Shooters

by Jonathan Snowden

  In 1967, despite wrestling clearly not being above board, some fans were still desperate to prove it was all “fake.” That it was all entertainment was evident to anyone with a functioning cortex — but that didn’t stop some fans from pursuing the issue aggressively with wrestlers during and after the shows. It was likely the leading cause of fights between wrestlers and fans in bars after the matches — the boys felt obligated to protect their industry.

  A group of aggressive fans began attending the shows in Columbus, Georgia, eager to get a shot at Mr. Wrestling. Leading the charge was biker Arnold Spurling, a 280-pound street fighter looking for trouble. Against all reason, Woods proceeded with the challenge, despite knowing trouble was brewing.

  “The head of the security police at the City Auditorium warned [promoter] Fred Ward that this guy was trouble. When both men entered the middle of the ring, that Wednesday night for their showdown, Spurling sucker punched the mild-mannered Tim Woods, ripped his mask off and threw it to the audience,” wrestler Dickie Steinborn stated on the Wrestling Classics message board. “Everyone was stunned. Tim sat up and buried his face between his knees. Spurling did something no other wrestler was capable of doing for over a year. The mask was thrown back into the ring and the referee handed it to Tim. Now Woods realized what he was in for.”

  Woods asserted his wrestling dominance from there on out, taking Spurling down easily several times and riding him, wearing his opponent out. He quickly went behind Spurling and took him down amateur style. Spurling was out of shape and Woods seemed to have things under control. Sensing that Spurling was flagging, Woods went for a cross face the third time he took him to the mat. That’s when the biker bit an entire joint of his finger off.

  “Spurling bit as hard as he could,” Steinborn remembered, “to dislodge the tip of Woods’ finger from his hand. Tim said, ‘What pissed me off, he stood up and disgustedly spit that finger onto the mat.’ Tim charged him for a double-leg takedown, which sent Spurling out of the ring and onto the floor. Woods then stepped through the ropes and jumped down onto Spurling’s body, sprawled on the cement floor. Spurling’s henchmen came out of the audience, which then emptied the dressing rooms to end the melee.”

  Punishing the Marks

  For the most part, that ended the challenge matches in America, although in Britain wrestlers like William Regal often paid their dues in a carnival setting before making it in the business. In America removing the challenge match limited the ability of wrestlers and promoters to defend the honor of the business. But sadists like Florida promoter Eddie Graham were not easily assuaged. Graham was by all accounts a solid citizen in Florida, well respected in the community and a generous supporter of amateur sports.

  Perhaps because of that reputation he felt the need to make sure wrestlers were considered legitimate. Marks still needed to be taught a lesson, both the ones who thought wrestling was fake and the ones who thought they were good enough to be wrestlers themselves. Former Olympian Bob Roop often worked over a steady stream of victims for Graham.

  “These guys had to sign a contract that said, ‘I will not sue even in the case of serious injury, permanent injury, or death.’ Or death! And these guys would sign that,” Roop said. “Does that give you a clue that maybe this is a little more than a workout here? A little more than pushups and situps? Of course then they come back there and say, ‘Bob, kill the guy.’”

  Roop came from an amateur background and didn’t feel comfortable hurting people. Pinning them? Sure. Using painful holds like the guillotine (today known in MMA circles as “the twister”)? No problem. But doing permanent damage wasn’t his style. Yet to promoters like Graham or long-time veterans like Terry Funk, it was crucial that anyone who came to challenge the wrestlers paid a price.

  Roop remembers a time he tried to help one prospective wrestler who had bitten off more than he could chew. The man’s girlfriend was ringside and it was an ugly scene. The man was out of it and Roop encouraged her to take him out the back door. But because they were parked out front they went out that way — right past Eddie Graham.

  Recalled Roop,

  Eddie pops the guy on the eyebrow, busting him wide open. Blood everywhere and they’re screaming and yelling. It was sickening. Years later I told Terry Funk about it and he explained something to me. Now Terry grew up in the business and had a much harder mindset than me. Terry and Senior used to fight in bars and things to draw money and show that they were tough.

  Terry said when you do wrestle with a mark, someone who has told everybody in his circle of friends, everybody in the bar or wherever he hangs out, that he’s going to try out with a pro wrestler — even if you stretch the guy to the point he has to lay in bed for four or five days because he’s so sore . . . four or five days later he goes back in the bar and says, “Oh, I kicked his butt. That stuff’s fake.” But he doesn’t have any marks on him. Nothing’s broken, nothing’s busted. It’s possible what he’s saying is true. Terry said, ‘That’s why you’ve got to mark them.’ Put in that context? Makes sense.

  While many men doled out beatings for Graham in Florida, the most brutal administer of punishment was an average-looking Japanese man named Hiro Matsuda, a former baseball player who had been one of Danny Hodge’s key rivals as light heavyweight champion. Matsuda didn’t look dangerous, but that’s part of what made him so deadly.

  “He was the franchise wrestling backbone of the Florida territory as a heel before Jack Brisco,” said former NWA world champion Dory Funk Jr. “But he was also the Florida policeman — the policeman at the gate. If anyone wanted to get into the business, they had to go through Hiro Matsuda first. We’d turn them loose with Matty and find out if they really wanted to be wrestlers. Consequently, we didn’t have a lot of guys come into the business at that time.”

  Matsuda didn’t just eliminate the dredges of society and overweight truckers. Legitimate prospects like Hulk Hogan had to pay their dues too — even if they looked like a million bucks and had “future star” written all over them. Matsuda worked Hogan until the big man could barely stand. Then the fun really began. Hogan remembers,

  I told Matsuda I was liable to go down at any second.

  “All right,” he said. “Now it’s time to wrestle.”

  Before I knew it, Matsuda was sitting down between my legs and putting his elbow in the middle of my shin. Then he grabbed the end of my toe and twisted my foot until — crack! — my shinbone broke in half. The whole thing took about two seconds.

  I had barely gotten into the ring and my damn leg was broken.

  Florida wasn’t the only territory that punished men looking to get into the business. Graham might not have even been the most brutal gatekeeper. In Canada, Stu Hart had his famous dungeon where hearing screams was commonplace for the Hart children growing up. Hart had a sadistic streak; not always looking to teach people the art of catch wrestling, he’d often punish weight lifters and others who made the mistake of coming into his domain.

  In the Carolinas, the rugged Anderson brothers were especially aggressive. Like in Florida they liked to work prospects until they were virtually immobile. That’s when the beatings began. Ole Anderson would apply a “sugar hold,” a half nelson variation that could quickly render a foe unconscious — especially if he had allowed you to demonstrate it on him.

  “There were big holes in the low ceilings made by the heads and feet of wrestlers,” Stu’s son Bret Hart wrote in his autobiography, Hitman. “Stu trained and broke in his wrestlers down there, hooking on like an octopus, squeezing hard enough that the screams of his victims would echo eerily through the rest of the house.”

  “Once I applied the sugar hold, I would really work it,” Anderson remembered. “The most effective thing I did with it was to take a mark to the edge of passing out, then bring him back. In other words, as he started to go under, I’d ease up on the pressure and let him relax for a second. Just as he be
gan take a quick breath, I’d clamp down on the hold and push him forward again. It’s the most miserable feeling you could ever have because you get panicky. The worst thing about it is, you can’t do a thing about it. You can kick or do whatever you want to do, but you just can’t do anything to get out of it.”

  Wrestling had come a long way since the days of Farmer Burns. Burns at least had the intention to actually train the men he stretched. The brutality in later years was an overreaction. Few in the audience believed wrestling was real — perhaps the backroom bouts just compensated for those feelings of inadequacy by showing skeptical fans and wannabe rasslers just how real it could get.

  The divide between amateur and professional wrestling had never been greater than it was in the 1960s and 1970s. Verne Gagne was able to sign Olympian Chris Taylor to an AWA contract, but for the most part the top amateurs avoided pro mats like the plague. One exception came, like many of amateur wrestling greats, from the state of Oklahoma. Danny Hodge was no ordinary amateur — he might have been the greatest wrestler in America’s history.

  12

  THE GREAT DANNY HODGE

  It’s one thing to see all the accolades on paper. NCAA champion, Olympian, legend. Dan Hodge was all those things. But seeing his power for yourself — that’s something else entirely. Hodge, well into his 70s, could take an apple in each hand and squeeze them to pieces. In his prime, he could rip a phone book in half with his bare hands. Typical strong man stuff to be sure — until you remember Hodge weighed just 177 pounds.

  “He’s a strong man,” college teammate and sparring partner Gene White said. “Strong as maybe three men in fact.”

  “He had big paws and grip strength to die for,” two-time NCAA champion Wade Schalles said. “He’d go into hardware stores and say, ‘My dad sent me in for some pliers. Give me the very best one’s you’ve got.’ Then he’d break the pliers with his hands.”

  In collegiate wrestling the best wrestler every year is given the Hodge Trophy. That’s not by coincidence. Simply put, there is a strong argument Hodge is the greatest wrestler America ever produced. He was a legend before he ever entered NCAA competition, actually representing America in the Olympic Games right out of high school. At 19 he finished fifth in the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, losing by pinfall to Russia’s David Cimakuridze.

  Former WWE announcer Jim Ross explained, “He was a hero to small town youth in our state. He came from Perry [Oklahoma], and Perry is like the Williamsport of wrestling. Where Williamsport is known nationally as the capital of little league baseball, Perry was a wrestling Mecca where kids started wrestling at four or five years old. It’s a rite of passage there. Hodge, coming out of high school, goes to the ’52 Olympics without any international experience. He’d never been on an airplane, never been on a boat. . . . That’s pretty phenomenal. He was a hero, and he became a star. His work and his work ethic and the results he got made him a star.”

  After the Olympics, college wrestling seemed easy. Ineligible his freshman year, Hodge won every match for the next three years running, taking home three NCAA championships for the University of Oklahoma. But that doesn’t do his dominance justice. “He’s too good for college boys,” opposing coach Rex Peery once said. “He’s head and shoulders above what we got.”

  Hodge was an unstoppable monster, winning nearly 80 percent of his matches by pinfall and never once being taken off his feet in competition. Prior to the Big Seven finals in 1957, Hodge had finished 19 opponents in a row by pinfall — a feat as unthinkable then as it is now. He went on to pin all four opponents in the national finals, finishing with 23 pinfalls in a row.

  “Do you know what the average time was in my matches during the Big Seven tournament?” Hodge asks any one who will listen. “Less than two minutes. One minute, 33 seconds. Some were a little longer, some were a little shorter. But nobody lasted too long. I wasn’t there to play. I was there to pin you. It’s easier to pin you than to beat you.”

  Prior to his senior year in college, Hodge once again represented the United States in the 1956 Olympics. In the midst of his unprecedented success in the collegiate ranks, he wasn’t quite ready for freestyle wrestling’s modified rules. On his way to the gold medal against Bulgaria’s Nikola Stanchev, ahead 8–1, a momentary lapse led to Hodge’s shoulder briefly touching the mat.

  “He missed winning the 174-pound gold medal by two seconds,” Hodge’s college coach Port Robertson said.

  “They weren’t even touching at the time,” Hodge biographer Mike Chapman said in an interview. “I talked to the Australian mat judge, who didn’t even know I knew Dan Hodge, and he said it was the worst call he’d ever seen in international wrestling. . . . The people of that era just shake their heads in wonderment. . . . To this day he has to live with the fact that he didn’t win the Olympic gold medal when most people could see he was the best wrestler in the world.”

  Hodge would have been just 28 for the 1960 Olympics and the odds-on favorite to win. But it was a different time and the Olympics held firm — only amateur athletes could compete. Hodge, who grew up working with his father 100 feet in the air on oil rigs, needed to make a living.

  “I thought I was going to coach and teach for a while but I went to work for a mud company in the oil fields in Wichita, Kansas,” recalled Hodge. “They told me as strong as you are you’d be a good boxer. I started going to the gym in the afternoons and hitting the heavy bag, and the first thing you know they’re getting me two or three fights a week.”

  Hodge gave boxing a try and was undefeated in amateur competition, mainly relying on his superlative athleticism to win the National Golden Gloves tournament in Madison Square Garden as a heavyweight. He looked a bit clumsy at times and was prone to shoving his opponent around the ring — he was warned by the referee several times to “stop wrestling.” But Hodge felt good about his chances, confident in his toughness and natural power.

  “In wrestling,” he said at the time, “you keep your muscles tight and tense; in boxing you keep them loose and agile. That’s what I’ve been doing, loosening up my muscles — jabbing long, working on my combinations, not pulling with my muscles like I would be in wrestling.”

  A YOUNG DANNY HODGE

  © WREALANO@AOL.COM

  He was knocked down early in the finals by Charles Hood — Hodge was still committing some major technical mistakes, dropping his left hand every time he threw a powerful overhand right. Hood did what no wrestler had managed in years — he took Hodge off his feet. The Oklahoman recovered at the count of eight and returned the favor twice in the second round before the referee stopped the fight. The 12,000 fans in Madison Square Garden roared and some were comparing the wrestler to a young Rocky Marciano.

  “The crowd was roaring. You can’t imagine the noise,” Hodge remembered 50 years later. Visions of enormous wealth in his head, Hodge signed on Sugar Ray Robinson’s manager George Gainford as his advisor and gave boxing a go. Not everyone felt as good about his chances.

  In New York, veteran trainer Charley Goldman was a little less enthusiastic than some fans. “I ain’t seen the kid yet, of course, but I ain’t excited,” he told Sports Illustrated. “Everybody thinks they got a heavyweight champion just because they got a big strong kid. Right now, he’d get killed by a pro. He don’t know enough about boxing. Of course, Rocky didn’t start fighting amateur until he was 25. I understand Hodge is the same age. Rocky didn’t turn pro until he was 28 either. If this kid is as big and strong as they say, you could teach him an awful lot in three years. But like I say, I got to see him first.”

  Goldman, ultimately, was correct. Although promoters considered matching him with champion Floyd Patterson, Hodge was never a skilled craftsman as a boxer. His final fight was against fringe contender Nino Valdes. Best known for beating former world champion Ezzard Charles and going the distance with the great Archie Moore, Valdes ha
d an up and down career. But he was way too much boxer for a young Dan Hodge, beating him mercilessly in 1959.

  “I saw him two weeks after the fight and I’d never seen anyone with that much damage and trauma to his face and eyes,” Hodge’s friend “Cowboy” Bill Watts wrote. “Danny had such great heart and was one of the greatest athletes I’ve ever seen, but that doesn’t make you a boxer. He just had so much courage he’d let opponents hit him, and he’d eventually wade through them.”

  In addition, like many young men entering the fight game, he ran into some clever hucksters who took him for a ride. It’s one thing to go through the car crash that is a professional boxing match. It’s another to do it for free — yet Hodge says he eventually went home empty-handed.

  “I won eight of my ten fights but I never got paid a cent,” Hodge admitted. “I told them I could fight all day in Perry, Oklahoma, if I was going to be fighting for free. That’s when I decided to call up Leroy McGuirk and give professional wrestling a try.”

  McGuirk, like Hodge, was a former NCAA champion, taking home the top prize in 1931 at Oklahoma State. McGuirk had been the top junior heavyweight wrestler of his era and the territory he owned, later called Mid-South, was one of the few willing to put a smaller wrestler on top.

  Mid-South was the perfect fit for Hodge. It helped that he was a legend in Oklahoma already, so the fans were willing to buy into him as a credible star. Jim Ross says a humble personality may have held Hodge back in the business, because the amateur star was not a natural showman. Wrestling legend Terry Funk writes that as great as he was, Hodge would have had trouble getting over big in other areas of the country: