greco-Roman falls, but it was more of a struggle, lasting nearly an hour combined. After 73 minutes on the mat it came down to a final fall contested under catch rules. This time Roeber was only able to stay alive for 62 seconds. Lewis pinned his shoulders to the mat and won an important victory for catch wrestling.

  Roeber soldiered on, declaring he was still the Greco-Roman world champion. He continued wrestling and even made a box office resurgence battling a stream of “Terrible Turks” at the turn of the century. But his day and Greco-Roman’s hold on the wrestling public were over.

  Unfortunately, it seemed Lewis’s best days were behind him as well. He was often ill, even suffering from a grueling bout of consumption that almost killed him in 1894. Wrestling needed a new champion and one was on the horizon. Martin “Farmer” Burns spent much of the year demanding a title shot. In April 1895, Lewis agreed, but only if Burns would wrestle with the stranglehold legal. Though giving up 15 pounds, the Farmer was close to his prime. Lewis was “fat as a prize pig,” but his legend was so great there were still cries that the fix was in. John Kline, one of Lewis’s supporters, told the Chicago-based Inter Ocean paper that he was disgusted by his friend’s lack of pride: “I am ashamed of Lewis for selling out that match, for I have no use for fakes; but, then, Lewis was square with his personal friends and put them on that they lost no money on that match. . . . I knew before the Lewis-Burns match that Lewis was going to lose it, but he lost it so clumsily I am surprised that any one who saw the alleged contest did not catch on to its being a fake, and he barely missed winning the match even while trying to let Burns have it. The referee did not know that there was a job put up, however.”

  Lewis would continue wrestling for several more years, taking falls for whoever opened their wallet. He is a legend of the sport and a pioneer for catch wrestling. But Burns, and more importantly his students, would lead wrestling to new heights.

  3

  “FARMER” BURNS

  The photograph is iconic, the content unforgettable: Martin “Farmer” Burns hanging by his neck from a noose. A normal man would, of course, never survive the experience. In fact a wrestler who later tried to duplicate the stunt died in the attempt. But Farmer Burns was no ordinary man.

  Raised in Iowa by Irish immigrants, Burns seemed born to be a wrestler. His wrestling career started out almost that early. By the tender age of eight he was wrestling friends in the schoolyard — always for money. This much, at least, never changed.

  As a teenager he spent his days plowing fields and his nights wrestling at every chance he got. By the age of nineteen he was quite well known in the neighborhood of Dennison, Iowa, as a very husky young man with a reputation as a winner.

  The Farmer wasn’t actually a farmer for long, just four years according to martial arts historian John Gilbey. Farming, after all, was back-breaking all-day labor. It was much more profitable to make a living from wrestling. But before he could turn to wrestling full-time, Burns needed some seasoning. He was a skilled grappler, but not among the world’s best, at least not in his youth. Like all amateurs, he needed to learn the tricks experienced professionals used to survive. Some lessons were learned the hard way. In 1886, Burns lost a match to Evan Lewis with the latter’s dangerous stranglehold. Vowing to never let that happen again, Burns (who weighed just 160 pounds) developed his neck until it was a gargantuan 20 inches.

  According to the legend of Farmer Burns, three years later, on a trip to Chicago to sell some hogs, Burns saw a sign advertising that pro wrestlers were in town. He desperately wanted to give Lewis another go and “The Strangler” was taking on all comers for a $25 prize. Lewis and his partner Jack Carkeek knew Burns was legitimate and wanted no part of him. This was one of the pitfalls of challenge matches. Usually it amounted to beating planted audience members or local toughs. But sometimes, when a man like Martin Burns crossed the threshold, an easy night of fun was no longer an option.

  Manager Parson Davies told Burns they had all the challengers they needed that night. But Burns was a patient man; he told them he’d be back every night until they had room. Finally Burns was allowed to take the stage, dressed in his farmer’s overalls, a gimmick he would use throughout his career. Taking one look at him, master of ceremonies J.W. Kelly decided to yuck it up:

  “What would you call a man who hoes potatoes and squash and shucks corn?” Kelly asked.

  “A farmer,” replied the musician.

  “Well, then,” he continued, “if this farmer would get locked up in a house and the house would catch fire, what would happen to the farmer?”

  “I do not know,” the musician replied.

  “Farmer Burns,” replied Kelly.

  It was Burns who would have the last laugh. He faced Carkeek, another tested professional, lasting a full 15 minutes, and held off Lewis in another 15-minute bout to take home $100. It wasn’t often that touring wrestlers were beaten at their own game, and Burns, now known as “The Farmer,” quickly became a part of their close-knit fraternity. He studied with the best, men like the Englishman Tom Connors, looking to learn every trick in the book. Realizing that skill could only take him so far, like William Muldoon before him, he built his body into a
perfect machine, avoiding cigarettes and alcohol.

  Traveling the country with Connors, Burns soaked up knowledge. He also put on a great show. Beyond the hangman’s noose, Burns had plenty of gimmicks to draw a crowd. A favorite gambit was challenging a town’s entire football or baseball team to wrestle. If Burns defeated them all, one after another, he would win and collect a side bet. If one of them were able to beat him, he’d have to pay up. More than any of his other contemporaries, wrestling was life for Burns. For most of his adulthood, it was a singular focus.

  Eventually, when he thought he was ready to assume the responsibility of being America’s top wrestler, the Farmer took another stab at greatness. Burns had become a crowd favorite, but champion Evan Lewis refused to meet him on the mat. He wanted Burns to earn his title shot; after touring the country for years, Burns believed he had. In 1895, after calling the champion out for more than a year, Burns finally got a shot at Lewis’s crown. In an April match at the Savoy Theatre in Chicago, considered by most observers to be an obvious setup, Burns finished the Strangler’s career as a serious mat man. The Farmer was the world champion.

  Burns was a wrestling machine, seemingly impossible to wear out. He toured often prior to winning the title. Afterwards he was constantly at work. He wrestled in the touring athletic shows and when they were taking a break, worked the fair circuit as well. Starting with Connors & Green’s Specialty Show, Burns wrestled for a variety of vaudevillians, including the Tarjee and Conner All-Star Show, the English Gaity Show, and the ubiquitous Parson Davies’ Floto Show. Soon he was leading his own troupe for the Richards & O’Donnell Company, putting on a show and developing new talent for the then-gargantuan sum of $300 a week. Burns had an eye for talent, recruiting some of the best and most marketable wrestlers of the era. He also expanded and perfected the time-tested methods of sucking an audience dry.