Kit Bauman explained things from Thesz’s angle: “He always was alert to the possibility of a double cross, but he trusted Karl enough, once they’d started working, to lower his guard. When Karl blocked him, it hit Lou immediately that something was up, and he ended things immediately. ‘I made him howl’ is how Lou put it. So yes, Lou believed it was an attempted double cross. And he was mad at himself for almost allowing it to happen. He once said to me, long after that initial conversation, that Karl was an excellent choice to do it, because he was a good wrestler and probably could have pulled it off if Lou hadn’t been so quick to snatch him and end the match.”
Those who knew Gotch don’t believe that this match was a shoot at all, believing the double wristlock submission was the scripted ending of the match. Wrestlers who worked out with both men simply doubt that Thesz would have so easily submitted a wrestler as skilled as Gotch.
But the injury to Thesz wasn’t anything unusual for the hard-charging Gotch, who had problems seemingly everywhere he traveled. Wrestler Abe Jacobs told reporter Mike Mooneyham, “I once said to him, ‘Karl, you haven’t got any friends left.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, you’re the only one I’ve got.’ Like I said, he was a hard guy to get along with. He had a quick temper and could get madder and madder by the minute.”
His most famous incident backstage occurred, once again, in Haft’s territory. Buddy Rogers, then the world champion, refused to meet either Gotch or Dr. Bill Miller in a title match. Rogers was the biggest star in the industry, but not a legitimate wrestler. To most everyone in the business this was meaningless — after all, wrestling hadn’t been about legitimacy in decades by this point. But to men like Gotch, Thesz, and Miller (a two-time Big Ten wrestling champion in the 1940s) it was paramount. Rogers, perhaps rightfully so, feared a double cross and didn’t think either man was worth the risk, neither being a huge draw in his mind. But for the two shooters, Rogers’ refusal to fight them was a hit to the pocketbook. A title match with Buddy Rogers meant a big house and a big payday.
Gotch and Miller cornered Rogers backstage at a show in Columbus in 1962. What happened next is shrouded in mystery. Ed “The Phantom of the Ring” Garea, a prominent wrestling historian, tells the tale this way:
Buddy Rogers was the reigning NWA champion and if there was one person Buddy didn’t like, it was Karl Gotch. Rogers often compared Gotch with Lou Thesz, whom he also distrusted, and let anyone within earshot know his feelings. Gotch, for his part, hated gimmicks and performers, feeling them inferior to a skilled shooter such as himself. When Gotch got word of Buddy’s feelings toward giving him a title shot, he confronted Rogers in the dressing room. Rogers told him straight out that not only didn’t he trust Gotch not to double-cross him, but that there was no money to be made in a match with Gotch. Gotch suggested that they have it out right there and then. Buddy demurred and began to leave the locker room only to find his way blocked by Bill Miller, Gotch’s friend and another wrestler snubbed by Buddy. Gotch began to pummel Rogers with his fists, and Miller, for his part, played the part of goalkeeper, in that he kept Buddy in play when the champ tried to run.
When it was all said and done, Buddy was bloody but unbowed, except for a broken hand, which limited his appearances for the next couple of months. He filed assault charges against the pair, who turned themselves in the next day to the Franklin County (Ohio) Sheriff’s Office, where they were released after posting a $25 bond each. Haft was livid, but managed to smooth things over with the authorities, using the old “boys will be boys” canard. The real damage, however, was done in the eyes of other promoters, who quickly listed Gotch as Trouble Personified, one reason why he mainly kept to Haft’s promotion until 1965, with only a stop or two in Japan.
Miller, a 6'6" 290-pound giant of a man, admitted they roughed Rogers up a bit, but claims Rogers left relatively unscathed. Rogers’ hand, according to Miller’s interview with radio host Mike Lano, wasn’t broken. “We got him in the dressing room and I stood in front of the opening,” Miller said. “Gotch slapped him. Then I slapped him. He ran right past me, pushing me out of the way to get out of there. . . .We never slammed, or crushed, or broke his hand in the doorway.”
Whatever happened in the locker room that day, it was the end of the line for Gotch. It was bad enough to be difficult to work with, temperamental, and capable of serious violence. Taking out your frustrations on a money draw was a step too far, especially when you weren’t a money-making star in your own right. Miller, a great wrestler and a star, survived the tumult. Gotch was essentially persona non grata everywhere but in Haft’s territory for the second half of the 1960s.
Luckily with Miller’s help he was able to catch on in Japan, eventually becoming a star there. Things calmed down in the States, as time seems to heal all wounds, and eventually Gotch settled into life as a show wrestler. Gotch and Rene Goulet were even tag team champions for Vince McMahon Sr. in the WWWF. Gotch and Goulet still held the titles when wrestler Antonio Inoki, looking for an opponent for New Japan Pro-Wrestling’s debut in 1972, made Gotch an offer he couldn’t refuse. With next to no notice Gotch left McMahon and American wrestling behind, taking the title belt he had kept when he was AWA champion to Japan with him — it was the perfect prop for the “Real World Title” Inoki won from Gotch to establish himself as the real deal. In Japan, Gotch finally found a home.
He was too old to be an active wrestler for long, but found work not only helping Inoki book the matches, but as a trainer for the young wrestlers as well. It was here Gotch shined, teaching the up-and-coming stars real wrestling holds and strategies to go along with their pro theatrics.
Shunned and blacklisted in America, Gotch was embraced by the Japanese as the “God of Wrestling.” The matches in the ring were still as fixed as ever, but in the dojo Gotch taught the next generation of Japanese stars to wrestle for real. Gotch brought the grappling techniques and teaching methods he learned in Wigan with him to Inoki’s New Japan Pro-Wrestling. There, Gotch found students willing to work hard, shut their mouths, and listen.
“He was made for Japan. And Japan was made for him,” Malenko said. “Karl had two things going for him in Japan. First, they respect talent. . . . Here in the States we were ‘rasslers.’ But over there we were wrestlers. Over here it was ‘You’re one of those jabronis that do that fake shit.’ Over there they look at you and actually appreciate your abilities and your talent. . . . And second, he was an older guy by the time he went there to train them and they respect their elders. It’s part of their culture.”
Things were different in Florida where Gotch settled between tours of Japan and after retiring. He often responded to requests from wrestlers in America to teach them his shooting style with a gruff indifference. Gotch had a firm belief that knowledge had to be earned. The cost he demanded was in sweat and time. He demanded prospective wrestlers be in exquisite physical shape before he would take them under his wing. Otherwise, someone asking to learn would get the Gotch version of the blow off.
“Karl could be very rude,” says Malenko. “His social skills were not the best. For somebody who had been in the limelight like he had, he was somewhat socially inept. He felt awkward around people to begin with. And if you were a person who was anything less than respectful and understanding of his skill level, you didn’t stand a chance with him. You probably wouldn’t even end up on the mat with him — or if you did you’d end up leaving quickly of your own accord. Or on a stretcher. He did not suffer fools gladly.”
“Karl used to go over to [pro wrestler Boris] Malenko’s and some poor pro wrestler that wanted to learn to shoot would ask Karl to show some holds,” Gotch protégé Tom Puckett wrote. “At that point he would run through about 250 submissions in about 10 minutes, then get up and say, ‘So now you got it?’ The poor bastard would then say, ‘Yeah I think so’ to which Gotch would go, ‘No you don’t, you’ve seen it.’”
With the Japanese, it
was different. In their rigid dojo environment, he was in complete control and could demand from his students whatever physical tolls he desired.
Malenko remembers Gotch’s brutal training regimen like it was yesterday. “He would crossface me and I would literally just have to take it for minutes at a time. I wasn’t allowed to say anything. I wasn’t allowed to squeal or move. I just had to take. Many nights I went home and I couldn’t even eat. . . . Karl would place me in a bridge and then he would sit on me. Eventually I got to the point where I’d have three or four guys, a thousand pounds, sitting on me. In hindsight, that wasn’t good for you. But back then, when Karl said, ‘Do it,’ you didn’t say no.”
Gotch’s philosophy created a very aggressive brand of submission fighter. He didn’t believe in defensive positions like the guard, describing the jiu-jitsu artists who used it as “old whores waiting for a customer.” Students of Gotch’s, instead, continued to attack until the match was over.
“Karl used to talk about ‘rocking the boat.’ You had to know a ton of submissions and you’d use holds based on how your opponent responded. You would go from submission to submission and kind of screw with their mind,” Malenko said. “They’d think, ‘Holy shit, no matter what I do, this guy’s getting a hold and it hurts. No matter what I do, he’s hurting me.’ Mentally you wear them down and wait for that time when something is really available and you can lock and load it and there is no recovery. Karl called that rocking the boat, keeping them off balance until they fall right out of the boat. Because they’ve lost their equilibrium.”
It took years to perfect the skills needed to “rock the boat” the way Gotch preferred. Few were willing to put the time and effort into learning such a specialized art. Those who did tended to succeed. Some, like Yoshiaki Fujiwara, Masakatsu Funaki, and Minoru Suzuki became legends in their own right.
“He cared about the people he was training. He really wanted you to get better,” Malenko said. “His goal as a coach was to make you better than him. He wanted pupils that could walk away and kick his ass. He didn’t hold back. He’d teach you what you needed to know to beat him.”
Malenko adds, “He set the tone for everything I’ve ever done. Wrestling is a builder of your soul, your morals, your ethics. It’s a powerful sport. . . . When you get past the hardness of Karl, which was honed from years of rough times, especially during the war, you have a guy who really loved the sport of wrestling. Did he know he was called the ‘God of Wrestling’ in Japan? Yes. Did he appreciate it? Yes. Did he have some nights when he asked his lovely wife to call him the God of Wrestling again? Maybe. But that wasn’t what drove him. It wasn’t his fame. It was taking young guys and creating good wrestlers. Good men.”
“I never took one cent from a boy to show him how to wrestle, all I asked for is guts,” Gotch once said. “I can make you strong, fast, agile, and train you for endurance and reflex, but guts you get when you are born.”
“The British Lion”: Billy Robinson
One of Gotch’s training partners at Wigan found more success than he did in America, but like the prickly Gotch, had trouble navigating wrestling politics. Billy Robinson had been a light heavyweight British amateur champion. Like many amateurs, however, he found he still had a lot to learn about wrestling. He found what he was looking for with Billy Riley and the lads in Wigan.
Robinson described his start in the Snake Pit to Jake Shannon:
At Wigan, initially, you’re not shown too much, and you are used as a sparring partner, but the coach watches you. Like in my case, it was close to four months before he said, “Okay. We’ll start to teach this kid.” They wanted to make sure I would stay, stick it out, no matter what happened to me. And that’s what they did. Not just for me. With everybody . . . Once you do that, like the old-timers you practice with, guys you could learn how to beat, they still like it when they beat you. “He’s a piece of shit” or “He’s no good,” that never happened. You respected them by just getting on the mat. And later on, when you’re that much better, they’re going to hope you would help them out. The respect is there with anybody, no matter how low or how high, because you know that nobody will say, ‘I am this. I am that.’ That will never happen because there’s always somebody that will knock the shit out of you. . . .
But the old-timers used to come down to the gym because of the atmosphere. And if they see you do something wrong, after your training session, they’d pull you to one side, explain to you, show you, get you back on the mat with a different sparring partner, and make you do it. And the thing was, I used to wake up with [my] head up, screaming, because I’d hear this voice, Billy Riley’s voice, Karl Gotch’s, God . . . screaming at me, “Do it again. Do it again.” And I’d wake up with ringing in my ears, “Do it again. Do it again.”
Robinson had the benefit of more than Riley’s knowledge. He was sent to Hungary to learn upper body throws from the best Greco-Roman wrestlers in Europe. He soaked in more knowledge in Sweden and Germany. By the time he left Wigan after almost a decade, he had developed into a very well-rounded and capable wrestler. Sometimes he’d return to Wigan between trips and show off his new moves.
BILLY ROBINSON THROWS ON A DOUBLE ARM SUPLEX
COURTESY BILLY ROBINSON
“Riley would have a smile on his face. ‘I’ll show you how to beat that,’ he’d say. ‘I just wanted you to know what it was in case somebody tried to beat you with it,’” Robinson said. “I got a lot of experience because of Billy Riley sending me to all these different gyms. And in Wigan, I could find five, six, seven sparring partners every time I went to the gym . . . I’d stay on the mat for two hours straight and these five or six guys would come in every few minutes. As soon as he started to get tired, or I was beating him too easily, Riley would send somebody else. That’s how we got stamina for long wrestling matches.”
In 1970, Robinson followed Gotch to America, but found significantly more success there. He became a main event star in the American Wrestling Alliance, wrestling the promotion’s owner and top star Verne Gagne dozens of times. Robinson, like Gotch, also found his calling as a trainer. In a barn, often in the dead of the Minnesota winter, Robinson broke in new recruits for Gagne, including men who would go on to become some marquee wrestlers in the 1980s. Wrestling Observer editor Dave Meltzer says Robinson earned a reputation in the Minnesota-based promotion — as a worker, a shooter, a trainer, and a bully: “Gagne used him as his head trainer and shooter when guys in Minnesota would want to be wrestlers. Robinson tortured the guys, and his rep in those camps was very different from the person he portrayed on television. Many call him a bully. But many of the great wrestlers of the era, like Ricky Steamboat, Ric Flair, Jim Brunzell, Curt Hennig, Iron Sheik, Sgt. Slaughter, Ken Patera, and Buddy Rose came out of those camps, all with stories of nightmarish things that they saw, and in some cases experienced. His rep was such that in the mid-’80s, when Randy Savage, who was a wildman who was quick to fight and one of the biggest stars in the business, was confronted, playfully as it was, by a well past his prime Robinson, it was described that he froze in deathly fear and nearly soiled himself.”
“I hold him in the highest esteem as a wrestler,” Verne Gagne said. “He was a technical genius with the way he would put on submission holds . . . We never did that in collegiate or high school wrestling. We didn’t do submission holds. After you turn pro you had to learn them . . . and that’s how you became a good wrestler.”
Gagne may have respected Robinson’s ability, but unlike the other wrestlers on the roster he was mostly immune to the British wrestler’s mean streak. After all, Gagne signed the checks. Others weren’t always as lucky with the finicky shooter. Robinson didn’t like doing jobs, especially for non-wrestlers, and would often take liberties with wrestlers in the ring when he was in a bad mood.
Said “Superstar” Billy Graham, “He was a mean man and would hurt you for no reason. Robinson
especially didn’t like three types of people — football players, bodybuilders, and bouncers. Obviously, I kept my distance from him. Finally got booked to face each other. I told Verne I thought it was a bad idea, but he wanted the match. I made a point to go by Robinson’s dressing room before our match. I showed him where I had taped a razor blade with half the blade sticking on one of my fingers. I told him, ‘If you try to hurt me in any way, I won’t hesitate to cut you up.’ He was a perfect gentleman in our match, lighter than he had every been with anyone before or since.”
“Robinson was a prick,” fellow wrestler Ken Patera remembered. “That’s why he had trouble in different places where he wrestled. Sailor White punched him out in Montreal, then pissed in his wounds. The Rock’s grandfather, Peter Maivia, nearly dug out his eye in another fight. Verne and Robinson were close, but outside the AWA, nobody wanted to work with Billy. They were afraid he’d fuck them up with cheap shots. And chances were that he would.”
Patera was one of the stars in Robinson’s 1972 training camp. A powerlifter, Patera was a natural target for Robinson. The sessions were brutal — Ric Flair quit twice and had to be talked back by Gagne himself. To Robinson, it was just the way things were done. And, in the Wigan style, he didn’t ask anything of his students he wouldn’t do himself.
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