Shooters

by Jonathan Snowden

  Nor should we be confused by the Gracie insistence on referring to Maeda as a practitioner of jiu-jitsu: in this first wave of judo’s internationalization, the relatively new term “judo” was used interchangeably with “jiu-jitsu”; early texts even make reference to “Kano jiu-jitsu.” What Maeda taught Carlos in their few short years together, and what Carlos and his frail brother Helio brilliantly transformed into the foremost submission grappling style on the planet, wasn’t unique because it was some ancient, secret strain of jiu-jitsu, a mysterious vestige of the feudal past, passed on to them by an exile committing a crime against his country. No, it was judo that Maeda taught, because that was all he had to teach, but it was, crucially, a judo twisted into new shapes and contortions by the demands of a life spent in the rough-and-ready world of professional wrestling.

  Ad Santel: Judo Conquerer?

  While Maeda was bringing judo to converts in North and South America, another important exchange was taking place at the Kodokan. Adolph Ernst, a wrestling world titleholder at lightweight as Ad Santel, brought the techniques and strategies of catch-as-catch-can wrestling to fellow grapplers in Japan.

  Santel’s name has survived what otherwise might have been a long forgotten wrestling career because of his role in the early development of future champion Lou Thesz. Santel was a legend in Thesz’s eyes, and contemporaries say a legitimate tough guy, a real handful for even the best wrestlers despite weighing just 175 pounds. Santel’s epic feud with the judoka of his era started simply enough — with a professional wrestling match in his hometown of San Francisco. His opponent was Ito, Maeda’s former running buddy who had returned to America when Maeda settled in Brazil. Santel dispatched with Ito by slamming his head into the ground for a TKO win in February 1916.

  Knowing a good gimmick when he saw one, Santel proclaimed himself the “world judo champion.” Wrestling, at the time, was a local and regional sport for the most part. While its popularity ebbed and flowed nationally based on the heavyweight champion, local areas could do brisk business with the right wrestlers as headliners. The world champion might, for example, visit Santel’s California stomping grounds just a few times a year, if that. The rest of the year it was up to him, and wrestlers like him all over the country, to draw a crowd. A gimmick like this just made it easier for Santel to keep food on the table for wrestlers in California.

  Four months later, Ito got his win back: “Ito threw Santel around the ring like a bag of sawdust. . . . When Ad gasped for air, the Japanese pounced upon him like a leopard and applied the stranglehold. Santel gave a couple of gurgles, turned black in the face and thumped the floor, signifying he had enough.”

  Santel’s loss was easily forgotten when the German made the trip to Ito’s adopted hometown of Seattle, Washington. Ito had beaten all comers there and established himself as a legitimate tough guy. A win over Ito carried weight in Seattle and Santel used his notoriety to challenge local judokas, beating two tough grapplers in 1917, slamming one so hard he was dizzy for some time.

  The Japanese judo establishment was aghast. They claimed Ito’s 10-year absence from the motherland might have weakened his judo foundation. He hadn’t been able to train with the very best. Thus, they claimed the losses did little to show wrestling’s superiority over their art. It merely showed a weakness in individual athletes.

  Santel decided to see for himself, traveling to Japan in March 1921 and challenging all comers at the Kodokan itself. While the venerable Japanese institution allowed mixed matches for research purposes, it did not approve of professionalism and refused to sanction matches for money. This didn’t stop some judoka from answering Santel’s challenge. Santel wrestled two men to a draw and won one match, a contest with a Japanese star who was part of Santel’s touring group.

  While Santel’s status as “judo conqueror” seems overstated, he and others who traveled to the land of the rising sun to try their hand at the Japanese style, like Russian wrestler Karl Pojello, had a lasting impact on those they grappled with. One of Santel’s opponents, Hikoo Shoji, became a pioneering if ultimately unsuccessful wrestling promoter in Japan. But even over in America, pro wrestling’s popularity slumped as the industry faced a promotional challenge of its own — what to do without its biggest stars.

  8

  A WORLD Without HEROES

  By 1913, Gotch had worn down. His final official title defense was in April of that year against Russian strongman George Lurich. In the immediate aftermath, chaos reigned. Gotch hadn’t taken a fall for a successor, still wanting to tour the country alongside boxing champions Jim Jeffries and Jess Willard with the Sells-Floto Circus. It was important to Gotch that he remain “The Unbeatable Frank Gotch” and so he left competitive wrestling with his reputation intact.

  Feeling some loyalty to his cartel and the industry he had helped create, Gotch attempted to use his influence to proclaim Charles Cutler as his rightful successor. Cutler was another Farmer Burns protégé and a fairly good wrestler and boxer. He had barnstormed with the great John L. Sullivan and even boxed the legendary champion Jack Johnson, who knocked him out in the first round. But Cutler met his match in Omaha, Nebraska, on July 5, 1915, against a gangly youth named Joe Stecher, the first of many double crosses that would shake the wrestling industry throughout the first half of the 20th century.

  Stecher had slowly built his reputation in Nebraska, making his professional debut in 1912 after seeing Dr. Benjamin Roller in action. The usual group of hustlers had come to Nebraska to fleece him and his supporters. Men like Burns protégé Yussif Hussane and Ad Santel, who hid behind the moniker “Otto Carpenter,” challenged the young Nebraskan, only revealing their true identities after the match had been agreed to. It didn’t matter what they called themselves, Stecher pinned them both with his leg scissors, taking advantage of a pair of tree trunk legs that looked odd underneath his lanky upper body. Although the leg scissors was not a new hold, historian Nate Fleischer explained no one had ever used it quite like Stecher:

  The climb from obscurity to fame, in any of the more strenuous sports, is usually tortuous and attended by pain and sorrow, but Stecher accomplished it almost overnight by the discovery of the body-scissors hold, the first really new trick devised in this form of athletics in a century.

  Marlene Dietrich’s limbs made her a million dollars. For a young lady to make a fortune by reason of her legs is natural to understand. But when a man makes a half a million dollars with his underpinnings, then there’s a good reason for climbing to the rooftops and telling the world all about it.

  Yet that’s exactly what Stecher did. His trick legs, sturdy as an oak, brought fame and fortune to the gladiator from the Middle West.

  The top wrestlers from around the world didn’t quite buy the developing Stecher myth, flocking to Nebraska to challenge him, confident they would solve the mystery of the scissorshold. With the “ringers” came plenty of gamblers, looking to take advantage of the locals who had invested so much in the hometown hero. This time the joke was on the hustlers. Joe and his brother Tony, a middleweight who took on the best smaller wrestlers in the country, always cleaned house.

  LEG SCISSORS INNOVATOR JOE STECHER

  SPECIAL COLLECTIONS OF THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES OF NOTRE DAME

  “Joe and I beat every ‘ringer’ the smart boys sent at us,” Tony later recalled. “And our farmer friends really cleaned up the gamblers.”

  Cutler was supposed to be the one to finally beat Stecher. Chicago-based gambling interests were counting on it. An all-star team was assembled to train him, including future world champions Ed “Strangler” Lewis and Earl Caddock. The gambling was fast and furious and literally hundreds of thousands of dollars were wagered on the bout, despite an earlier Stecher contest being canceled when Omaha police had gotten word it might not be on the up and up. Evidence of duplicity never seemed to stop the betting, which is many cas
es was more about figuring out what the hucksters would decide outside the ring than what was happening inside it.

  This match, contested in July 1915, appears to have been on the level. Cutler simply believed he would be able to beat the wunderkind — but he failed. Stecher took the first fall in 18 minutes and Cutler took his time getting to his feet, his insides crushed by the leg scissors Stecher had used to pin him. The second fall went even faster, the powerful scissors pinning Cutler to the mat in just 10 minutes. Cutler wasn’t just beaten, he was humbled.

  “We were a bunch of boobs,” Cutler told the local Fremont Herald. “We had the idea that another ‘farmer wonder’ had been courageous enough to announce himself in the heavyweight class and we came out here with the feeling that it would be like taking candy from a baby. . . . Stecher is a better man than I am. He can throw any man in the world. Frank Gotch cannot throw him, nor can anyone else.”

  Gotch was sitting ringside for the bout and for most wrestling fans was still the real world champion. There was money in a match between the old champion and his 23-year-old successor, and wrestling historian Steve Yohe believes it’s a match that was essential because “Gotch’s shadow hung over any claim Stecher had.”

  The match was tentatively set for Omaha when Gotch broke his leg in training, shattering his fibula and Stecher’s chances of being a transcendent star in a single mishap. Gotch died a year later of uremic poisoning, and an era died with him. Mac Davis described a whole state in mourning: “In Humboldt, his hometown, every store closed down, the schoolhouse was shuttered and empty, on the day of his funeral. Thousands of weeping mourners, gathered from many parts of the land, trudged the icy path to the rural cemetery on a cold December day to bid a final farewell to the farm boy who had been the greatest wrestling champion in history.”

  With Gotch and his mentor Farmer Burns out of the picture, a new collection of schemers and mat men had to carry the business forward. Gotch and Burns never ended up giving back to the burgeoning industry that had made them rich, failing to crown a new champion and leaving nothing but scorched earth behind them, the business falling into disrepute wherever they set foot. Stecher and his compatriots would have to build wrestling from the ashes of its former glory.

  The Big Four

  While Stecher took on all comers, his main rival was the burly Ed “Strangler” Lewis. Canonized by sportswriters and his protégé Lou Thesz as one of the toughest men of all time, Lewis was born Robert Fredericks in Wisconsin in 1890. He took his name from the original Strangler, Evan Lewis, and came to prominence with a win over Dr. Benjamin Roller in Lexington, Kentucky, for the American title in 1913.

  Soon after, Lewis met Billy Sandow, a former middleweight wrestler who had a flair for promotion. Together with a Burns protégé named Joseph “Toots” Mondt, the two would form the Gold Dust Trio, one of the most notorious and successful wrestling conglomerates in the sport’s history. When he first met Stecher, however, Lewis was just making his name nationally.

  The two wrestled to a draw in Evansville, Indiana, in October 1915, a dull affair that saw Lewis mainly on the defensive. Of course, only the few in that town knew how boring the match had been — the result was what mattered, and Stecher’s inability to pin Lewis was a feather in his cap that Lewis and Sandow used to promote Lewis throughout the country.

  A return match was booked in Stecher’s homebase of Omaha where 18,000 people watched the two grapple for almost five hours on July 4, 1916. When darkness claimed the last of the daylight, the mat was illuminated by car headlights. The two eventually had to settle on a draw. Many have used this match to demonstrate the turning point for the wrestling business. The theory proclaims that shooting contests were too slow and ponderous for fans to enjoy. It was matches like this one that led to creation of worked bouts to keep things interesting for paying spectators.

  It’s possible, however, that wrestling history is wrong — this match pointed at so often as the turning point between real and phony wrestling may have actually been far from a contest. Historian Steve Yohe believes the five-hour tilt between Stecher and Lewis was a product of gamblers betting on when the match would end. The longer the match went, the more fools were parted from their money, sure a winner would eventually come forward: “It wasn’t just a bad match, the people of Nebraska lost thousands of dollars betting on Stecher. Before and after the match, no one felt Lewis had a chance of beating or pinning Stecher, so the real bet was on the length of the match. Joe won all his matches in short time and straight falls, so the farmer types thought it was a safe bet to put their money on ‘Stecher under 60 minutes’ or even under 30 minutes. As the match continued, they kept raising their bets with each half hour. A small fortune was made by the Lewis bettors and big city gamblers all over the country. Lewis was willing to stall and ruin the contest because the money was in the gambling, not winning a match or a title. Stecher, himself, was probably in on it and made money. The word ‘mark’ was a gambling term long before it was used by the wrestling world.”

  While this famous example of a shoot may have indeed been a work, there’s no doubt that the wrestling business was transforming quickly. Fifteen thousand people had seen Stecher beat Cutler and 18,000 had been in attendance for the Lewis match, a dramatic increase in attendance compared to most bouts at the turn of the century. It was easier than ever to travel from town to town and urban areas were exploding all over the country. Money at the gate was becoming significant, and newspaper exposés of con men made betting less of a factor than ever, with potential marks leery of being suckered by professional con men.

  Curley was the leader in changing the business to reflect a rapidly declining attention span and the increased competition for entertainment dollars. It was no longer enough to come into a town and put on wrestling matches. They had to be entertaining or no one would come. Historian Scott Beekman makes the case for Curley as a transformative figure in the sport’s history: “The excitement engendered by boxing knockouts, motion pictures, and the startling home run power of Babe Ruth demonstrated to Curley that professional wrestling required a dramatic overhaul to stay competitive in the box office market. Curley and the other promoters, therefore, agreed to a variety of rule changes, including the adoption of time limits, referee’s decisions (to alleviate the public anger over time limit draws), and the increasing usage of one-fall matches. Most important, they recognized that through cooperative effort promoters could dominate the sport and effectively eliminate the power of independent-minded wrestlers.”

  Curley’s main opposition were Western promoters led by Gene Melady, a former football star who had made his money in the livestock business and then promoted many of the biggest matches of his era. He had been the man behind Stecher’s matches with Cutler and Lewis and controlled Earl Caddock as well. Dubbed the “Man of 1,000 Holds,” Earl was one of the top amateurs in the country, an AAU champion at both light heavyweight and heavyweight. Caddock was without a doubt a skilled wrestler, using the head scissors as his finisher in most matches; Melady took him to Farmer Burns and Frank Gotch for extra seasoning, making him even more dangerous. He trained with Gotch throughout 1916 as the legend prepared for a match with Stecher. Instead, with Gotch dropping out with an injury, promoters turned their attention to a Caddock-Stecher match, building both men into seemingly unstoppable juggernauts.

  When the two finally met in 1917, it was an extravaganza, packing an arena in Omaha full of more than 7,500 spectators paying $14,000 for the pleasure. Stecher had been known as wrestling’s last honest man, but let down his fans in a controversial contest. After splitting falls with Caddock, the first time either man had his shoulders pinned to the mat, Stecher refused to return for a third fall. In the seminal exposé Fall Guys, Marcus Griffin calls the bout nothing more than an opportunity to take Stecher’s fans for all they were worth:

  Again the unsuspecting friends and supporters of a wrestling king were taken into c
amp by the sharpers. Ranch men and farmers who had seen Stecher apply his famed scissors hold to luckless opponents were convinced that not a living man had a chance to beat their Nebraska pride and joy. Imagine their consternation when Stecher lost.

  The Stecher-Caddock bout has always remained one of the unexplained matdom mysteries. Joe won the first fall and Caddock the second after nearly an hour and 40 minutes of tugging. Then it was that Stecher threw down the many friends who had been betting on him by refusing to come out of his dressing room for the third and deciding fall. Caddock was named victor by “default.”

  While Caddock, Lewis, and Stecher dominated the scene in the Midwest, a fourth major star was created by in the Northeast. Wladek Zbyszko, younger brother of Polish wrestling sensation Stanislaus Zbyszko, became a player with a strong performance in a Greco-Roman tournament and a win over Lewis, both in New York. A big man with bulging muscles, Zbyszko looked the part — and unlike his brother had learned some hooks to go along with his classical wrestling acumen.

  Wladek, Stecher, Caddock, and Ed Lewis main-evented cards across the country for Curley and his partners, becoming the four biggest wrestling stars in America. Historian Steve Yohe calls it a golden era of wrestling, one often overlooked in the rush to move the narrative from the dominance of Frank Gotch to that of Lou Thesz in the 1950s.