The newspapers still weren’t treating it as a proper sport, nor should they have, but the distinction is striking in context. As The New Yorker pointed out in 1932, “The World Almanac for 1931, which faithfully recorded the champions for the previous year in such sports as archery, handball, and the racing of sled dogs, found space for no word on wrestling.” (Oddly, it was largely left to the more highbrow national magazines, like The New Yorker and Collier’s, to serve as the record of the sport.)
By the time that the Greek heartthrob Jim Londos—he had the “appeal of a Dempsey for the multitudes,” said The New Yorker—was selling out shows in New York and Danno O’Mahoney—an Irishman imported by Bowser to entice the region’s immigrant population—was reigning in Boston, the artifice was the art. Sure, many fans still took it to be “real,” but there were just as many who didn’t. The ambiguity mattered far less in those days than it may today. As Rice quoted a fan in ’31: “As far as I know the shows are honest. But even if they’re not I get a big kick out of them, for they are full of action and all the outward signs of hostile competition. It is either honest competition or fine acting and in either case I get a real show.”
When Londos won the world championship from Dick Shikat in 1930, “no New York newspaper gave the event more than a few lines in its sports section the next day; for professional wrestling had already been exposed more times than Santa Claus.” Within a year, Londos would be performing to sellout houses in Madison Square Garden, a feat that was unheard of even in the boxing world at its heights. But despite the attention from the highbrow magazines, the sports journalism establishment hardly cared. Perhaps they realized that pro wrestling made them expendable: The wrestling matches mythologized the athletes and wrote the stories themselves. The audiences need only watch the shows to see the symbolism. The promoters were putting on morality plays filtered through the lens of nationalism, with heroes constructed specifically to appeal to the ethnic origins of the fans. For years, Londos ruled in New York in repetitive fashion:
A Foreign Menace, in most cases a real wrestler, would be imported. He would meet all the challengers for the title whom Londos had defeated in any city larger than New Haven, and beat them. After that, he and Londos would wrestle for the world’s championship in Madison Square Garden. The Foreign Menace would oppress Londos unmercifully for about forty minutes, and then Londos would pick him up for the airplane spin, which is like the climactic movement of an adagio dance or a hammer throw. Skeptics have pointed out that this movement requires cooperation from the adagio projectile. . . . Londos would whirl the current Menace around his head and dash him to the mat three times, no more and no less, and the match would end in time for suburbanites to get the trains they caught on theatre nights.
For O’Mahoney’s part, he “said he’d heard a lot of talk about fixed matches but was sure wrestling was entirely on the level. ‘I win every time out,’ he said in justification of his faith, ‘and I’ve never been asked to lay down.’” Of course he hadn’t: Danno was a lousy grappler, but Bowser decided that he wouldn’t lose until he took on Londos—some fifty matches into his career—and O’Mahoney won that one too. “Unforgettable was the ‘winning’ of the championship by Danno O’Mahoney,” groaned The New York Times in 1952. “His ignorance of the sport was monumental enough to have filled the Irish Sea. But Danno meant packed houses in Boston where the sport was going big and so the Trust elected him the champion.” (O’Mahoney eventually lost to Shikat, a perpetually aggrieved fighter who went off script and injured the underskilled O’Mahoney to prove a point.)
The fix was in, and the crowds were pouring in to see the wrestling cards nonetheless. In a world absent any viable alternative, the discussion turned not to ethics but to entertainment. Every year or two, some magazine would do a piece on the sport and slyly allude to its insincerity, but bizarrely a consensus never seemed to be reached on the subject. It’s as if every journalist approached the industry as does a young child first exposed to wrestling’s Technicolor morality plays: first to believe, unquestioning, and then, slowly, to doubt:
“The veteran wrestling fans recall, with copious tears, how the hippodrome flourished in the land. It became a nice question for experts in entertainment to differentiate between a wrestling bout and the living statuary acts then in vogue.”
—John B. Kennedy, “Pillars of Sport,” Collier’s, September 19, 1931
“Not the least interesting of all the minor phenomena produced by the current fashion of wrestling is the universal discussion as to the honesty of the matches. And certainly the most interesting phase of this discussion is the unanimous agreement: ‘Who cares if they’re fixed or not—the show is good.’”
—Morris Markey, “Catch as Catch Can,” The New Yorker, April 18, 1931
“If this be play-acting, then it is play-acting of the highest order and comes close to being the best entertainment in town. To cavil at it for being play-acting is to cavil at a Booth or a Barrymore for getting up off the floor and putting on his street clothes after the final curtain has been lowered on ‘Hamlet.’”
—Joel Sayre, “The Pullman Theseus,” The New Yorker, March 5, 1932
I quote these periodicals here at length for a reason. There’s a general feeling that wrestling’s artifice has only recently been exposed, that the facade began to crumble roughly around 1984, when John Stossel covered the sport on 20/20 and got smacked by “Dr. D” David Schultz. In this telling of wrestling’s modern history, the jig was only fully up by the time reality shows in the early 2000s started acknowledging their production chicanery. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Fans have been in on wrestling’s ruse for a century—since the ruse began, more or less—and over the past eighty years there has been a steady procession of “exposés,” each received with the same feigned surprise and then immediate-onset amnesia. But equivocations of the above sort have been repeated over the years almost verbatim. “Some of the fans know they are watching a show and feel certain of it when they witness the hokum and byplay between mat clowns,” said sportswriter Joe Jares in his 1974 book Whatever Happened to Gorgeous George?, “but when the going is rough and exciting they are less doubtful.”
It’s precisely this equivocation that defines wrestling’s fandom and disquiets its detractors. For non–wrestling fans, revelations about the sport’s authenticity are compelling because they smugly assume the fans are dupes; for wrestling fans, each revelation is met with a relative yawn. Since the earliest days of pro wrestling, the sport’s otherworldliness has been its calling card. And since the first moment that it was exposed to be a “fake” sport, the industry has adapted and thrived.
It was a Polish impresario named Jack Pfefer who dragged professional wrestling, kicking and screaming, into the sunlight. Pfefer—a man of diverse interests with a deep love for opera, a comically malapropos usage of English, and the sublime nickname of the “Halitosis Kid”—had been a semimajor player in the backstage dealings of the wrestling biz in New York until a realignment of power left him unaffiliated and out of work. New York bigwig Jack Curley had a falling-out with top star Jim Londos, who decamped to Tom Packs’s St. Louis domain, and Pfefer took Londos’s side in the spat. When Curley and Londos made amends—as part of a new multiregional wrestling mafia that included Packs, Boston’s Paul Bowser, Philly’s Ray Fabiani, and others—Pfefer was left out. So Pfefer did what any scorned lover would do and dragged his former cohorts’ names through the mud. He found encouragement from Dan Parker, the sports editor from the New York Daily Mirror, and set about announcing to the world in a series of articles from December 1933 through 1934 that the Curley-Londos regime had been fixing matches.*
Two qualifiers: (1) This was not exactly a revelation, and (2) insomuch as it was, it wasn’t a full-throated one. People had known—or suspected—wrestling was largely fake for at least a decade. In 1931, Grantland Rice recounted how when he wrote a snippet about wrestling f
or his syndicated column fifteen years prior, a number of his editors around the country wrote back telling him that they had no interest in printing anything about such a nonsport. What’s significant reading back through the Daily Mirror archives is precisely that willful neglect of the wrestling world, even as it filled up houses in the Big Apple. With the exception of a few very brief asides about business-side trends like new venues or managerial realignments, Parker functionally ignored the wrestling game. When he was compelled to comment, he would address his target with snide precision, sarcastically throw in a “Now, I am the last person in the world to suspect that wrestling is not on the level,” and then give his audience every reason to suspect just that. If he was confined by anything, it seemed to be his assumption that readers weren’t as savvy to the shtick as he was.
Ever the gadfly to what he saw as an unbecoming spectacle, Parker was probably gleeful to give Pfefer his platform. Throughout his career, Pfefer always fell on the entertainment end of the “sports entertainment”* continuum—favoring midgets, giants, and lady wrestlers—and had little time for the pretenses of legitimacy. (“An honest man can sell a fake diamond if he says it is a fake diamond, ain’t it?” he once said to A. J. Liebling.) But his admissions in the Daily Mirror were oddly trifling: They were accusations of match-fixing to get the marketable Londos to the title, not a full exposé of a dramaturgical enterprise. (Maybe Parker’s sensitivity again played a hand in this slow reveal.)
Nevertheless, it’s indisputable that, at the very least, the subject of wrestling’s legitimacy was finally broached, and moving forward, journalists—and fans—could approach the sport with something approaching ironic distance, no matter how invested they were in the proceedings.
Traditionalists like Curley were peeved, insistent on protecting the realism of the sport above all else. And through the next fifty-five years or so—more or less until Vince McMahon began admitting to the WWF’s illegitimacy to get around state athletic commission fees in the late ’80s—they were able to keep up the facade to some extent because the marks were always willing to accept the violence at face value, and the people who were clued in were happy to play along to further their enjoyment.
After Pfefer’s revelation in 1933, maintaining the appearance of validity was a losing quest, though Curley and the other promoters tried. The new New York State Athletic Commission intervened, insisting that pro wrestling label its bouts “exhibitions” rather than “matches”—a then-significant distinction that’s often lost on the modern audience.* At the time, it should have been a big deal: It was a label announcing the wrestling product was counterfeit. To the fans, it didn’t matter—the distinction was either insignificant or easy enough to ignore.
By 1938 Pfefer had reclaimed his career and he alone was ruling the wrestling world, largely by being the one who embraced the unreality of the sport. Though he had certainly been motivated by spite as much as anything, his accusations were sort of a beautiful gambit in retrospect: He got revenge on his erstwhile cohorts by accusing everyone of fixing matches, and then, once the hierarchy had been toppled, he assumed the throne by basically admitting that he was fixing matches. “It isn’t a sport; it’s show business. I’m not an athletic promoter; I’m a theatrical man,” he told Collier’s that year. “I don’t tell people my wrestling shows are on the level; I guarantee them they’re not. I’ve never seen an honest wrestling bout in my twenty years in the game. Maybe there was one, but I wasn’t there. And I’d hate to see one; it’d be an awful thing!” As Liebling put it in ’39: “The trouble, according to [Pfefer], is that the moneyed clientele has ceased to believe in wrestling as a sport and has not yet learned to appreciate it as a pure art form, like opera or classical dancing.”
A search for the moment at which wrestling became “fake” is a futile one; like many other such incidents of great significance through time, the moment does not exist so much as it is imagined back into history. To be sure, embedded in this quandary are two separate questions: (1) When did wrestlers start fixing matches for entertainment’s sake? And (2) When did fans realize that the sport was counterfeit?
Both answers are more than a little ambiguous, but here goes: (1) From the very beginning, and (2) it doesn’t matter.
Wrestling didn’t become fake in any sort of active way. It could have diverged toward legitimacy like boxing did, but it did not, and it shouldn’t ever be judged on those terms. It was once a purer sport, sure—a sport full of fixed matches and exploitative put-ons. But just as much as it was a sport, it was a sideshow—a carny act that eventually made it to Broadway.
So the next time you hear somebody say, “You know wrestling is fake, right?” you can tell him that yes, you know. That’s exactly the point.
A quick postscript to this long story. Frank Gotch, the “Peerless Champion,” walked away from the sport in 1913 at the top of his game. He retired to his Iowa farm but eventually returned to the road, wrestling all comers for a traveling circus. While pondering a comeback in 1917, he fell ill, and the greatest wrestler America ever produced died at the age of thirty-nine of uremic poisoning.* Gotch would be a trailblazer not just in his life but also in his death. In the century that follows, wrestler after wrestler would die before his time.
In a way, it’s fitting that this demigod of the mat world went before he got too old, when his legend was still vital. It makes it easier to forget his humanity.
HACKENSCHMIDT: THE FIRST HEEL TURN?
Though it’s unclear when the trend started of turning friends against one another to create new villains (and, conversely, turning one villain against another to create a new hero), it was almost certainly a matter of Territorial Era expediency when faced with a small available cast and limited room at the top for long-term fan favorites. The biggest turns of the ’80s were some of the most galling moments in wrestling history at the time: Larry Zbyszko turned on his legendary mentor Bruno Sammartino, icon of the WWWF, during a supposedly friendly exhibition match in 1980, smashing him over the head with a wooden chair and cutting him open—and making Zbyszko into the most hated man in the Northeast. In 1982, in Championship Wrestling from Florida, golden-boy tough guy Kevin Sullivan turned on his pal Barry Windham and embraced a bizarre, semisatanic gimmick (while carefully eluding the actual embrace of the Devil) that made him the most shocking and reviled heel in the region for years—a character he returned to multiple times in other areas in his career. In the Crockett territory in ’85, Pez Whatley notoriously turned on Jimmy Valiant after the perceived slight of Valiant calling him “the best black athlete in professional wrestling.”
In the early days of the twentieth century, though, before the roles of good and evil within the squared circle were defined, it probably came as something of a shock to George Hackenschmidt that he had been booked into a heel turn. After years on the vaudeville strongman circuit and some renown as one of the first famous bodybuilders, the Russian Lion was famous the world over, in all strata of society. (Teddy Roosevelt was once quoted as saying, “If I wasn’t president of the United States, I would like to be George Hackenschmidt.”) But after he won the world championship from Tom Jenkins and was positioned to take on Gotch, suddenly the international exemplar was cast contra the American hero Gotch as the bout’s villain, whether he liked it or not.
Newspapers told the tales of Hack’s insouciance: He arrived in Chicago for the match out of shape; he refused to engage in the public workouts that the promoter had arranged; he went on long, fugue-like walks around Lake Michigan. When he complained about Gotch’s underhanded tactics in their match, Hack was accused of whining, of making excuses, and, in the end, of being a quitter. Sayeth the referee: “I say, that as the referee of that match, I thought that the ‘Russian Lion’ quit.”
It was not a treatment befitting an idol of his esteem, but it laid the template for many wrestling villains that followed: the evildoer as weak, as deplorable know-it-all, as egotistica
l narcissist, as selfish coward. Most would agree that that wasn’t who Hackenschmidt really was, but for American fans of 1905, it was the role he was born to play.
THE
TERRITORIAL
ERA
As wrestling’s popularity grew in the first half of the twentieth century, there was sufficient stability in many larger regional markets to support their own local federations. Many of these started out as proxies for the Gold Dust Trio; at first it was a practical means of having a business-side infrastructure in place for Sandow and Lewis and Mondt when their troupe came through, but soon cities like St. Louis and Chicago were importing wrestlers from all over the country to fill up local houses on a regular basis. Before long, many of these regional promoters were industry power brokers unto themselves. They were putting on fully independent pro wrestling shows, developing local talent, and, above all, making good money.
With their newfound independence, many of the regions appointed their own “world champions,” and while the appearance of finality was helpful in establishing independent legitimacy, eventually the credulity of the audience was strained. It was no secret to many a fan that the “world champion” in, say, Minneapolis wasn’t recognized as such in Boston. The National Wrestling Association—note the last word there because it’s important—was a national group, a spin-off of the National Boxing Association, that took it upon itself to anoint Lou Thesz as the national champ, but he rarely toured to the majority of wrestling towns, and in his absence, competing “world champions” proliferated.
And so on July 18, 1948 in Waterloo, Iowa, a meeting of the pro wrestling dons was called in which the first iteration of the National Wrestling Alliance was formed. Under the NWA banner, the major promoters from each region would cooperate, “share” a universally recognized world champion,* swap wrestling talent, and work together to keep upstart promotions from taking root.
The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling Page 3