Shooters

by Jonathan Snowden

  After building for much of the decade, the Stecher-Lewis match on February 20, 1928, did a respectable, but disappointing, $65,000 at the box office. Wrestling had taken its lumps in 1927, especially in the Midwest where Chicago authorities had investigated the sport’s legitimacy to lurid headlines in the local papers. Still, despite the hullaballoo, they attracted 7,500 people, including the mayor, assorted politicians, and dozens of writers from all over the country who reported the next day that Lewis had taken the title from Stecher, winning two of three falls in a match that went on until almost 1:30 in the morning.

  The match wasn’t without controversy. When Lewis scored the final pinfall, Stecher’s legs were both entangled in the ropes. It was a major point of contention, a screwjob finish if there ever was one, but word of it was largely confined to St. Louis: the Associated Press report, distributed nationwide, makes no mention of the ropes at all, saying, “[Lewis] won fairly and decisively, never leaving a doubt as to the outcome.” Still, Stecher was able to leave the sport with his head held high. Lewis, for his part, ignored the controversy and proceeded to defend his title exclusively against his own clique of wrestlers controlled by Boston-based promoter Paul Bowser.

  Dynamite

  Weeks before Lewis finally beat Stecher, Gus Sonnenberg made his professional wrestling debut in Providence, Rhode Island, where he was a football star. Sonnenberg had made his reputation nationally at Dartmouth, but football wasn’t paying the bills on the professional level. Giving wrestling a try, Sonnenberg was an immediate sensation. He made his debut in Boston for Bowser a week later, and in just a few short months amassed an impressive winning streak, even beating Wayne “Big” Munn, the original footballer turned wrestling star.

  Unlike Munn, Sonnenberg was “Dynamite” in the ring, earning that nickname thanks to an exciting style and explosive tactics. There was no veneer of wrestling in Sonnenberg’s performance. It was all show, including powerful open-hand slaps to the head and a flying football tackle that laid opponents out. A 1936 Time magazine article credits his appearance with spicing up and changing the wrestling game forever: “An upturn was provided in 1928 by Gus Sonnenberg and the flying tackle he used as a Dartmouth footballer. His first opponent, no halfback, was unable to dodge, was carted unconscious from the mat. The success of this new tactic quickly boosted the sport. With addicts neither so naive nor so particular as before, refinement soon disappeared entirely. Eye-gouging, hair-pulling, and kicking became common practice. Assault & battery on the referee proved a popular diversion. Lately one wrestler introduced the new fad of trying to garrote his opponent with three feet of chicken wire. Though even the most bloodthirsty addicts frown on its use, chloroform has been employed on several occasions to down an adversary.”

  Lewis defended his title against Sonnenberg for the first time on June 29, 1928. The football star had been wrestling for barely six months, but was one of the most popular stars in the game — 14,000 fans packed the Boston Arena for the confrontation. Lewis kept Dynamite Gus strong, giving the 5'7" 205-pound new star the first fall, losing to his patented football tackle despite having six inches, 30 pounds, and decades of wrestling knowledge on his opponent. In the second fall Lewis ducked a Sonnenberg tackle and the footballer went sailing out of the ring, right over the heads of amazed reporters ringside. He couldn’t continue and Lewis was awarded the match — but Sonnenberg hadn’t really lost, victim of his own enthusiasm more than anything Lewis had done.

  The rematch in January 1929 drew 20,000 fans to the Boston Garden. Sonnenberg had been busy in the meantime, not just winning wrestling matches, but helping lead the Providence Steam Rollers to an NFL title. More than just a tackle, he also played running back, threw for a touchdown pass, and was the team’s kicker. Against Lewis in a bout for the title, it was only his tackling that mattered. Sonnenberg rammed his head into the champion’s midsection again and again. Fans would compare him to a goat for all the butting he did, but it worked.

  It was the end of an era for Lewis, who had been among the sport’s top stars for more than a decade. It was the last time the Strangler would ever be the undisputed champion of the world. For $70,000 Bowser bought one clean fall and one countout. Lewis wouldn’t allow his shoulders to be pinned twice. In the second fall, the flying tackle knocked him out of the ring seven times.

  After the seventh pratfall Lewis couldn’t make it back into the ring to answer the referee’s count. Sonnenberg’s hand was raised and the Boston crowd exploded with joy. Educational Film Exchanges captured the bout on 1,000 feet of film and the match was shown all over the United States and Europe, giving wrestling fans across the country a taste of the action that had made Sonnenberg such a hit in the Northeast.

  For nearly two years he defended the title in front of solid crowds, but the specter of a shooter hung over his head. Sonnenberg would only wrestle a handful of carefully selected opponents. With zero real wrestling ability, almost any legitimate contender would be too much for him to handle if someone decided to double-cross him. The restrictions rankled some promoters. Tom Packs refused to use him in St. Louis, and in Pennsylvania he was suspended by the athletic commission for refusing challenges from worthy opponents.

  Sonnenberg traveled with a contingent of shooters, ready to take on any challengers who looked like they might threaten the champion. They were also his regular opponents on his barnstorming tour, a fact exposed by the media. One of his policemen, Dan Koloff, wrestled Sonnenberg under five different names.

  Of course, none of this stopped him from attracting huge crowds. Fans didn’t care whether he was a legitimate shooter. They just wanted to be entertained. A third match with Lewis set a new pro wrestling gate record by drawing $90,000. Held in the gargantuan Fenway Park, the 25,000 who were in attendance there saw what was described as one of the best matches in Boston’s history. Lewis won the initial fall, becoming the first to pin the champion, reversing his tackle and sending Sonnenberg crashing to the mat. The champion won the following two with his trademark tackle.

  “DYNAMITE” GUS SONNENBERG

  SPECIAL COLLECTIONS OF THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES OF NOTRE DAME

  On a west coast swing, Sonnenberg drew well against a returning Stecher, Lewis for a fourth time, and rising star Everett Marshall in a match that drew 25,000 to Los Angeles’s Wrigley Field, a miniature version of the venerable Chicago institution, for a California record-breaking gate.

  Meanwhile, other title claimants began to pop up in droves, including Jim Londos on the East Coast. A Greek immigrant, Londos was a solid wrestler and one of the most popular drawing cards in the country. He had expected the championship reign that was given to Sonnenberg, and when it was denied him, went his own way, teaming with Toots Mondt and drawing big money in his own right. Twenty thousand fans turned up in Philadelphia to see him beat Dick Shikat for their version of the world title.

  The promotional rivalry was intense. Londos and his crew even took the trouble to book a fake Sonnenberg in a tour of the south, losing most of his matches. Then, according to Lou Thesz, things got even uglier: “Londos arranged for a friend of his, an accomplished middleweight wrestler, to confront Sonnenberg on a crowded street in downtown Los Angeles and eye gouge him, then give him a thorough beating.”

  The beating did happen as described, with wrestler Pete Ladjone head-butting Sonnenberg in the face and straddling him, yelling that he had whipped the champion. Sonnenberg went to a police station and pressed charges. His assailant was given 30 days in jail, but the damage to the champion’s reputation was done. Damage to his body was piling up too — his aggressive style of wrestling, hard drinking, and numerous auto accidents were taking their toll on him after only a few years in the wrestling game.

  Double Crosses

  While many historians pinpoint this attack as the beginning of the end for Sonnenberg’s championship reign, in reality he actually ruled the mats for more than a
year after the street fight gone wrong. When the end did come it came at the hands of another newcomer, 1928 Olympian Ed Don George from the University of Michigan. George took the title from Sonnenberg in December 1930, leaving the popular football crossover to travel the country and simply make money for his partners, no longer having to worry about shooters gunning for a world title he didn’t actually need to draw a crowd. George was obviously legitimate and didn’t present any of the problems Sonnenberg did as champion, but promoter Bowser didn’t consult his partners Lewis and Sandow before making the decision to go with the new star. George was the one who paid the price.

  Just four months later on April 14, 1931, George lost the title unexpectedly to old man Ed Lewis. The former great, by then barely a month shy of his 40th birthday, wanted to prove a point to promoters and wrestlers in the business. In the weeks leading up to his title match he had been pushed hard, winning straight falls against serious contenders like Everett Marshall. When he decided to take the title from George, he told the young star that he could do it “the easy way or the hard way.”

  “We were supposed to wrestle a three fall match, and I was going to win of course,” George said. “We came out to the center of the ring for the referee’s instructions and Ed says to me, really casually and friendly, ‘Well, Don, tonight’s the night.’ I knew immediately what he was saying — that he was going to take back the title — and all I could think of to say was ‘Oh no.’ Ed smiled and said,‘Oh yes.’”

  Lewis himself was supposedly double crossed in a match three weeks later against Henri Deglane in Montreal, Canada, a town promoted by Bowser. Deglane, a 1924 Greco-Roman Olympic gold medalist, wasn’t a match for Lewis, even a 40-year-old Lewis, on the mat. Instead, according to the Strangler, Deglane bit himself between falls in the dressing room, then pretended Lewis bit him. Local reports confirm there was a biting incident. The Arena magazine reported:

  There was nothing eventful about the first fall of the match, which came in 33:15, save that Deglane surprised everyone, and especially Lewis, absorbing two devastating headlocks just prior to the end and coming back to side-step Lewis’s third rush, clamped on a wicked head and arm lock from which there could be no escape, and pinned the big one solidly. The contender then retired to his dressing room for the rest period, while Lewis remained in the ring, listening to his manager “ragging” the referee in an attempt to get that official excited into doing something like losing his head, but his success was not in evidence.

  In the meantime, DeGlane used the time to good advantage, returning to the ring in fine fettle and stepped in the lead by applying two or three headlocks that did the headlock king no good at all. Lewis started weakening, all of which might have had much to do with his following maneuver, and as they milled around on the ropes action got brisk fast. DeGlane, behind the champion, reached for a headlock to pull the big fellow to the center of the ring, only to let go in a hurry and fall to the mat beneath Lewis, nearly pinned. The referee, who had been making for the ropes, called the fall for Lewis, only to note the tooth marks and broken flesh on DeGlane’s right forearm. Thereupon he quite properly reversed the decision, giving the fall, the match, and the title to DeGlane on a foul.

  The champion was disqualified and Deglane awarded the title. At least that’s what Lewis and Lewis supporters like Lou Thesz wanted fans to believe. And it makes a great story — but more likely this was a way to get a championship belt on two different men at the same time. The screwjob loss allowed Lewis to advertise himself as champion in cities where he still drew well, while Deglane and later Don George were also able to represent themselves as the best in the world with yet another version of the world title. The championship was good for business — and the Deglane-Lewis match allowed two men to claim a title instead of one.

  They all played second fiddle, however, to Jim Londos, who was drawing huge crowds in New York’s Madison Square Garden. Soon Londos replaced Deglane and Lewis as the top stars in Los Angeles as well.

  Lewis struck back by challenging Londos in his New York base. Londos had broken free from Jack Curley and booker Toots Mondt, who were no longer getting a percentage of all his checks. They wanted Londos out, but he refused to meet anyone he felt he couldn’t trust, and they couldn’t find a way to get the title off of him. Plain old skullduggery had to do.

  Londos was tricked into signing a contract to face the winner of a Sammy Stein–Dick Shikat match — Londos was expecting the popular Stein to win. Instead, Shikat had his hand raised and Londos was in a pickle. Londos quit the promotion rather than wrestle Shikat in a straight match, and when Shikat did a job for Strangler Lewis, things went from bad to worse for Londos.

  Mondt manipulated the Athletic Commission into ordering a match between the two title claimants (Lewis and Londos), and when Londos refused, he was stripped of the title in New York in September 1932. The dashing Greek was fine — he just defended his title in California and elsewhere in front of packed houses. It was New York promoters and fans that suffered with a 40-plus Lewis headlining increasingly empty arenas.

  Eventually the commission ordered Lewis to wrestle Ray Steele to determine a rightful champion. Steele, a legitimate shooter, was one of Londos’s right-hand men. In a match thought to be a shoot by insiders, Lewis (representing Jack Curley’s interests) battled Steele (representing Londos) in a heated match at Madison Square Garden on December 5, 1932. Steele was disqualified for a series of elbows to Lewis’s head, allowing Lewis to lay claim to the world title in New York. It was a weird decision in a weird match. Elbows would normally be legal in a wrestling match in this era, seeing as wrestling was a full-on show. In fact they were used without incident on the undercard. But the officials treated this purported shoot differently — a tacit admission that most wrestling matches were not on the level.

  The match finish set off an uproar in the crowd. Londos fans and Lewis fans were fighting in the stands. In the ring, Steele’s second knocked out Curley with a single punch “that would have made a dent in a brick wall.” Time magazine claimed the crowd booed the match for 20 minutes straight: “The bout had not ended in a fall. Instead, after stumbling about the ring with their heads locked like two foolishly embattled elks, Lewis and Steele separated, glared, grunted. Steele whacked Lewis on the face with the back of his hand. Referee Forbes warned him to refrain. Steele whacked Lewis three times more. Instead of disqualifying Steele, Referee Forbes warned him again. A wrestler who had helped Lewis train for the match, lop-eared John Evko, climbed into the ring in his bathrobe, whacked Challenger Steele. Referee Forbes tried unsuccessfully to push Wrestler Evko out of the ring, then awarded the bout to Lewis on a foul. A disgruntled spectator slapped Promoter Jack Curley on the nose. Members of the New York State Athletic Commission prepared to investigate the bout.”

  In the end, peace was reached in a settlement that brought wrestling under the same management coast to coast. Lewis bombing at the box office played a big part in the decision. By 1933 he was drawing just 5,000 fans to Madison Square Garden and dropped the title to journeyman Jim Browning. Londos, a money-drawing star, was better for business and was soon reinstated as the world champion. Icing on the cake for Londos was a September 20, 1934, win over Lewis that set a new record, drawing $96,000 at Chicago’s Wrigley Field.

  Peace never seems to last long in wrestling and lessons learned are soon forgotten. Londos was replaced by a new hot box office attraction, Irishman Danno O’Mahony. A shot-putter, O’Mahony didn’t know a thing about wrestling — but under the tutelage of Boston’s Paul Bowser, who had guided the equally clueless Sonnenberg, that hardly mattered.

  O’Mahony was thrown right into the fire with a match against Lewis in London. His first match in America drew 14,000 to the Boston Garden for a bout with Ernie Dusek. Irish fans were rabid for the new star, sight unseen. Two weeks later, 16,000 came out to see O’Mahony dispatch Ernie’s brother Rudy Dusek. Two consecutive wins made
O’Mahony a huge name right out of the gates.

  In just his fourth match in America, O’Mahony was main-eventing Madison Square Garden against Ray Steele. He prevailed with his “Irish whip” quickly being established as one of the most devastating finishing holds in all of wrestling. O’Mahony won a reported 49 matches in a row — his 50th win was for the world title over Londos in front of 25,000 at Fenway Park in Boston on June 27, 1935. It was a momentous occasion — no one could recall the last time Londos had lost a clean match. He rarely even lost falls in two of three fall title bouts. He was guaranteed $50,000 for losing and received $20,000 from the gate receipts.

  A month later O’Mahony unified the title, beating Ed Don George at Braves Field in Boston. Forty thousand fans packed the stadium to see Danno become the undisputed champion. It was a wild scene as the special guest referee, former boxing great James Braddock, punched out George’s cornermen after the bout when they came charging into the ring after Braddock counted George out. An old-fashioned donnybrook erupted in the ring, setting up a rematch, to take place in front of 20,000 at Fenway Park.

  The good times came to an end when an angry Dick Shikat shot on O’Mahony during a match at Madison Square Garden in March 1936. Shikat, a real wrestler, was upset he had been passed over for an opportunity at the world title years earlier, when Jim Browning got the nod instead. Feeling mistreated, and doing more jobs than ever, Shikat took his career into his own hands. To get the title back, the wrestling trust actually took Shikat to court. They had a promotional contract with Shikat’s name on it and claimed he was in violation when he didn’t show up at bookings he knew nothing about. He ended up suspended in many states. The wrestling elite did everything in its power to make Shikat pay for his treachery.

  Shikat wanted to drop the title quickly to an outside promoter. The wrestling trust wanted to keep a hold of the belt and sued. It was a risky move, one that could have backfired if wrestling’s secrets were exposed to the world. Newspapers in New York reported on the trial, as did Time magazine: “One Joe Alvarez, who claimed to be [Shikat’s] manager, sought an injunction to keep Shikat from wrestling Baba in Detroit. Shikat frankly admitted that before three recent bouts, a man had pushed his way into his dressing room, instructed him to ‘lay down,’ lose the match. These orders he had faithfully executed until last March. Then, indignant at having to lose all the time, he disobeyed his dressing room order by pinning Champion Danno O’Mahony in a world championship match. At this testimony Promoter Jack Curley, who with five others rules the wrestling world today, exploded. Such a thing as a ‘fixed’ match, he yelped, was unknown to him.”