MARTIN “FARMER” BURNS (right)
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“Burns became the master of what I — and the old Greek pimps and hustlers who taught me a lot of those tricks — call cross-roading,” historian J. Michael Kenyon wrote. “It was the business of sending in ‘advance’ men and then following up with late-arriving ‘challengers.’ Burns’s troupe, which included most of the great rascals of the pre–World War I era, would work an area for, maybe, four or five months at a time. Then, having robbed the locals of every nickel and dime they could get their hands around, they’d skedaddle — and open up shop in another region.”
Harper’s Weekly had an interesting tale of exactly how Burns and other professionals would sucker local sportsmen out of their hard-earned money. It was called barnstorming, the practice of traveling the country looking for local wrestling stalwarts and taking them for a ride. Wrestling as McCarthy, a wood sawer, Burns challenged a Scandinavian farmer with a reputation for toughness. After giving up the first fall, a Burns compatriot in the audience bet $100 it wouldn’t happen again. The Scandinavian’s neighbors, having seen the first fall, were quick to accept the bet. Then Burns took over, winning consecutive falls in less than a minute. Burns turned a cartwheel and revealed his true identity to the crowd, suddenly revealing they had been played for patsies. This kind of thing was repeated across America as wrestlers used local pride to soak fans who vehemently supported their local favorites.
Burns discovered many of the greats who followed him into wrestling history, including “Toots” Mondt, Charles Olsen, and Earl Caddock. His crew also included Emil Klank, John Berg, Billy Sandow (who was later the second Strangler Lewis’s manager), and Bob Manoogian (who usually appeared as “The Terrible Turk”). These were among the best wrestlers in the world at the turn of the century.
Farmer Burns was not just a gifted athlete. He was also a leader of men, the kind of man others wanted to follow. A brilliant teacher who could explain the complicated human chess involved in a wrestling match so it made perfect sense. He opened wrestling schools in Iowa and Nebraska and was soon hawking his teachings nationwide in a mail-in course called The Lessons in Wrestling and Physical Culture. Filmmaker John Nash thinks Burns was doing more than selling pamphlets. He was helping create a wrestling resurgence in popular culture:
Burns’s success can be attributed to an increased interest in amateur wrestling across the country, which in part was fueled by an interest in professionals such as Burns. As the nation’s urban centers grew, a movement started to organize sport as recreation for the industrial workers. In 1888 the Amateur Athletic Union sanctioned its first national tournament and soon afterwards became recognized as the governing body for amateur wrestling in the United States. Athletic clubs opened across the nation offering wrestlers a place to train and compete. In the early 20th century colleges began to hold wrestling meets. In a few decades wrestling had gone from a sport where two local toughs challenged each other to one where hundreds of professional athletes supported themselves wrestling and where a vast amateur network gave tens of thousands an opportunity to participate.
Of course, despite his own accolades and his success as a promoter, Burns has been overshadowed by his protégé, the great Frank Gotch.
The Legendary Frank Gotch
Born on his family’s farm in Humbolt, Iowa, in 1876, Frank was the ninth child of Fred and Amelia Gotch. Like many strapping lads from the heartland, he grew up strong from his chores and with a love of wrestling. With his very aggressive style of wrestling, he owned the local scene as a young man, terrorizing anyone who dared match up with him. Young, strong, and unskilled in wrestling science, Gotch was the perfect mark for a man like American heavyweight champion Dan McLeod.
McLeod was traveling the country under an assumed name in 1899, pretending to be a furniture mover from Omaha, Nebraska, named Dan Stewart. Using his real name would have been impossible; McLeod was well known as the man who bested Farmer Burns in 1897 for the American Championship. Under that assumed name he could draw betting action against him when he challenged local stars like Gotch. Not knowing who his opponent was, Gotch was happy to accept the stranger’s challenge. His supporters were just as happy to bet on him against “Stewart.”
The two engaged in a fierce contest on a cinder track at a Modern Woodmen of America picnic. They battled for more than an hour before McLeod was able to secure a fall. Gotch called it the most difficult contest of his career. “I was picking cinders out of my anatomy for more than a month after that battle . . . we went at it like a couple of Turks. Head spins and all sorts of things,” the champion recalled in his 1913 biography.
FRANK GOTCH
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The pain, not just from the cinders, but from tasting defeat, was eventually well worth it. The match with McLeod brought Gotch to the attention of Farmer Burns, the most powerful man in American wrestling. Always on the lookout for new talent, Burns was pleased to put Gotch to the test himself later that year in Fort Dodge. Gotch had come to challenge the wrestlers, and Burns, rather than let one of his troupe potentially fall victim to the talented lad, decided he’d better answer Gotch’s challenge himself. Historian George S. Robbins paints the scene: “Burns was offering $25 to anyone who could last 15 minutes without getting pinned. Gotch gave him all he could handle, but the Farmer prevailed after 11 minutes of hard wrestling. The Farmer then addressed the audience and told them, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I have never met an amateur wrestler the like of this fellow in my life. If he will go with me, I will make him champion of America in a few months.’”
From Burns, Gotch learned the art of wrestling. Under the tutelage of Burns’s cronies like Jack Carkeek and Joe “Ole Marsh” Carroll, he learned the business of wrestling, warts and all. Touring Iowa and the Midwest, working programs with Burns when other challengers didn’t present themselves, Gotch was initiated into the industry’s inner workings. Gotch lost a match to a local baker, Oscar Wasem, in 1901 despite outweighing his foe by almost 30 pounds. Two weeks later, Burns came to the rescue, getting revenge for his protégé in straight falls. It was basic storytelling, but it worked. The local crowd was much more willing to support their champion with an important win over Gotch under his belt. Interest in the Burns match was much higher than it would have been without building Wasem first. Gotch was learning not just how to win wrestling matches but how to control the audience with the kind of showmanship that separated mere wrestlers from champions.
With a firm understanding of how the business really worked, Gotch was tagged to travel to the Klondike as part of an elaborate scam. Teaming with Ole Marsh and the ancient collar-and-elbow specialist Colonel James McLaughlin, Gotch journeyed to the Klondike to fleece a mining community starved for entertainment. Gotch went by the name Frank Kennedy and joined the camp as an actual miner. McLaughlin and Marsh were the top wrestlers who had come to challenge any who dared.
Soon challenges and money were flowing freely. As Kennedy, Gotch established himself as the toughest man in the camp. Of course he was chosen to face the professionals in their midst, the other miners unaware he was actually in partnership with his opponents. Eventually, the camp began catching on. It was time for the final hurrah — Gotch as Kennedy finally scoring a big win over Marsh. The wrestlers then disappeared from Alaska like smoke in the wind, but not before a final scare — the original ship scheduled to take Gotch back to the mainland sunk with all his worldly goods, but not his money stash, on board. Fortunately, Gotch had stayed behind for a final soiree.
Upon his return Gotch was not just flush with cash — he had also proven his worth to Burns and the powers behind the scenes. He was ready to take a step into the limelight, ready to go beyond being merely champion of Iowa. He was ready to take on the great Tom Jenkins for the championship of America.
4
JENKINS, THE TURK, and the AMERICAN TITLE
Tom Jenkins was a man made of iron. It’s little wonder; he built his rock-hard and powerful body working in the steel mills in Newburg, Ohio. Jenkins looked like a wrestler from another era, with callused hands and steel grip to go along with a missing left eye. Unlike wrestlers in the wild and wooly American frontier, Jenkins didn’t lose his eye in a grappling match. It was an accident much more innocent than a reckless gouging — a toy cannon exploded on the Fourth of July when he was just eight, taking his eye and breaking his jaw.
Jenkins grew up hard, on the proverbial wrong side of the tracks. His eye injury slowed him down for a year, when he was confined to a dark room to protect his vision. Soon enough, though, he was running amok in the streets, a petty thief stealing from one street vendor and selling his ill-gotten wares a few blocks down the street to another. By the age of 12 he had been arrested eight times.
Like many professional wrestlers of his time, Jenkins came about his career by happenstance. He had been working full-time since the incredible age of 10, first making tire irons before getting a job at a steel mill in his teens. At 18, he finally got his break. During a benefit for an injured waterboy at the mill, one of the wrestlers scheduled to entertain failed to appear. The mill manager George Patton volunteered Jenkins, who impressed everyone by going to a draw. Sensing real potential, his boss sent Jenkins for wrestling lessons in 1891. Two years later, he was turning professional, a mat natural.
Although not a skilled technician, he made up for it with raw power and willingness to dish out and accept pain of all kinds. Jenkins was immensely strong. His job at the mill involved redirecting red hot 100-pound iron bars with a giant pair of tongs. He did this day after day, hour after hour.
“That job taught me to be quick,” Jenkins said. “And it put a neck and arms on me and horny calluses on the heels of my hands. When I got my man on the mat, I ground the calluses into his face. It took the skin off.”
Using his hard-earned calluses to his advantage was just one of Jenkins’ tricks. He was tenacious and aggressive to the point of being dirty, relying on power moves like body locks to soften opponents up and a stranglehold as his finishing technique. When that hold was banned in most contests, he moved to a jaw lock, which to even the most careful observers looked an awful lot like a stranglehold.
Jenkins became an attraction right away. He must have been quite a sight — before each bout he would remove his glass eye, shocking those not in the know, and wrestle with his socket exposed to the world. It was a fitting image for a no-nonsense athlete who came up the hard way in a hard world.
By 1897, under the management of George Tuohey, Jenkins had worked his way into title contention. He sat ringside along with 1,500 other rabid wrestling fans that October in Indianapolis to witness Dan McLeod take the world championship from Farmer Burns. Immediately after the bout, which McLeod won two falls to one, Jenkins issued a challenge to the new champion.
Instead, a month later in front of the same fans, Jenkins beat Burns in consecutive falls. Both he and McLeod claimed the world championship. It’s unclear who had the right to call himself America’s best. Jenkins had battled Burns that March and the champion failed to throw him the required two times. But it wasn’t reported at the time as a title change. Going forward, both claimed to be the champion. A bout to settle the score seemed logical, but since Jenkins wasn’t part of the Burns inner circle, he didn’t get a real opportunity to dethrone McLeod for several years. Instead he returned to the Northeast, leaving the Burns troupe to their Midwest stomping grounds.
Between bouts with McLeod, Burns, and other major names of the time, Jenkins stayed plenty busy. Bravely, perhaps foolishly, he boxed with champions like Jim Corbett, risking his one good eye. Corbett won handily but made it clear he didn’t think there was a man out there who could take it to Jenkins with a more liberal rule set. In a straight fight, Corbett believed Jenkins was one of the toughest men in the world.
A Foreign Menace
Jenkins was one of the few Americans willing to take the challenge of the enormous Terrible Turks who came to the melting pot of the world to ply their trade against the nation’s best wrestlers. Foreign challengers would become a staple of the American mat game, but Youssuf Ishmaelo was a trendsetter, the first real Turkish wrestling star to make the trip to the western world to test his prowess against our mat masters.
That fact seems to have been lost in what was to follow; dozens of “Turks” eventually made their way to America, led by manager Antonio Pierri, described as having a head “shaped like an egg” and being as crooked as they come. The bulk of these were clearly frauds. Some, like the “Turk” who wrestled for Farmer Burns’s troupe, were really just swarthy Americans putting on a show.
It’s this confusion that may have caused the attack on Youssuf’s reputation in the years after his death, a tragic boating accident in 1898 that cost 546 people their lives. By the time Graeme Kent wrote The Pictorial History of Wrestling in 1968, Youssuf was being referenced as a French dock worker who wasn’t a real wrestler at all.
While there’s little doubt that wrestling at the time was filled with chicanery and plenty of gimmicks, it’s unlikely Youssuf Ishmaelo was one of them. If you wanted to create a gimmick wrestler to fill the role of “villainous foreigner,” why go through the trouble to recruit Koca Yusuf (Ishmaelo’s real name), one of the leading Turkish oil wrestlers of his generation? If you didn’t need him to actually be able to wrestle, why pursue the real thing when a Parisian dock worker really would have served just as well?
Ishmaelo was brought to France in 1894 where he ran roughshod over the leading European grapplers of the time. He beat Pierri, who would later become his manager, the enormous Frenchman Paul Pons, and the British star Tom Cannon before touring America in 1898.
The Turk immediately made a huge splash in New York. Promoters claimed he had won 115 bouts in Europe and promoter William Brady, an early motion picture and theater producer who knew a good drawing card when he saw one, offered $100 to any man who could last all of 15 minutes with the foreign terror. Veteran catch specialist George Bothner took him up on the challenge, but at 125 pounds was no match for the giant. Youssuf was furious that such a slight man would dare challenge him and knocked Bothner unconscious with a thunderous slam. The smaller man still remembered the bout clearly years later:
He was a modern Hercules and he knew how to apply his punishing strength, as he was as quick as a jungle cat and master of all holds. Youssuf came at me like a bull. He rushed me right off the mat into a bunch of chorus girls in the wing. The first thing I knew I found myself helpless. The Turk picked me up as if I was a kitten. Never before have I felt such terrible strength. Before I could give a wiggle or squirm he dashed me down on the boards with terrific force, knocking all the strength and wits out of me.
They told me that after I had landed, Youssuf rolled me over with his foot, looked out over the audience, gave a contemptuous snort, and walked off the stage. When I came to, I was a sadder, but wiser young man. Somehow or other I got into my clothes, hobbled out into the street and started to walk up Third Avenue towards my home. Youssuf had given my neck such a wrench that he almost tore it from my shoulders. It was several days before I could look in the direction I was headed.
Beating Bothner was one thing, he was 125 pounds soaking wet. Taking on a legitimate heavyweight was another thing altogether. But Youssuf was up to the task, challenging Evan “Strangler” Lewis, Ernest Roeber, and other wrestlers of note. Roeber was the first to respond, and the Turk manhandled the Greco-Roman star in front of a standing-room-only crowd at Madison Square Garden. It was a spectacle that intrigued more than just the male sports fans that typically attended wrestling bouts. The New York Times was shocked to find as many women as men in the crowd, all howling for the Turk’s blood. He entered with pomp, wearing an ove
rcoat over his trunks and a giant plaid turban. He was a monster of a man, 6'2" and nearly 300 pounds. The Times noted his muscular back and giant hands. Roeber, a man who relied much on physical strength as most heavyweight Greco-Roman wrestlers do, seemed to be in trouble: “The two men met on a giant open platform open on all sides. This was typical of the time — sports-specific arenas didn’t exist yet and performances were often held on the same stages that regularly held stage actors and musicians. Roeber wanted little to do with his enormous opponent. He danced around the edges of the platform, refusing to engage. Eventually Youssuf had seen enough. He pitched Roeber right off the platform. The American champion fell five feet to the ground and couldn’t continue.”
The crowd was hot for blood, calling for a lynching and surrounding the stage menacingly. The Turk was escorted to the back by a squadron of police officers. Tom Cannon volunteered to take him on in Roeber’s place, but officials felt the crowd was too riled up to bring the foreigner back onstage. Fearing for Youssuf’s safety, the evening’s entertainments were brought to a close.
Promoters, of course, were delighted. A rematch was scheduled for the Metropolitan Opera House a little more than a month later. The crowd packed into the building, and a large contingent of women again turned out to see the bout. If possible, it was even crazier than the first match.
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