Steve Yohe, another noted historian, believes almost all of Gotch’s matches were works. Historians like Yohe would point out that plenty of newspapermen did question wrestling, outright calling it phony. Others, like the newspapermen Chapman relies on, were often part of the promotional machine. For example, Ed Smith, the referee in the first Gotch-Hackenschmidt match, was also a Chicago-area writer. These, some historians say, are hardly unbiased accounts. Yohe believes that big-time shooting matches rarely happened, if they happened at all:
Everything I’ve learned from pro wrestling stops me from agreeing with such fantasies. Pro wrestling has always been made up of people interested in making money with sportsmanship and ideas of fair competition left to amateurs. It wasn’t the contest or your won/loss percentage that was important. It was the money you brought home to feed your family that decided if you were a success or failure. Pro wrestling, as it is today, was a work. Styles are always changing but the concept of working matches has changed very little over the years. . . .
Now I believe the wrestlers of this period to be just as they were billed. They were shooter/rippers who deserved their reputations and I believe only the best were pushed as the major wrestlers. I also believe that most of what they did were shoots or near shoots. Major wrestlers spent most of their time performing in carnivals or traveling shows taking on all comers who were overmatched. At times special matches were set up with local amateurs with good reputations, who really had little chance versus a true pro. These matches, a good percentage of the time, were contests, but when a pro stepped into a ring with another skilled professional or amateur, he knew the outcome before he left the dressing room. Some matches may have been shoots if the dominant wrestler was sure of winning, but, for the most part, pros worked matches. Of course, this style of work also had to look completely legitimate, because some very hard people were betting on the outcome, and they were breaking the law. So kayfabe, in those years, was no joke. “Show moves” did not exist.
Gotch’s known associates also point to the possibility of deceit. Jack Carkeek was in Gotch’s corner for his 1908 match with Hackenschmidt. Just over a year later he was in federal prison, arrested as part of the Mabray gang and accused of putting on fraudulent wrestling bouts. His former manager Joe Carroll, who Gotch fleeced miners with in Alaska in 1901, was also arrested in the same nationwide scam.
Gotch was surrounded by frauds. There remains the possibility that he was an innocent among wolves, but it seems unlikely he was untouched by his cohorts’ efforts to fix matches. These weren’t random hangers-on. This was one of Gotch’s main training partners and his former manager. Gotch’s mentor Martin “Farmer” Burns was also often accused of working matches in the latter years of his career.
Finally, the promoter of the match, Jack Curley, was also suspected of masterminding a phony boxing match between Jack Johnson and Jess Willard. Johnson was struggling with the law and racist law enforcement agents, and had to flee America to escape an arrest warrant. Johnson’s biographer Geoffrey Ward writes that Curley had a solution to the champ’s problems: “According to Johnson, Curley had a ready answer. If Johnson would lie down to Willard and give up his championship, he could have a sizable off-the-record payment, in addition to which Curley promised to use his personal connections to see that he was allowed to go home again without fear of prison.”
Many Americans had already figured out wrestling wasn’t on the level. Not every performer was as talented as Gotch, and some hippodromes were easier to spot than others. Gotch’s wrestling seemed real; ironically, despite this legitimacy, the second Hackenschmidt match did more to damage wrestling in America than 100 newspaper exposés. Historian Scott Beekman believes it was the end of the golden age of wrestling. The poor performance in the match exposed the sport to ridicule nationwide, especially when film of the bout became widely available: “The Gotch-Hackenschmidt rematch fiasco did irreparable harm to professional wrestling. Already reeling from more than a decade of concerns over the legitimacy of matches, the Chicago debacle, occurring in a highly touted world championship bout, destroyed much of the remaining public faith in wrestling.”
The Gotch match was the last of Hackenschmidt’s career. He returned to Europe where he lived a long, full life outside the ring. Gotch, despite periodic retirements, defended his title on and off until his death in 1917. He spent much of his time working the carnival circuit, wrestling friends and business partners and eschewing competitors he did not already have an established relationship with. In 1916 he went on a 30-week tour of America with the Sells-Floto Circus. Accompanied by Jess Willard and manager Curley, Gotch took home a cool $1,100 a week.
With his inactive schedule, Gotch had essentially taken the wrestling business hostage. Promoters wanted to match the old champion up with rising star Joe Stecher, but Gotch made such unreasonable financial demands that the match never happened. In the end, a freak injury to his leg did what no opponent ever could — cause the great Gotch to collapse to the mat in pain. His leg was caught between two mats and his fibula was fractured during an exhibition with Bob Managoff in July 1916.
Gotch declared himself done, but as usual his retirement only lasted a few months. In August he filmed a match specifically for Selig Polyscope for use in the theaters. He was offered $85,000 to film two more matches, but he demurred. Again, though, Gotch found it was hard to stay on the farm. He wrestled a final bout against Leo Pardello at the Chicago Coliseum on May 1, 1917.
By the end of the year, Gotch was dead. There would be no comeback. Wrestling would have to find a new standard bearer. Two men were up for the job. Joe Stecher and Ed “Strangler” Lewis would battle for wrestling supremacy for much of the next two decades. While the two catch wrestlers met on the mats in America, a new generation of Japanese matmen was also preparing to take the world by storm. As American wrestling was finding a style of its own, across the Pacific judo stars were ready to shine in Japan and beyond.
7
From the KODOKAN to the COUNT of COMBAT: Mitsuyo Maeda
Mitsuyo Maeda — judoka, catch wrestler, and key figure in the founding of what would come to be known as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu — is a man around whom wild stories have swirled for more than a century. With Maeda, the tall tales take us back even further than the globe-spanning professional contests that would earn him the title Conde Koma (“The Count of Combat”), all the way back to the circumstances surrounding his earliest training, his first days at Jigoro Kano’s Kodokan, the very center of Japan’s grappling revolution. The tallest tales have been told by Maeda’s most famous students.
Brazil’s great Gracie family has undoubtedly given more than most to the martial arts world. From the days of Carlos and Helio, that first generation of Gracie grappling innovators, to the family’s current champion Roger, who shows the beauty of his family’s art every time he steps onto the mat or into the ring or cage, there can be no doubt of the efficacy of what has become the world’s foremost school of submission grappling. But one curious part of the Gracie package, part of what has sometimes been called “The Gracie Myth,” surrounds the origins of their art, and the supposed origins of Maeda, the instructor from whom all follows. In his excellent book co-authored with John Danaher, Renzo Gracie describes Maeda as “a highly regarded student of classical jiu-jitsu [who] eventually switched to Kodokan judo.” Crosley Gracie tells the same story, but in much more detail: Maeda, the story goes, overwhelmed his first five opponents at the Kodokan using skills honed by years of classical jiu-jitsu training and was awarded the rank of purple belt on the spot, in recognition of this considerable feat. That Maeda could burst onto the scene as Gracie describes it is unlikely but certainly possible; that he was awarded a purple belt — despite the fact that the introduction of coloured belts other than black, brown, and white did not occur until decades later under Mikonosuke Kawaishi in France — is an impossibility and shows the cracks in the
Gracie version of who Mitsuyo Maeda was.
The most meticulously researched and documented accounts of Maeda’s life paint a different picture of his origins as a martial artist. Born in 1878 in remote Aomori prefecture, Maeda came of age at a time when many of the classical, old-school koryu jiu-jiutsu schools were dying out. The relative few that remained suffered from poor reputations and were losing both high-profile challenges and promising students to Jigoro Kano’s Kodokan judo, founded in 1882 at Eishoji Temple. Kano had artfully synthesized the teachings of several koryu branches, notably Tenjin Shinyō-oryū and Kitō-ryū, and added to them the guiding principles of seiryoku zenyo (maximum efficiency) and jita kyoei (mutual welfare). Kano focused his judo — literally “the gentle way,” a self-consciously philosophical take on “the gentle technique” of jiu-jiutsu — on a relatively small number of techniques that could be drilled safely at full resistance, and discarded the more fearsome maneuvers of the old schools, which, while deadly in theory, were impossible to practice safely, or at all.
The emphasis at the Kodokan was on vigorous randori, live sparring that put a premium on throws, trips, pins, chokes, and joint locks that were both combat effective and safe — indeed, combat effective precisely because they were safe — and could be trained regularly and intensely. This, the best evidence suggests, is the crucible that forged Mitsuyo Maeda: not an unspecified, unnamed, unknown classical jiu-jiutsu school, but the Kodokan itself. After a youthful false start in the world of sumo — a sport which offered few possibilities for a diminutive man whose height and weight, variously reported, never exceeded 5'6" and 155 pounds — Maeda entered the Kodokan at the age of 18 while a university student. At the Kodokan, Maeda came under the tutelage of Tsunejirō Tomita, one of Kano’s original pupils, and one of the famed “Four Heavenly Kings of the Kodokan,” a now legendary group of judo’s earliest champions, veterans of the challenge matches that helped earn judo its place of prominence in the Japanese martial arts world. After four years of study under the guidance of Tomita, Maeda earned the fourth-degree black belt rank of yondan with a dynamic performance at a Kodokan tournament that saw him defeat no fewer than eight consecutive opponents.
Maeda was thriving. So too was judo on the whole: having firmly established itself as the preeminent grappling art in Japan by the turn of the century, Kodokan judo began its inexorable spread around the globe, fulfilling Kano’s international aspirations for his creation. Yoshiaki Yamashita, another “Heavenly King” of the early Kodokan, was one of judo’s most successful ambassadors in this period, taking up a teaching position at the U.S. Naval Academy and once instructing President Theodore Roosevelt, an avid boxer, in the fundamentals of judo at the White House. A year after Yamashita had set out on his tremendously successful visit to America, Tomita decided to follow suit, and brought with him two assistants: Soishiro Satake and the 26-year-old Mitsuyo Maeda. The three arrived in New York December 4, 1904, and straight away began a series of demonstrations at Columbia, Princeton, West Point, and various YMCAs throughout New York and New England. Tomita and Maeda would perform various kata — prearranged give-and-take exhibitions of judo techniques and principles — before taking on challengers from the crowd: wrestlers, football players, tough young athletes of whatever stripe. In order to make wins even more impressive, and to mitigate the impact of a loss or draw, Maeda and Tomita would generally solicit challenges from people larger than themselves (which wasn’t hard). Tomita and Maeda continued with these sorts of public demonstrations, extolling the virtues of their judo way for the better part of a year, establishing a modest judo club in New York City along the way.
But it wasn’t until Maeda parted ways with Tomita later that year that the shape of things to come would come into focus. A November 6, 1905, article in the Asheville, North Carolina, Gazette News reported that Maeda had been in contact with Akitaro Ono, a judoka who had come to America in hopes of securing a teaching position and turned to professional wrestling to make ends meet when those hopes were dashed. Ono would eventually go on to teach in military academies in Berlin and Gross Lichterfelde and would come to be seen as a pioneer of German judo, but when Maeda came upon him in North Carolina, he was in somewhat rougher shape: less than two months earlier, Ono had been battered in a bout against Charley Olson, a much smaller wrestler who is thought to have made off with the better part of $10,000 in side bets for his efforts. Not long after this encounter with Ono, Maeda was taking pro wrestling bouts in Georgia, and, according to the Atlanta Journal, living out of a YMCA in Selma, Alabama. This was not exactly what Kano had in mind when he encouraged his students to take his judo abroad. “With judo,” Kano said, “We have no professionals in the same sense as other sports. No one is allowed to take part in public entertainment for personal gain. Teachers certainly receive remuneration for their services, but that is in no way degrading. The professional is held in high regard like the officers of a religious organization or a professor in the educational world. Judo itself is held by us all in a position at the high altar.”
There can be no doubt that Maeda, making the leap into the world professional wrestling, was, out of necessity or otherwise, turning his back on at least part of the lofty educational ideal of Kodokan judo. But Selma, Alabama, was a long way from the Kodokan.
It was also just the beginning. For much of the next 20 years, Maeda would travel the world, joined variously by Soishiro Satake, Akitaro Ono, and Tokugoro Ito, a rough-and-tumble judo champion turned professional wrestler who, according to martial arts historian Joseph Svinth, might well have been originally brought overseas by the Seattle Japanese Association “to intimidate union organizers and patrons of Chinese-owned gambling houses and brothels.” First, they went to Cuba, where they would come to be known as “The Four Kings of Cuba,” then in quick succession England, Scotland, Belgium, and England again where, most notably, Maeda competed in the 1908 Alhambra tournament and impressed many with strong performances against much bigger men. Later, he came up short in a 1909 bout against heavyweight boxing great Sam McVey. In Spain, Maeda performed under the name “Komaru Maeda,” or “Troubled Maeda,” in an “ironic allusion to his financial troubles,” but it was another name bestowed upon him during his time in Spain that would stick with him for the rest of his days: “Conde Koma,” The Count of Combat. We know that throughout his many travels, Maeda taught judo whenever he could, and we know that he wrestled and fought almost constantly to make a living; what we don’t know, exactly, is when he was working and when he was shooting. There was, in all probability, more of the latter than the former.
The oft-repeated claim that Maeda won no less than 2,000 professional fights in his day is complete speculation and does not bear scrutiny. Maeda and his comrades were all tough, skilled martial artists, with strong, verifiable backgrounds and achievements in a physically demanding discipline before they began their careers as professional wrestlers. There was nothing ambiguous about their skill. But there is, understandably, a great deal of ambiguity surrounding the legitimacy of the bouts they took part in regularly to pay the rent.
Other times, the game was entirely clear. After Spain came Havana, and after Havana came Mexico City, where Maeda took up residence at the Principal Theatre in 1909 and made his mark with a simple proposition: if any man could throw him, that man would walk away 500 pesos richer. If it turned out you couldn’t budge Maeda, but Maeda couldn’t throw you either, you would earn the more modest but not inconsiderable sum of 100 pesos. There is no record of anyone ever collecting either sum, although we are probably within our rights to wonder whether or not these encounters were entirely on the up-and-up. What happened next, we can be sure was pure theater: a mysterious Japanese by the name of Nobu Taka emerged as a challenger to Maeda in a bout that was billed as the World Jiu-Jitsu Championship. In front of a stunned audience, Taka won the match, only to drop the entirely fictitious title of World Jiu-Jitsu Champion back to Maeda a mere four days later. History reco
rds that “Nobu Taka” was in fact Maeda’s old friend Soishiro Satake; it does not record how, exactly, their impressive little stunt was viewed by Mexican bookmakers.
Despite theatrics like these, Maeda was somewhat controversially promoted to the Kodokan rank of fifth degree black belt for his considerable work popularizing judo, particularly in Cuba, even if his methods were rarely in keeping with the founder’s vision. He would ultimately attain the rank of seventh degree. Through all the stunts and the shenanigans, the real challenge matches and the staged wrestling bouts — and who knows where his contest against a knife-wielding Capoeirista falls on that spectrum? — Maeda was always a man of judo. After he married and settled in Brazil, the pro wrestling matches and the fights dwindled, but his commitment to the art he studied under the watchful eye of Tomita those many years ago never wavered. Maeda, with his chief partner in crime, Satake, are celebrated as key figures in the history of judo in Brazil, a country where judo has positively thrived. Clube Remo, a judo club Maeda founded in 1921, still operates to this day.
But despite those considerable contributions to the sport of judo and to his adopted home of Brazil, Mitsuyo Maeda would have almost certainly remained little more than an obscure footnote in the history of professional wrestling and the martial arts were it not for a chance encounter with a young Carlos Gracie. Had the 14-year-old Gracie not been in the audience at the Teatro da Paz in Belem that night in 1917, had he not been fascinated by the grace and efficiency of Maeda’s peculiar judo, a judo shaped by contests against all comers from all over the world, would we, today, know the name of either man?
Here, again, the Gracie myth, that curious and unfortunate part of the Gracie package, rears its head. Carlson Gracie, describing his father’s brief but vital period of study under Maeda, inexplicably suggests that “at the time, it was considered a crime against the nation for a Japanese national to teach jiu-jitsu to a non-Japanese.” As we’ve seen, nothing could be further from the truth: Yamashita, Tomita, Maeda, and others like them traveled the world over with the explicit aim of spreading Kano’s art, and were in fact commended for their efforts by the Kodokan itself, the very heart of judo.
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