The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling

by Shoemaker, David

  It wasn’t necessarily an issue of Hack changing his mind; the discrepancy is as likely to be because one—or both—of the quotes was created by someone other than the Russian Lion. Such was sometimes the nature of the sports writing world in those days; wrestling immediately evinced itself as the perfect vessel for such fictional storylines. It’s notable that both Gotch and Hackenschmidt were performers as much as they were fighters; Gotch appeared in stage plays over the years, and Hack was a vaudeville strongman. In their fight, they played the roles of opposing national heroes, and though the ending was not predetermined, it was left in such a way so as to give credence to each wrestler’s constituency. In a sense, even in these comparatively pure days of pro wrestling, it didn’t even matter who won. When two fighters come to blows, each representing a different continent, it’s not surprising that the perception of the ending will be different depending on what side of the world you’re on. Gotch vs. Hackenschmidt may have been a genuine wrestling match—Gotch’s suspect tactics aside—but its story would be legend.*

  When Gotch and Hackenschmidt met for their rematch at Comiskey Park three years later, Gotch was the undisputed world champion and the sport’s biggest star, and 30,000 people attended, which was the biggest crowd any athletic event had ever attracted in America. But the match was a dud. Hackenschmidt was injured going in, and Gotch took him down in short order. Rumors abounded that Gotch had paid one of Hack’s training partners to “accidentally” injure him before the match, and indeed latter-day champ Lou Thesz long claimed that the infamous hooker Ad Santel told him that he had been paid $5,000 to do the deed. Nobody other than Santel himself puts Santel in Hack’s training company, though, and the Hackenschmidt camp always maintained that Dr. Roller* caused the knee injury, and that it was actually an accident. Nevertheless, the media of the day picked up on the more scandalous version of the story. “Their return match carried too many phony and lopsided features,” recalled Grantland Rice in 1931. “The result was one of the loudest and longest squawks in sport and the doom of wrestling in most of the big cities.” Whether the fans were dissatisfied with the perceived shenanigans or simply peeved at the anticlimactic match is probably a fair question. Regardless, the wrestling industry was thereafter thrown into widespread disrespect for the first time.

  It was just as well that they get used to it. There would be a lot more of that to come over the decades.

  For a while it was back to the small venues and sideshows for the grapplers. The New York scene, run by Jack Curley and his posse of heavyweights, remained as the center of the American wrestling universe. But for much of the rest of the country, the touring carnivals were the primary source of wrestling in particular and entertainment in general in those days before cities grew up enough to host their own full-time means of spectacle. The carnivals were a natural fit for wrestling, and as wrestling evolved over the decades, it would never leave behind the insider vocabulary of the sideshow circuit: terms like mark, work, schmozz, kayfabe—this is the slang of the carny, not the professional athlete. Many men who would go on to be nationwide stars of the ring, wrestling for championship titles in big cities, came out of those small-time beginnings: guys like Farmer Burns; William Muldoon, who dressed as a Roman gladiator (and was canonized in song as “Muldoon the Solid Man” by composer Ed Harrigan, and later in fiction by Theodore Dreiser as “Culhane, the Solid Man”); and a future icon named Ed “Strangler” Lewis.

  “The wrestling game became the smelliest sport in the world,” said Marcus Griffin in his excellent 1937 history of the wrestling world, Fall Guys. After the Gotch-Hackenschmidt debacle, the sport passed out of vogue—and, moreover, into laughingstock territory. If the matches were exciting, they seemed fixed (even when they weren’t), and if they were boring, well, they were interminable. Here’s The New Yorker: “[The wrestlers] would go to the mat and stay there for hours and hours, a mass of mute meat. Matches lasted sometimes as long as a third of a day. As practiced by the old school, wrestling was one of the most unexciting spectacles a person could pay money to see: a race between two century plants.”

  A BRIEF GLOSSARY OF WRESTLING LINGO

  As with any microcosmic world, a wrestling language developed over the years to mark the insiders from the outsiders. What separates wrestling lingo from some other similar industry dialects is how the insider terms have become widespread terms of art with the emergence of the Internet era. Some of the words are derived from carny back-speak or pig Latin, while others grew from the early days of the Territorial Era, with terms moving freely around the country as wrestlers traveled.

  A few that come up over the course of the book:

  babyface (often shortened to “face”): A good-guy wrestler.

  booker: The backstage head writer and decision-maker.

  bump: A planned fall after a hit.

  gimmick: The character a wrestler portrays, or the storyline in which one is taking part.

  heat: A reaction from the crowd, usually negative, that measures the success of an act.

  heel: A bad-guy wrestler.

  kayfabe: The wrestlers’ adherence to the big lie, the insistence that the unreal is real—the rule that you have to play your character all the time, even outside the ring, to make sure you don’t ruin it for anyone. For decades, this was the abiding dogma of the pro wrestling industry. The term is thought to be an old carny term—perhaps a slangy, bastardized form of “be fake”—borrowed in wrestling’s embryonic stages on the sideshow.

  mark: A wrestling fan not clued in to the sham of the enterprise.

  over: Popular with the fans. (To put someone over is to make one’s opponent look good in the ring.)

  pop: A big cheer; a positive response from a crowd.

  promo: An interview or monologue given by a wrestler.

  rib: A prank between wrestlers, usually backstage.

  schmozz: A match that ends in chaos rather than in a decisive finish, or as Roland Barthes described the art: “Some fights, among the most successful kind, are crowned by a final charivari, a sort of unrestrained fantasia where the rules, the laws of the genre, the referee’s censuring and the limits of the ring are abolished, swept away by a triumphant disorder which overflows into the hall and carries off pell-mell wrestlers, seconds, referee and spectators.”

  shoot: An instance of reality in wrestling, be it in a “shoot fight” or in a “shoot interview.”

  smart: Having intimate backstage knowledge of the wrestling world.

  stiff (also “working stiff”): Using actual force in a wrestling match rather than the standard, more pantomimed technique; as in “a stiff punch.”

  swerve: A shocking left turn in a storyline.

  work: The act of the wrestling world. As a noun, it’s usually the opposite of “shoot”—as in, “I know it looked real, but that match was a work”—and as a verb, it’s usually a measure of fooling fans—as in, “He was working the crowd.”

  Even as the carnival men started settling down into offices in the bigger cities, from where they organized loose troupes of mastodons, the wrestling world didn’t get much respect in the wider sporting world; with failed boxing managers and former sideshow barkers now acting as the “promoters” of the sport, it’s little wonder.

  Those wrestling promoters on the East Coast had little use for Robert Friedrich, a teenager from Wisconsin who was going around under the rather presumptuous name Ed “Strangler” Lewis—a moniker given him by a sportswriter who thought he resembled Evan “Strangler” Lewis, the first American Heavyweight Champion. Even though this new Lewis had achieved success on the carnival racket and toured the world honing techniques, like his signature stranglehold (also borrowed from the original “Strangler”), that weren’t legal in the “mainstream” American wrestling world (the carnival circuit had fewer rules and more of an emphasis on thrilling the crowd, both aspects that would eventually be taken up by the mai
nstream as it evolved into its modern form), he was given no warm welcome by the New York promoters—or, rather, he was unwelcome precisely because of his skill. The last thing those increasingly theatrical promoters needed around was a guy who could actually win any match he wanted to win. It wasn’t that the matches were all predetermined; it was that a wrestler that good could take the title, take over the territory, and, if he were so inclined, cut the promoters out of the take.

  Unemployable in the wrestling mecca, Lewis* headed back toward home and settled down in the Midwest. One night, the legend has it, a manager named Billy Sandow threw a wrestling event in Louisville, Kentucky, on the night before the Kentucky Derby. He hired Lewis to take on the “Terrible Turk” Yussif Hussane.* It was a fixed bout, and Lewis was booked to lose; and as both a man in need of a paycheck and a product of an increasingly fabricated wrestling world, he was fine with it. The breaking point came when Sandow told him to lose in twenty minutes so that he and the Turk could catch the last train out of town. Lewis declined. Sandow said it hardly mattered, that the Turk could beat him in well under twenty minutes if he wanted to, and Lewis said he was happy for him to try. Of course, this being a part of the fabric of wrestling mythology, the two men supposedly then had a legitimate match and Lewis won handily.

  Three days later, Sandow* was back in Chicago with a new protégé he intended to set loose on the world of wrestling: the very Ed “Strangler” Lewis. They teamed up with Toots Mondt,* who was recommended to Sandow by Farmer Burns and who would become the group’s enforcer and, more important, the wrestling visionary. Sandow handled the money, Mondt handled the staging—at first in combat style, and later in match choreography—and Lewis handled the wrestling. Over the years they came to be known as the Gold Dust Trio, likely for both their moneymaking ability and the seeming magic that they were able to orchestrate in the ring.

  That period of wrestling in the 1920s—the higher-profile championship-level matches in particular—had its share of fixed bouts, sure, but they were in the service of a more fascinating reality. Mondt was hired by Sandow to be Lewis’s sparring partner and enforcer. He would take on opponents before they got in the ring with Lewis to make sure they were “worthy” foes, but in reality, Mondt—sometimes regarded as a better pure grappler than Lewis—would soften them up for his colleague. Perhaps it was the fatigue from this role as the heavy lifter in the outfit that led to him rethinking the whole thing, or maybe he was purely a futurist, which is how he’s usually painted. Regardless, Mondt could see what nobody else could, that the sports fans weren’t just tired of wrestling—they were oblivious to it. They couldn’t appreciate the minute maneuvers that made up a marathon heavyweight match. So Mondt conceived of a new style of wrestling that would combine classical Greco-Roman and freestyle catch wrestling with boxing and the sort of brawling that was popular on lumberyard campsites to birth a new hybrid that was wholly entertaining and, as such, the direct antecedent of what we know today as professional wrestling. Mondt created submission holds—some seemingly from thin air, many of which are still used today—that were meant to project out to an audience member thirty rows back. Moves, in other words, that were meant as much to impress onlookers as to inflict agony on opponents. He also conceived of the idea of a touring show, in which a stable of wrestlers would travel together from town to town, mixing and matching opponents or just repeating matchups, night after night. This would allow the promoters full control over the card and cut out the need for local fighters to be hired and wages negotiated at every venue. It would allow managers to set prices more definitively. And it would allow wrestlers the relative luxury of sparring with comfortable partners, in bouts with predictable endings.

  An implicit part of this new method was the fixed match. In order to appeal to the fans’ sense of drama and spectacle, the matches had to build powerfully to the endings, and the endings had to be fulfilling.*

  Wrestlers were brought in to the Gold Dust confederacy to face Lewis or to fight on the undercard of the shows they were now promoting nationwide. If they went off the script, as some purists were wont to do in the early days, they would soon find themselves facing the enforcer Mondt (or later John Pesek), who would beat the logic of the new system into them. The plan was to keep Lewis on top, and to dramatize his reign as much as possible.

  The trio quickly realized, however, that a single champ with a never-ending reign was bad for business; to keep things fresh (and believable), they had to supply Lewis with some legitimate competitors, and to legitimize them, Lewis was going to have to lose to them. So began the process of trading wins: You win this match, I’ll win the next one. Lewis was the proverbial ace card in this new system. He was widely considered to be the actual best and toughest wrestler in the world—with the occasional dissenter claiming it was Mondt, who allowed his considerable talents to take a backseat to Lewis’s and, moreover, to the larger conquest of the trio—so there was little fear that an opponent would be able to abscond with the belt since Lewis could win it back at will. This new system doubled down on the contract with the audience that Mondt’s new wrestling vision had signed: The promise of perfectly honed entertainment could now be spread over weeks and months instead of just across the span of one match.*

  Winning and losing mattered, of course, insomuch as everyone wanted to be on top. The significant fact was that winning and losing—even in that era of perceived legitimacy of the sport, and in a world of rough fellows who were all supremely protective of their own reputations—was subjugated for the greater good of entertainment. When Lewis did occasionally wrestle real “shoot” matches, he confirmed the potency of the Mondt model. “The Strangler once wrestled Joe Stecher in what the boys in the trade call a ‘shooting match,’” wrote Arthur Daley in The New York Times. “They started at 4 o’clock in the afternoon and Lewis was the winner at 9:30 that night. It wasn’t exciting but it was the best brand of wrestling anyone would want to witness.” That Lewis could win this sort of drudging bout—that he was a legitimate combatant—was necessary for this transformation to occur. If he hadn’t been a legitimate tough guy, it would have been impossible to remake the industry. His authenticity married with Mondt’s artificiality confirmed that the best brand of wrestling is the exciting brand. What mattered now wasn’t who won but how they won, and how the crowd would respond. What mattered was how one match would get the fans to pay money for the next one.

  Within a few years, the Gold Dust Trio was in control of almost all the wrestling in the United States. Their cartel—really, that’s the word, as they were employing almost all of the high-profile wrestlers in North America—spanned multiple houses the country over on multiple nights a week. If it wasn’t exactly a majestic sport on par with boxing, it was still a big draw.

  One of the regional promoters who aligned himself with the Gold Dust Trio in the early 1900s was a Boston-based man named Paul Bowser. Bowser was a central figure in the dissolution of reality in the sport—not because he had a hand in reimagining it like Mondt, but because he presided over some of the last “real” fights in the field. Some of the last ones, anyway, that were supposed to be fake and ended up real. He supposedly told John Pesek to go off script and defeat Nat Pendleton, who was managed by the New York City promoter Jack Curley, who had formed a sort of guerilla operation along with old-school grappler Joe Stecher that ran in opposition to the Gold Dust regime. Curley got his revenge when he paid off Stanislaus Zbyszko (who had previously achieved fame on the Gold Dust circuit) to shoot and upend Gold Dust–approved champ Wayne Munn on April 15, 1925.

  These were the death throes of the legitimacy movement in the wrestling world. Even the athletes like Stecher who claimed to be interested in the sport’s authenticity were eventually motivated more by fame and profit than purely by victory. When so much uncertainty was set against the potential for money to be made, it was only a matter of time before the dinosaurs died off and the capitalists reigned.


  Perhaps the most significant thing that happened under Paul Bowser’s watch was the introduction of Gus Sonnenberg. Sonnenberg was a collegiate and professional football player of some renown in the Northeast, so he was a perfect fit for the hero role, despite his lack of wrestling background. What Sonnenberg didn’t have in technique, he made up in flair, integrating a repertoire of football-style moves into the wrestling playbook—the flying tackle, most notably, which brought wrestling off the mat and into the air.* The crowds were dazzled by this new style and started coming to wrestling events in multitudes, despite its patent artificiality. (In fact, the outlandishness of the new moves actually helped their credibility. “Obviously this type of wrestling could not be rehearsed,” as Grantland Rice put it, “since no opposing human body could stand such punishment oftener than once a month.”) But the fans wanted action, not reality.

  It took the fall of boxing in the second decade of the twentieth century for wrestling to regain its place as the country’s chief pugilistic pastime. “The revival of a sport that was in the doldrums, and particularly its acceptance by the select, is due chiefly to the decline of boxing,” Morris Markey put it in The New Yorker. “Boxing has gone completely to pieces because the current crop of boxers is so extremely bad. . . . [W]hen it collapsed from within it left a great many people bereft of the sporting evening, a ceremony to which they have become devoted.” To wrestling they turned. The blue-collar fans—the immigrant populations of the Northeast in particular—had never abandoned wrestling, but with the return of a more affluent fanbase, pro wrestling’s influence began to escalate.