18 - Wrestling is Work, part 1 - The early history of pro wrestling

Transcript

Speaker: camera hello Hello, everyone, and this is The Wonder Camera, glorious theme song that makes us dance. This is your podcast in which three dilettantes talk about something interesting.

Speaker: Open up the doors of The Wonder Camera and pull out a fascinating object. And today's dilettante story is Dave. Dave the dilettante. Thank you for the elegant introduction, Jen.

Speaker: Not very elegant at all. The exact opposite of elegant, in fact. i My name is Jen Rumpel, and I'm working on my intros. I'm here with... Dave Powell. and Tracy Anderson Powell. And we are The Wonder Camera. I was so eager to hear Dave's story that I just jumped right in.

Speaker: Dave. Okay, so my last episode was on The Great Dying and was about something I have no expertise in whatsoever. And so much like Jen diving into the Brontes, who were clearly an object of obsession with her, or even Kurt Cobain prior to that, I'm going to talk about something I know a hell of a lot about.

Speaker: Maybe not as much as the best, but I would say more than most. So I invite you, my dilettantes, to come with me as I dive into the greatest of American folk arts.

Speaker: One, I'm going to watch Jen's face change expression. um One which blends athletic competition with the high drama of theater and the outright grift of the carnival, professional wrestling.

Speaker: i okay Oh, this could be very interesting. i Especially if you're ghoul like me and they are interested in, um you know, death and destruction and injuries. There's a lot of that. That's what we're talking about. So interesting I am going to speak to our hypothetical audience and maybe help set aside some baggage and preconceptions others may have about this craft. I'm going to use the word because I think sport has always been a poor word for it.

Speaker: Particularly, I want to speak to those who think wrestling is crude entertainment for lowbrow morons. I'm just kidding. i don't know how think that. As lowbrow moron, I bristle at wrestling being called crude.

Speaker: So wrestling is its own creature. It is not real and it is not fake. It is not sport and it is not acting. Its closest kin are old working class forms of theater, the circus, and in particular stage magic. Wrestling. hey Yeah, it's performance, athletics and lying.

Speaker: So uniquely American. It is so American. It is more American than most things. So Jen and Tracy, I'll start with ah Tracy because I know the answer to this. What's your relationship to pro wrestling?

Speaker: I lived with my uncle when I was 20 and he was a big wrestling fan. So it became our routine, I guess. pre Yeah. to watch To watch professional wrestling on Monday nights when he got home from work. And from there, I joined a an online wrestling writing group where you make your character and write as them. And that's how I met Dave. Yep.

Speaker: Amazing. tracy I knew that story. Yeah. Yeah. Tracy and I met through online fantasy pro wrestling. Yes. And I will mention that, as of course I'm hinting, I'm a giant wrestling fan. ah Tracy doesn't necessarily watch with me, but she loves going to see it live. It's one of the best life live wrestling. Oh, my God. It's so much fun. She's now insisted only leave only ringside seats from now on, which is expensive, but makes me so happy. Jen, how about you?

Speaker: Gee, my relationship is long and complicated. No, not really. When was a kid, you know, in the era of you know Jake the Snake Roberts and Hulk Hogan and The Undertaker, i would watch it. And I do remember me and my little, one of my little sisters, Jerry, Jerry Lynn, she was so into it as a kid. So after school. Jerry Lynn?

Speaker: Jerry Lynn was into wrestling. Jerry Lynn is also a wrestler. Amazing. Seriously? yeah. yeah Jerry Lynn is a well-respected kind of journeyman wrestler, came up through ECW and was always considered a very skilled wrestler, but never kind of got his big break. I believe he currently works or did work for All Elite Wrestling as a producer and coach.

Speaker: Really? I wonder if my sister has a secret life as a trans wrestler that she's not telling us about. Amazing. Whole identity. Yeah, she's into it. I would watch it. yeah i I dated a guy for two years, during which time, this is like the Stone Cold Steve Austin, Triple H...

Speaker: Right before the Chris Benoit. I read that era early era. I pretended I liked it. But to be honest, never got into it really. I kind of just would watch it and go, okay, this is all right. But it was never really for me because I saw that. It was like a big soap opera. Like all the Vince McMahon BS I was not into. But, you know, i'm I understand that like it's...

Speaker: not real in the sense that these fights are essentially the outcome is predetermined, but it takes a lot of athleticism and artistry. The wrestler film was excellent, but that's the extent of it for me, basically.

Speaker: Perfect. That gives me a good understanding of where you're coming from. And ah I think the film, the wrestler, although some in the industry ah are not in love with it because it shows this very dark side is an essential story to what I'm going to be getting into.

Speaker: Okay. ah So ah now where was I on my script? want to watch that movie again. Yeah, it's a good movie. What we should watch if want to get really sad is The Iron Claw, which is the Bronte sisters except wrestling because I haven't seen it. And apparently it is a tearjerker. Well, why don't we all watch it as a group? Because I want to see it, too, because I heard it's extremely bleak. And I'm like, oh, sign me up. Oh, there go. And OK, fantastic. So for me, i am a hardcore wrestling fan and have been ah since I was a teenager. I bought in Holy when I was 14 in the mid 90s and I was enraptured by the rivalry between the Albertan brothers, Brett and Owen Hart.

Speaker: Oh, yes. Yeah. And ah I was an active member of what us geezers in the wrestling fandom call the IWC, the Internet Wrestling Community. And this is a base of the informed smart fans, which is now basically all fans.

Speaker: These online fan communities of the mid to late 90s were among the first to talk about wrestling from a behind the scenes perspective. Talking about the decisions of who wins and loses, backstage fights, contract turmoil, people jumping companies. And the smart marks were both scorned and catered to by the wrestling promoters.

Speaker: If you think about the, ah which was it? ah The Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie episode and how it's basically a a loving fuck you to the Hardcore Simpsons fans.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. That is very much what a lot of the wrestling companies were doing, where they would do what they were. They deliberately draw responses out of the ah hardcore online fans and then complain about us endlessly, quite legitimately. um And so.

Speaker: Although we understood wrestling is worked, which is a term I'm going to get really into, much of the industry was still very secretive and we wanted to know everything. The behind the scenes stuff is so fascinating.

Speaker: This led to the advent of what we call shoot interviews. This is a new kind of groundbreaking insight into pro wrestling because we were at that point with particularly the internet where the secrets had fallen away.

Speaker: And so the idea was you haul in a usually retired or inactive wrestler and then you give them a few bucks to talk about everything and anything. and And these tapes were popular online. They were traded around. Shoot interviews were sort of a hot currency in mid 2000s.

Speaker: And it was also clear that A lot of the men and women, certainly not all, but enough, were not doing well. Mixed in with these shoots were interviews with wrestlers who were destitute or dealing with miserable lifelong injuries and frequently addicts, particularly of prescription painkillers. Mm-hmm. Quick, real quick question to interrupt. Was there ever a time where people, before these sort of the behind-the-scenes stuff came out, did people really think wrestling was real?

Speaker: know some people do, and they get made fun of... I'm to into so much detail that. Okay, okay. So many spoilers. My great-grandmother... Old English lady loved professional wrestling and was watching it on TV all the time. And she insisted it was real. i like, OK, but it's pretty fantastic. The grannies are the greatest of all wrestling fans. There is nothing more perfect and pure than an absolutely furious septuagenarian at ringside saying the like most obscene things you can possibly think of to a good wrestling heel.

Speaker: I love that energy. It's so pure. How much fans believed in wrestling is going to be a substantial amount of what I talk about, though. So interesting there's a long answer. And so and this is a long podcast.

Speaker: So good good then we're in the mid 2000s where I'm putting this period. An astonishing number of wrestlers died. This is a quote from a 2014 study by Christopher Herman.

Speaker: The mortality for all wrestlers over the 26-year study period was 0.007 deaths per total person years, or 708 per 100,000 per year, and 16% of deaths occurred below the age 50. Now, this kind of doesn't mean anything yet.

Speaker: The translation is if you follow 100,000 wrestlers for one year, lot. the stats say seven hundred and eight will die that's a lot Yes. Among wrestlers, the leading cause of deaths based on CIF was cardiovascular related. 38 percent for cardiovascular related deaths, drug overdose related deaths and cancer deaths. Wrestler mortality rates were 15.1, 122.7 and times greater than those of males in the general population.

Speaker: Oh, wow. Wow. Drug overdose in particular, 122 times more likely, 15 times more likely for cardiovascular. And I don't think he even studied suicide here, which is a huge part of this.

Speaker: Yeah. Because the painkiller stuff makes sense. but oh i guess you I imagine, so the film wrestler, you imagine somebody just wearing their body out. Don't really think about Oh, yeah, that but that can lead to severe painkiller addiction. it is ah It is not the current ah the issue now that it was then, but my God, was it an issue?

Speaker: So a website dedicated to tracking the deaths of pro wrestlers, wrestlerdeaths.com, shows an ex- Oh, that's grim. Tracy was with me during a lot of this, and- I can't stress how many wrestlers I knew died. It was wild. And you became numb to it. and just who's the next death going to be?

Speaker: Yeah. Starting in the nineteen eighty s the number of rock stars in the Genuinely. Yeah. a genuine yeah ah But imagine that you have this wave of grunge rock stars in the 90s and then it gets 10 times worse in the in the in the 2000s and continues into the twenty ten s Like it's an apocalypse.

Speaker: And and so the rash of deaths, you began to see an increase in the 80s. It got massively bigger in the 90s. And in the 2000s and 2010s, it was at its peak. The actual number is um I decided not to get too much into it because who is and who is not a wrestler can kind of get a little complex. But we're talking about dozens of major names and 100 to 200 people who are just wrestlers. Right.

Speaker: right so just to name a few i'm going to just list some wrestlers who passed during this period kurt mr perfect handachke china brian pillman davy boy smith the british bulldog the big boss man brian christopher chris canyon crash hawley luna vahann rick ruod ummaga terry gordy and yokozuna um It goes on and on. And all of them. And I'm only listing wrestlers who died younger than 50. That's a key part here.

Speaker: Interesting. I was reading about Chyna like a couple weeks ago, just out of curiosity. She died of alcohol and benzo yes overdose. Yes. I was on track to like that. yeah I know Chyna's story is extremely tragic. Yeah, it's crazy. She had her brief moment at the top. This is an aside. And she was in a relationship at that time with the now ah head of WWE wwe Triple H, ah Paul Levesque.

Speaker: And he effectively dumped her for Stephanie McMahon, who he was in an on-camera storyline with. Which I thought was fake. That's when I was watching, too. Yes. And no, he genuinely left Joni Lauer China ah for Stephanie.

Speaker: China also, unfortunately, was what's the best way to say this? Because I have a lot of affection for her. Kind of a pain in the ass to work with. She was the first ah woman in wwe WWE to have intergender matches. So she beat, for example, Chris Jericho for the Intercontinental title was a huge deal.

Speaker: But she also kind of had a ceiling on a wrestling ability because she was big and impressive, but a combination of what they would generally call attitude issues and just not being skilled enough as a wrestler.

Speaker: And also was a talker. She was at her best when she was silent and terrifying. And so she hit a ceiling, left w WWE, and then ah just her life kind of fell apart. She fell into addiction. She worked in pornography as a sex worker for a while. And then, yeah, she she passed away from an overdose. um And yeah every one of these wrestlers has a story. And a lot of it is they have their time at the top, which in retrospect is often astonishingly brief.

Speaker: Like someone like Rick Rude, who is of that Hulk Hogan, Jake the Snake era. And their bodies just start breaking down. Rick Rude was injured out with a horrible back injury, if I recall. And ah just, again, end up with these tragic deaths.

Speaker: And nowadays, it's very common to see wrestlers wrestling in their early 40s at a very high level. Like top wrestlers in the world level. And back then, a wrestler who was 40 years old was ah considered like past it, broken down, either seconds away from retirement. Like Stone Cold Steve Austin retired at something like 37. Really? Oh, I thought he was older than that. He always looked like 45. Yeah. yeah ah He had a couple of brief sort of return matches. yeah But his time at the top of wrestling was maybe four years.

Speaker: Yeah, that's it's not that's wild to think about. yeah Meanwhile, as well, I remember thinking, oh, she's only it was a couple of years where she's at the top. Absolutely. So although the industry and also I'll say there are other deaths, particularly that of own heart, I'll cover in much greater detail. This is a multi-parter in a future episode.

Speaker: Although the industry took notice, there wasn't really policy change. Most of the wrestlers who were passing were well past their best years, which meant that particularly w WWE, who during this time was well and above the top game in town. Their competitors were like 10 times smaller.

Speaker: Not so for Eddie Guerrero, who died as one of the top wrestlers on the planet in 2005, passing of heart failure 38 years old. In 2007, so sort of a year and a half later, Guerrero's close friend, my favorite wrestler at the time, and Edmonton hero, Chris Benoit, committed a family annihilation. That one I know.

Speaker: yeah Yeah, that is the famous one. And murdered his wife, Nancy, who was an influential wrestling manager who went by woman, and his young son, Daniel, and then himself. Mm-hmm.

Speaker: Benoit's horrific acts spurred an enormous surge of negative attention in wrestling. And this actually got w WWE and importantly, Vince McMahon to do something. Who implemented a strict wellness policy? I'll talk about more down the line.

Speaker: While the media babbled inanely about Roy rage to describe an act that took place over several days, which was ah just on the face of it, ludicrous, uh,

Speaker: The most plausible explanation came from a former wrestler who Tracy might recall, chris Christopher Nowinski. Oh, yeah. ah He worked very briefly in WWE wwe in the early 2000s, having a snobby Harvard graduate sort of, well, not snobby, but like, I'm a super smart prep guy kind of gimmick, but was injured out with post-concussion syndrome.

Speaker: And Nowinski dedicated his life afterwards to studying concussions, founding the ah the Concussion Legacy Foundation. Nowinski's work is I can't stress how much this guy changed wrestling for the better and also football.

Speaker: He completely changed ah pro wrestling, American football and a concussion protocol and spurred mass awareness of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Encephalopathy. Encephalopathy. Yeah, I think I got it right the first time. Yeah, you did. Nailed it. up from The condition brought on from repeated untreated concussions. Upon so upon study, the 40-year-old Chris Benoit had the brain of a man who was 85 years old.

Speaker: Yeah. wwe WWE, of course, adamantly denied that they had anything to do this, but they banned chair shots to the head. hu Because one of those things about how wrestling needs to have that verisilitude, that sense of realism, is those chairs were not gimmicked. They are heavy metal folding chairs. And wrestlers took great pride in how they could take a full chair shot on the head.

Speaker: The Rock, ah Dwayne Johnson, ah you know, ah who is also kind of at the head of w WWE and the board of directors for TKO, famously hated doing chair shots on the head and always put his hands up and was kind of mocked for it.

Speaker: Smart man. So, yeah. So since that point, the old ways of pro wrestling started to change. Steroid abuse in particular completely changed into something else where it became more about how, you know, how celebrities go into the super expensive celebrity program and come out looking like ah looking super jack. Yeah, that's done under close medical supervision. That's kind of how wrestlers manage their health and also genuinely how they manage things like growth hormones and steroids. Right. Rather than just like injecting mass qualities of steroids in their ass according to whatever the vibes are because they got it from a sketchy doctor. Yeah. um We have people administering these in a medical fashion. That's exactly it. just

Speaker: But they're still doing the steroids. Yes. But the big thing I can stress is they're wrestling a lot later and they're not dying all the time. i mean, it's better. ah like Here's my thing is and I don't say this as somebody with any kind of expertise.

Speaker: Also, you can always kind of tell if a wrestler is on steroids when not only do they get a lot of muscle growth, but they get back acne. The back knee is always a tell. But yeah um the point is, is that if you look in the 70s and 80s in particular, actually the 60s to an extent, the wrestlers were partying every night.

Speaker: They were doing mass number of steroids, particularly in the 1980s under the Hulk Hogan era. and living these extremely reckless ah like reckless personal lives. Nowadays, the wrestlers are primarily clean-cut athletes who play video games all the time, or Dungeons & Dragons and stuff like that.

Speaker: They're all nerds. and so I noticed that too. Yeah. So some people online say, oh, the left one professional wrestling. Yeah, it's because it's true. The only more left wing. And if if we call it a sport and rank it with sport, there were some surveys and wrestling has one of the most left wing fan bases out of any sport. The only stuff for the left is like the WNBA.

Speaker: Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. Because it used to be like, even, you know, back when I was watching it in the early 2000s with that boyfriend, it was it was like, this is what dudes are into. This is my own thing. And it was very like. Yes.

Speaker: Chud coded. It was very chud coded. And frankly, w WWE still is. Yes. Editorialized. Linda McMahon's a piece of shit. Oh, God. Vince McMahon is a demon. More on him later. but There's a really good episode on Behind the Bastards about Vince McMahon. Oh, it's great. It's great. It's a series. Sorry. Yeah, it's a series. It's a five-parter. Mostly based on the on the book Ringmaster, which I own and actually haven't dug into as a source yet. Because I haven't gotten even got to the point of where I'm going here. so I know.

Speaker: Now... And yet I guess the big thing I will say is that wrestling really has changed since and that change took place over the 2010s into something that became a bastion of geek culture rather than a ah sort of. ah And again, ah i use the term working class with some hesitation, a very working class form of entertainment.

Speaker: And this was a transition that took place over a long period of time. And although I would say wwe WWE is heavily tied to the mega movement and is quite right wing as a company, wrestling fans in general are much less right wing than that company. And the company I love, All Elite Wrestling, AEW. Yeah. It is a very capitalist enterprise owned by the son of a billionaire, but it's quite progressive, treats its wrestlers extremely well. And, ah you know,

Speaker: really signals a kind of we're on the left ah thing. Not overt. For example, it is a popular form of audience participation to chant fuck ice at ah Brody King, one of the wrestlers, because he wrestled in Mexico at ah the greatest arena in Mexico, ah called Arena Mexico, wearing a giant abolish ice t-shirt.

Speaker: Nice. I love that great. was sad he wasn't there in Edmonton. I wanted to chant fuck ice at him. Anyways. Yeah. In that case, you just mean the ice that's on the ground and making it impossible to walk and drive. I mean, fuck both. Why not both? I'm kidding. Yeah. yeah ah The former is killing more people right now, though. So anyways, no this all all of this is preamble to lead me to my, for lack of a better word, research question here.

Speaker: And it goes into the other thing I'm an expert on. Not a professional expert, but I know more than most people. I don't need to know why so many of my wrestling heroes died young.

Speaker: I know why they why they died, often in incredible detail. I want to know why the fuck they didn't have a union. Ah, yes. So... Hmm. This is asked constantly. Wrestling fans ask this all the time. And major names in wrestling have called for unions in their later years or during ah periods where they weren't wrestling, including extremely wealthy men who made a lot of money out of wrestling.

Speaker: Bret Hart, Ric Flair and CM Punk have all called for a wrestling union. These are three of the most important wrestlers to have ever lived. There is a huge industry of wrestling pundits, largely old men with podcasts of varying quality, but their explanations are incomplete.

Speaker: This is because they know wrestling extremely well, but they don't know a damn thing about unions. And I know a lot about both. So comes together like peanut butter and chocolate. Yes. I also do want to stress, I know why wrestling is not currently unionized. ah Most jobs aren't union nowadays. And unionizing a multibillion dollar industry based on an independent contracting model is extremely hard. It's a tall order.

Speaker: What I really want to know is why it wasn't unionized 80 years ago. Right. When yeah unions were actually, especially in America, in the States, and in in America, had more power than they certainly do now. Right. We're talking about the ah sort of post-New Deal world and, oh God, um my friends are going to kill me for ah for forgetting this, Wagner Act, ah that is that established the concept of contract unionism, which is the notion of it being a sort of golden handcuffs is a separate episode and topic entirely. But the point here is

Speaker: Industries around the U.S. were unionizing like mad. And importantly, other professional sports were unionized. Now, right one of the ingredients into why it's not unionized I'll get into is boxing never successfully unionized, which is the closest, ah which is the close ah bigger brother of wrestling straight up.

Speaker: But nonetheless, ah wrestling is a very different industry from boxing. And there were a lot of opportunities. And that's what I'm going to get into here.

Speaker: In order to really understand this question, I'm going to go back to the very roots of wrestling. And what we're going to hear for the rest of this episode is a history. And that history is going to be about the earliest origins of professional wrestling all the way to around Rome.

Speaker: Well, professional wrestling. Oh, OK. Yeah. i'm lookoo The Greeks and the Romans. Yes. are gone greeks Unfortunately, we don't know if they were. We don't know if they were, ah you know, working the marks back then. ah Yeah. OK, it's true. But we're going to go from the earliest origins of pro wrestling in the 1830s to a century later, maybe a little bit further. eighteen thirty s Yes. They love that carny shit back then. Oh, they did. So ah my sources I'm going to briefly mention here are Dragon King Carl's Pioneer Pro Wrestling Omnibus. which is a genuine work of love from an an excellent amateur wrestling historian and podcaster who whose' whose Patreon you should follow.

Speaker: And he sort of got his ah fame as the the guy you knew more than everybody on the ah paywalled and influential Wrestling Observer Newsletter ah online discussion board. Mm-hmm. And then Ballyhoo by Jim Langmead, which is incidentally the best pro wrestling history I've ever read. It's so well written, exhaustively researched. It just came out a couple of years ago, building on the work of many other wrestling historians who came before him. So hell of a good book. Strongest recommendation.

Speaker: Cool. So now that we have the preamble out of the way, out of what are we in? 20 minutes or so? Perfect. 28 minutes. ah We had some, we talked a little bit previously. It's fine. That's true.

Speaker: So ah to borrow, well, there's your problem bit. What is professional wrestling? As most people know, and in order to understand this, like with any topic, you want to start with a lexicon.

Speaker: And wrestling has an entire glossary. Face, bump, juice, put over, stretch, heel, screw job, kayfabe, heat, spot monkey, jobber, sell, hooker, dirt sheet, shoot, tweener, get color, mark, smart, pop, house show, paying dues, go home, squash and potato.

Speaker: Potato? Potato. I knew like kayfabe. Potato means to hit somebody hard, like to to throw a punch that's so hard it might as well have been a real one. That that guy was throwing potatoes.

Speaker: There's one term here that matters more than any other, though. And although kayfabe, the one most people know, is important, the one I care about is work. Wrestling is not fake.

Speaker: It is work. And I want to explain why it's not fake, aside from the fact that it offends wrestlers to call it that. A fake is then an inferior copy, like a fake Chanel bag.

Speaker: Actual wrestling matches are not good spectator sports. And as we'll find out through this history, they're a boring thing to watch. Professional wrestling is not an inferior version of Olympic freestyle wrestling. It's not like, oh, I'm watching the fake thing. I want the real thing. It's something entirely different.

Speaker: Right. thus wrestling matches are not fake fights they are worked fights to work is to manipulate the crowd you work a match by stringing together holesen sequences you work a crowd through charisma timing intensity and various intangibles and you work a hold by making sure that headlock is on tight without hurting somebody, but there's no air in there. and That's ah something you'll hear Steve Austin rant about on his podcast. Tighten up that hold, buddy.

Speaker: a fake punch doesn't connect. Like a fake punch is an acting punch where you throw your fist and then there's a reaction shot where it cuts to behind the other person. They go, blah. A worked punch connects.

Speaker: Yep. And it might yeah actually really hurt, but it's safe. Yeah. Like, God. Yeah. And I think people understand that fakeness is it's not, it's fake in that the outcome is predetermined, but everything else is real. It's basically a theatrical performance. Yes. And yeah it is and i and my I also don't like using the word real. And the reason for that is because it's still a lie. So for example, all wrestling, sorry, the fundamental rule of wrestling is used is make taking advantage of surface area. Right.

Speaker: If you land on the point of your elbow, you're going to break your elbow. Yeah. If you land on your back flat and throw your arms out so that the backs of your arms hit and then your feet go down to you, have maximized the amount of surface area on your body that can hit the mat. And therefore, it'll wind you if you're not used to it and also really does hurt.

Speaker: ah You can still get up and do and and do like 10 more of those. That's a wrestling bump. And so i I use the word legitimate ah rather than to differentiate a real fight from a ah worked one because we're going to early history and that starts to matter.

Speaker: But that is where like and yes, it's real to hit the ground like that. But it's also not how people but also it's you know, it's a practice and very highly trained technique on how to fall. So, yeah, again, it's it's not real or fake. That's part of the part of the fun. thing Yeah. And it does. It's obviously taking athleticism and talent and skill.

Speaker: Oh, yeah. It's selling yeah, it's very hard to do well. And one of the big things about wrestlers, they tend to be at their best in their thirty s most sports, your athletes peak in their are early to mid 20s.

Speaker: And that's because the ability to wrestle convincingly and work the crowd takes a very long time to ah to learn. yeah The peer athletics do peak earlier, but you need that combination of your body being able to do all this stuff and also being able to add the aura, the intangibility, the intensity, all that stuff.

Speaker: The performance aspect, right? yeah It's a performance. ah So another thing is for wrestling to be convincing, it has to be visceral. So that means real hits, real blood, real impact. But again, it's worked so you can do it the next night.

Speaker: Many wrestlers work stiff, meaning when they hit someone, they do it really goddamn hard because it's more visceral when they do that. ah Chris Benoit, famously stiff worker.

Speaker: Other wrestlers work quite light where they emphasize never putting their opponent in a situation where they're even close to being in trouble. Bret Hart will brag till his deathbed, rightfully so. He's never injured an opponent, which is incredible. yeah Genuinely one of the best wrestlers who ever lived.

Speaker: It seems like a decent individual as well. He's not bad. ah You know he ah he has, um their business after ah his stroke, ah which happened in the early 2000s, thank you, Goldberg, he's certainly a complainer, but it's kind of fun.

Speaker: Oh, hey, look, I love complaining more than almost anybody I know. so I hadn't noticed. Well, I hadn't either until you pointed it out, and then I've got to reflect on my life. That's okay. grow and I learn and grow. So and a veteran, a veteran tough wrestlers may work really stiff with someone new until they hit them back twice as hard as a means of earning respect. You know, welcome to the business, kid. Don't throw those wimpy looking punches at me or we're not making any money together.

Speaker: So if somebody throws a wimpy punch, the older wrestler is going to beat the crap out of him until he starts hitting back. That's a common thing. And ah yeah but some wrestlers went took it way too far, ah like JBL, Justin Bradshaw, Layfield or ah famous for ah being a kind of wrestling policeman, whether people wanted him to or not. And ah yeah, he brutalized some people.

Speaker: oof um Where does Mick Foley kind of fall into this? um isn' i He's just doing chaos. He's just jumping on thumbtacks. He's a saint. Mick Foley is. Yeah, I love Mick Foley. Mick Foley, also the guy who popularized the wrestling book by writing an excellent biography. had a nice day in 97 so.

Speaker: Mick Foley's style of ah taking enormous bumps, which is kind of a like some wrestlers did that ah ah ah did that a little earlier. But he's the guy who, again, falling off the hell in the cell and all that and putting his body at extreme risk meant that he exceeded beyond the fact he's a sort of kind of schlubby looking guy, which is not going to succeed in WWE anymore. And again, famously, an incredibly kind man yeah who, like, for example, he did a thing where everybody who donated ah enough money to reign the ah anti-sexual assault network, he but he would fly to your house and mow your lawn.

Speaker: Really? Yeah. ah He's a good dude. I heard about him early on. and He seems like a like one of the people I think of when I think of wrestling. As well, you should. He'll forever be associated with it. And ah also notably, when the ah information that Vince McMahon was a genuine like rape demon came out, some people stepped by to stepped up to defend him. Looking at you, John Cena.

Speaker: Other people ah like McFoley were like, I'm just in a process of grief right now. Yeah. yeah no Like, again, he's a very heavily scrutinized person. Nobody's perfect, but I'd say he's as close to perfect as you get.

Speaker: So let's go back in time now and actually start our sort of history. Can someone give me a time machine noise? dioo dialoo andoo dioooo All right.

Speaker: So as we travel. We have a backup. We have a time machine backing up. Yeah. The backup siren. It's kind of both going on. Backing up into the past. Yeah.

Speaker: So as we travel, we ah understand that our early records are largely from newspaper clippings, archives, personal texts, and the rare published word and a lot of word of mouth and a kind of informal oral history. The historiography sucks.

Speaker: um Wrestling is obviously very secretive, was never taken seriously and so rarely scrutinized from without. And serious books about pro wrestling are almost a modern invention with a couple of exceptions.

Speaker: There was no centralized record keeping from wrestling until 1980 when Dave Meltzer started the Wrestling Observer Newsletter. Wow. So the histories on wrestling are pretty recent and they're building on one another.

Speaker: so And unfortunately, from what I can understand, doing my own limited research in history, relying on newspaper accounts is not great because they're full of lies. absolutely. They publish lies the newspaper all the time. Yeah. And it's lies about lies, right? Because wrestling is lying in the first place. Yeah. So ah and to illustrate how the history of wrestling has been really badly maintained. Jen, have you ever heard of Babe Ruth?

Speaker: Yes, I have. Have you heard about the man who was more famous than him in the early Frank Gotch? frank gach No. I think I'd remember Gotch. that's Yeah. It's you know kind of quite the name. No, I don't. Never heard of him. How about Jim Londos?

Speaker: Nope. Nope. I'd argue both of these men deserve equal space and popular memory alongside people like Babe Ruth. They were that popular. Right. Right. So that is where and so we're going to go into this. And ah one of the reasons I decided to really get into the history here is I didn't know much about it.

Speaker: And so I just said, OK, where the hell does wrestling come from? So pro wrestling starts. So its origins are in Europe, where regions across the UK and the continent had various forms of folk wrestling as a kind of accessible form of local sport that usually didn't kill or injure its competitors. Mm So ah this was particularly popular in England, where each region had their own styles and rules.

Speaker: These traditions emigrated to the U.S. and took real hold in the 19th century because immigrants and styles get smashed together. And so from ah Dragon King Carl's omnibus, the earliest records we found are in the 1830s discussing wrestling contests as a popular distasteful public pastime.

Speaker: yeah That's pretty much the attitude to this day, though. Yeah, popular yet distasteful. That's kind of everyone's attitude. That's been the attitude. Yeah, throughout. I have to mention that a ah somebody very much involved in this scene was Abraham Lincoln.

Speaker: Oh, really? It always surprised. Yeah, that's so funny. But people were people, right? Yep. ah Abraham Lincoln was absolutely a wrestler and a fairly serious one. his ah The omnibus kind of goes into detail trying to tease apart where was he actually a big deal? And the answer is no, but he wrestled.

Speaker: ah He became a big deal for other reasons. so That is kind of amazing. At first, and one of the they the greatest American presidents was also a professional wrestler for a time. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, amazing. Yeah. or And here's the trick is we don't actually know how much of the professional that is. ah Was he in on a carnival grift? We really know. We just know that he wrestled because legitimate wrestling absolutely existed, too.

Speaker: It's impossible to know ah unless some kind of source shows up. So the way that it started to get that professional attached to it, which, again, is kind of more of a lie, is that people made bets on the matches.

Speaker: All right. That's mean money, and this is where the grift begins. So this is, again, the golden age of con artists. So... During the 19th century, there's three key styles of wrestling that land in the U.S., transforming what was a folk tradition into something different.

Speaker: So and I'll mention them because for those who follow any kind of wrestling, it's neat to see these different pieces come in. So Union soldiers returning home popularized an Irish style of wrestling ah that became very popular in the ranks. You have huge number of Irish who were sent off to die in that war, collar and elbow wrestling.

Speaker: ah Which, of course, gives us the famous lockup that starts most wrestling matches. Greco-Roman wrestling arrived with immigrants, ah and apparently it was huge in France, for example.

Speaker: In the 1870s, popularizing the pinfall is a way to win a match, as well as showing people what a suplex is, because a Greco-Roman doesn't let ah you hold someone below the waist, so you can have spectacular th throws to get them down on the mat.

Speaker: Mm-hmm. And Greco-Roman is an intense, serious way to wrestle, but it's kind of boring for spectators. So ass at this point we start to see records of wrestlers working a little, meaning they are going out of their way to make the match more fun to watch, whether by working up the crowd or even timing in what is probably at least mostly legitimate contests saying, we'll wrestle fast, we'll wrestle slow here to kind of build it up and bring it down.

Speaker: That kind of thing. Okay. Finally, something called catch wrestling caught fire like mad in the 1890s. So the full name is catch as catch can, which is ah ah kind of goofy name for a very dangerous style of wrestling. That is also the fundamental style behind modern American pro wrestling. Hmm. It emerged in Lancashire as a form of no holds barred wrestling. And what I mean by no holds barred is a modern no holds barred match means you can hit somebody with a barbed wire wrapped baseball bat.

Speaker: um That's not how they did it back then. i just meant that, for example, you can do a hold below the waist. ah And then vitally, it means would hook in somebody's eyes. Eye socket. Those kinds of things, a little less so. That's pretty dirty. Yeah, exactly. Stuff that was overtly dirty, no. And we'll get we'll get into that, actually. But the point is, is that joint locks were permitted. Yeah.

Speaker: And joint locks are unbelievably dangerous because you can snap. So what that? So if I, an an arm bar. So if I was, ah if you think of like a classic, because this features in wrestling and MMA a lot. If you have your arm on the ground and I am lying parallel to you and your arm is draped through my legs with your elbow right against my pelvis. Oh.

Speaker: One pull and I can snap your arm. Okay. That is. And so these joint locks are extremely dangerous. Yes. As I've said around 15 times. Catch wrestling has a lot in common, weirdly, with Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which is the foundational style for mixed martial arts today.

Speaker: I don't think they informed one another, but it's kind of parallel evolution because... Yeah, that's right. MMA is another no-holds-barred kind of fighting. And so what happens is that joint locks become number the one of the top ways to win a match. Right.

Speaker: So wrestlers began to learn to keep ways to keep themselves safe during these matches. The Touring Carnival Act involved often facing local toughs, right? You sort of, you know, which man from this village can be, to ah you know, the champion of Ohio or whatever. Right.

Speaker: And so the young men show up. And what if this guy is seven feet tall and ah carrying a knife? So wrestlers became very good at exploiting pressure points and joints so they could beat any opponent who didn't have equivalent skill, no matter their size and strength.

Speaker: right Catch wrestling kind of formalized this into a real technique and evolved into what wrestlers call hooking. Over time, these... They go to the streets on the street new street corner, they'd pick up a guy. Yeah, absolutely. They're genuinely called hookers.

Speaker: We talk about hookers so much on our podcast. We really do. It's different kind. So over time, ah the legitimate folk wrestlers who came up and catch a Greco-Roman or whatever were replaced by good looking athletes. This happened decades later, and I'll talk about that in a lot.

Speaker: But those who knew the technique of hooking became super feared because it was like they knew a secret martial art. that nobody else knew and it was jealously guarded. So after a certain point, we're talking sort of 40s to 60s kind of thing. And a little later, if you were a hooker, you were like, ah you're like a ninja.

Speaker: And importantly, this this guy who knows a secret trick to break your arm that you don't understand is a great way to enforce the wrestling business. And they could ruin your life if you pissed them off or their boss. Yeah.

Speaker: Right. I don't like this guy. So and when you're wrestling him, don't go easy. Just snap his arm like a twig. Yeah. And it's pretty rare that it happens, but it happens. And it's the threat of it, too. That's exactly it. You know, right. And ah one of the big things here is, well, this match is rigged.

Speaker: What if you don't want to lose? I don't want to lose. I want to be the champion. I get more money as the champion. All right. Well, now I'm going to make you lose that kind of thing. OK, sure. yeah So by the late 19th century, wrestling became a popular touring act.

Speaker: Women's wrestling is also documented at this time. And I'm going I was going to talk about it a bit, but I'm going to just do an entire episode on women's wrestling ah because it exists in parallel to men's wrestling the whole time. But because of that partial segregation, it sort of has its own history and challenges. So I'm going to talk entirely about men's wrestling here and save the women for another time because they deserve a lot of time.

Speaker: And also ah the ah good sources on women's wrestling at this period. A little scant, although I found one this morning. ah But got some reading to do. again That's for next time. Yeah.

Speaker: And the betting is also fascinating. So it's not just who wins. Most matches were two out of three falls. And because these matches were hours long and boring, the bets were really how you got your excitement.

Speaker: So you don't just bet on the victor. You can bet on events of the match. Right. who takes the fall, who goes to the ground first. Anything that you can make a bet on, you can bet on, which is very similar to how modern sports betting works. So that's like polymarket has always been with us. Exactly. That is polymarket style betting. yeah And again, we're we're just in the Gilded Age, right? we've just gone Because this is the Gilded Age back then, is the Gilded Age now, which again means it's crap, but it's got a gold leaf on the outside. Yeah.

Speaker: Yes. Gilding is not great. Yeah. It's not solid. Yeah, exactly. Gilding isn't good. It's hollow and rotten. So when wrestling is rigged, it means you can set up the match to ensure the house wins handily. But the marks feel like enough people want to come back for the next one and try again. That's the art.

Speaker: And league wrestling was also legally questionable, of course, because it's unsavory. There's a lot of violence. People like people can die. ah It's a whole thing.

Speaker: But wrestling had a layer of protection from the cops getting too involved. And that layer of protection was boxing. Boxing was much more popular, involved in parallel to wrestling, and was the number one source of ire from the newspaper and the police. So the cops were always taking down boxing matches and banning boxing. And wrestling, which nobody ever took seriously, kind of squeaks by with minimal regulation and oversight.

Speaker: Isn't that interesting? To this day, got people go, oh, a boxing match. That scene is like sort of classy. Whereas like, oh, I'm going to to WWE. It's like, you know what I mean? It's like kind of a Chad thing. Whereas boxing, I mean, I guess it's blending today.

Speaker: Well, and the thing is, as m MMA is the chud sport. It's straight Yeah, okay. MMA is actually purely chud-pilled. That's true. But no, you're right, where um wrestling has... And MMA kind of has that unsavoriness to it that wrestling you that wrestling kind of has. But there is still that um wrestling is down-market entertainment for easily fooled morons. And that is... Whereas boxing is quote-unquote real. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so the questionable legality and genuine danger to the promoters and wrestlers that they made off with somebody's money meant that a secret code evolved, sort of offshoot from carny lingo, because they often toured with carnivals. And so I've gone into great detail. Well, sorry, I just babbled off a million different wrestling terms.

Speaker: But... ah What the term I'll launch on, which is sorry, touch on that most people know now is kayfabe, which is a probable. Nobody knows the origin, but to me, it makes sense that it's pig Latin for fake.

Speaker: Oh. You just reverse fake a little bit, do i throw the Y in there, that kind of, it's, yeah. Yeah, kayfabe. Oh, yeah, i yeah, you're right. Yeah, you can tease it Kayfabe simply means maintain the illusion or suspension of disbelief, and it's so widely used that it is a common term among VTubers.

Speaker: So everything- i know it. yeah Exactly. So everything within kayfabe is a work and something which is legitimate is a shoot, a real fight, a wrestler dropping character to speak from the heart. Or, of course, those interviews I talked about are shoots.

Speaker: OK, now we can talk about wrestling as labor a little bit here. So in this period, mid to late 19th century, where the histories are broad, largely pulled from newspapers. There's some personal accounts. And again, more historian more and more historians are working on this than ever before, which is a good sign as we build on the work of others. ah But the big thing is that we know it's dangerous.

Speaker: For example, in 1864, notorious character with the great name of Uziel Prickett was a legitimate collar and elbow wrestler who claimed the championship of America, which is also the first document I see in the omnibus of a wrestling title with any notoriety. He lost the title after two years of defending it to a black wrestler, Simon Thompson, in a match that Uziel was heavily favored to win.

Speaker: The mob immediately decided that they'd been scammed and almost lynched to the man. course. going to say, that didn't end well for the unfortunate man who won. Yeah. yeah And two years later, he was shot in the back of the head after a vicious beating in a saloon in Ohio. Allegedly due to throwing another... Sorry, the black man? No, Uziel Prickett.

Speaker: Oh, okay. Hopefully that other guy got okay. Yes. I mean, sucks for Prickett, but... Well, and um there have always been black black wrestlers, and they have always been treated terribly. So I don't have a record of how things went for him. But if this was the popular wrestler and the champion, meh.

Speaker: So and this is where the muddiness of it becomes deadly because wrestling is a grift designed to get money from marks. The marks sometimes realize they're grifted and get mad. And so this is also a key thing is people were chanting fake at wrestling matches as early as the eighteen sixty s Oh, wow.

Speaker: Now, ok this is not because they think that, oh, that wasn't a real punch, although they might. It's because they're betting and they know that these assholes are trying to rip them off. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. it's Wrestling was only sort of kind of worked back then, much unlike as it is today. They were really wrestling, but in the context of really wrestling, you can ah you can sort of blend between a work and a legitimate fight. where you are um deliberately holding up letting go of a hold a little earlier so that you can get up on your feet and make it look more fun.

Speaker: Or again, ah you know that you're supposed to lose the second because people have bet have a bet against you losing the second of the three falls. Like that kind of stuff, right? It's it's a weird blend at this point.

Speaker: And importantly, it is impossible for us to know without some kind of new source emerging how much of this was legitimate and how much was worked. We do not know. But we do know it was a blend.

Speaker: Now, I'll actually get into a story here. ah So the audience were far from the greatest risk to the wrestler. This is, despite me geeking out over wrestling history, ultimately lay a labor story. And that's where we need to introduce our villain, who is, in all labor stories, the boss. Yep. Yep. In wrestling, heal. Absolutely. And so the boss is the promoter, sometimes the manager as well. And the promoter promotes the fights and also functions as being the house for bets at this point. The managers would genuinely manage the wrestler and also ah promote the wrestler, get out in the newspapers because everything's newspapers in these days. And also i just do what they can to make the wrestler a big deal. So in the late 1890s, promoter William Brady brought forth Yusuf Ismail, a Bulgarian who was immediately dubbed the terrible Turk by the press.

Speaker: Did they not have a map or anything? Nobody knew where Bulgaria was. Yeah. Look, and if he fails, he can be the terrible Greek the next year, a whole new thing. Yeah. And he can be the terrible Bulgarian one day. Hilariously, there were multiple terrible Turks, and I saw mention of one terrible Greek in one of the books I read. Well, they have to, because they hated, you know. Yeah. Get the rivalry going. I also do love that the Turks and the Greeks, famous best friend, and then you've got this Bulgarian playing both. Anyways. That is funny. So, uh... Yeah.

Speaker: yeah So Yusuf's man. ah so Brady, who was sort of the manager promoter for Yusuf, would have the terrible Turk parade around New York in his best. We think this is what Turks dress like outfit. Intimidating people he saw, like growling at folks on the street and just being a wild man in that very sort of late Victorian. um I've got the scary foreigner who is exotic and strange, a common kind of freak show attraction.

Speaker: yeah Brady would have... Oofty Goofty. One of the finest Gollop episodes. Oofty Goofty. I love that one so much. hear you weirdo If you're listening to this podcast, stop right now. Abandon this podcast permanently and go listen to Oofty Goofy.

Speaker: And then come back. one of the earlier dollop episodes, and I don't think it's that long. No, it's a short one. No, it's shorter. It's classic, though. Yeah. It's so good. So... All right. The... ah So Brady would do... Have him do astonishing things. Like...

Speaker: I'm going to try to get through this with a straight face. Had him appear at popular restaurants, eating multiple steaks and desserts. And then had the newspapers whipped up to follow and report in his outlandish behavior. He would say anything.

Speaker: The Turk was the assistant of the Sultan. He never bathed as to not sap his strength and was so powerful he slept for 12 hours a day. That doesn't indicate power. He's so powerful. Turns out he was just depressed. Yeah. mean, look, when I sleep for 12 hours a day, i am not at my most powerful. Yeah, when I sleep for 12 hours a day, people ask me if everything's all right. I know.

Speaker: Next time say, no, no, leave her alone. She's powerful. yeah I gotta go. Shut up. I gotta to go be powerful. um So this, ah this Ballyhoo worked and the reports in and the papers were constantly contradicting his size and manner. Everyone who saw him came away with a different story because it was like seeing a car accident. They had no idea what was going on.

Speaker: So and this goes to a match in Madison Square Garden, which is the site of a lot of stories I'm going to tell and is the arena in New York and the most famous arena in wrestling. It's actually been several arenas. It's kind of moved locations. But nonetheless, MSG is the arena.

Speaker: um And Ismael performed to a standing room only crowd against a German or er ah Ernest Robert. Ismael pushed Robert, who fell out of the ring. The audience thought the man was dead. And so they immediately charged the ring, screaming, kill the Turk. The police had to break it up.

Speaker: Oh, no. The rematch at an opera house was even crazier as when the wrestlers went down to the mat, the audience couldn't see. And so they all stood up and they just broke out into fistfights.

Speaker: The New York City Herald wrote, from the quarters with ah sorry from the quarters which the George george Goulds and Seward Webbs and W.C. Whitneys call their own quiet little boxes came roars of smash him. The city has never witnessed so disgraceful a spectacle. Yeah. Like, we tend to know crowds. We're like, post-COVID, people can't behave in public.

Speaker: Look, man. Yeah. um Were we ever able to? um Late that year, Ismael set sail for home on a French liner, La Bourgogne.

Speaker: ah Bourgogne? Yeah, close enough. La Bourgogne? Yeah, Bourgogne. I think it's Bourgogne. The liner collided with another vessel near Halifax, and 549 souls were lost, including Yusuf. Oh, God. Aww. Yeah. And so... One uses wrestling powers to scoop everyone up on his broad shoulders. Wait for it. Okay, sorry, yeah, powering Remember, he a remote no although heels had not been invented yet, he is still meant to be a monstrous, horrible person. Yes. The papers in New York mentioned that the ship sang disgracefully, with open fighting between the crew and passengers for the lifeboats.

Speaker: Yousef's manager, Brady, seized on this to tell lies about his dead employee. Yeah. Oh my God. Claiming that the terrible Turk was hurling women and children overboard to save himself. Oh no. no And would not let go of his 40 pound money belt crammed with gold coins from his victories. The weight of the belt is why he drowned.

Speaker: oh I mean, it's a good story, but this poor man getting slandered. Just as an aside, people complain anti-feminist, like, well, why is it women and children first? Yeah, that's sexist. You know why? Because they're helpless. Because during shipwrecks, men would push women and children out of the way and save themselves. Yeah.

Speaker: So, yeah, women and children first is kind of the rule of honor, even though that was ignored most the time. Anyway. It's why chivalry was invented, right? Because the knights were doing bad things and they had to get it to knock it off.

Speaker: Exactly so. Weird where our manners come from. So the promoter of so a a promoter who I'm going to talk about a lot, Jack Curley, and the centerpiece of the book Ballyhoo, remarked, I doubt that his manager has ever let him have enough money to affect his buoyancy.

Speaker: Oh, Ismail very likely You guys are so snide. I love it. Oh, yeah. Ismail likely... Jack Curley's entire thing is being a catty bitch in the newspapers. He loves it Ismail likely died scraping by while his promoter certainly made a lot of money.

Speaker: So into the early 19th century, where into the early 20th century, good Lord, I forget how centuries work. Well, it's 19th. I got to think about it every single time. Yeah, me too. If it's 19, then it's later, so it's 20. Yeah, every time. Yeah.

Speaker: Into the early 1900s, American wrestling underwent a boom and found its first bona fide megastar. Wrestling in the U.S. is highly regiongi and regional, and although New York and Madison Square Garden are forever associated with it, the true heart of wrestling is in the Midwest.

Speaker: Hmm. Through this area, toured strange carnival wrestler named Martin Farmer Burns. So just Farmer Burns. ah He claimed temperance and clean living and preached a kind of jog Kellogg style obsession with personal health.

Speaker: He would. AKA not jorking it. ah Yeah. all Lots of cornflakes and no masturbating. I am shocked that the source I have on him does not discuss eye his opinions on masturbation because I bet he shared them to anyone whether or not they wanted to hear them. So, OK, he just so let let's say he is right. So he told reporters he slept with a canvas bag of lead across his throat to strengthen his neck.

Speaker: Oh my God. A favorite gimmick of his was to challenge people to strangle him, to shut him up, but none can shut off a stream of batter. So you can imagine he's shouting at people to stop jerking off as they're strangling him. It's like, ah, maybe you should try it a little harder, buddy. You don't have any grip.

Speaker: You choke your chicken with those hands? Sorry. And Burns was like a skinny, weird-looking guy who can only describe as Steve Buscemi-coated.

Speaker: So this... So kind of hat? he was Like, just sort of a hollow-eyed, skinny, weird guy. yeah but he was a brilliant wrestler. So his grift was to show up in town, take on a job as a laborer, and drop that he wrestled for money. People would be convinced he'd be yeah he'd ah he'd be easy to take down because he looks like a wiener, and that he'd build to a match with heavy betting thanks to mysterious financial backers. And then, of course, the big match would come, everyone bets against him, and he annihilates local talent and make off a look. So he's a wrestling shark like a pool shark his favorite wiener i just want to choke him out sorry i mean anytime i'll never stop well jen we know your opinion about wieners now so it was more of a jorkin it joke but yeah i know i know uh

Speaker: That's what I was saying. ah So okay just as I was clarifying just to make sure because I have to clarify, i just make sure you all know that I'm joking. So, OK, his fame grew and eventually Farmer Burns just couldn't keep up this grift. And then he just went into promoting and running a kind of touring carnival. And there he discovered a new talent, Frank Gotch.

Speaker: Gotch was tall, handsome, skilled and theatrical. He paired off gotcha. Yeah, sorry gotcha. and go ahead That's fair. He paired off with another wrestler, Ole Marsh, and traveled to Dawson City to try to catch some Cole's Gold Rush cash.

Speaker: Gotch had a superhuman to Hulk Hogan-like aura to him. In one scene, taking an insane fall into an orchestra pit. The audience were terrified they saw the man die because apparently at this point, if you fall out of sight, you were instantly dead. and he just It's like a Mario Brothers game. maybe Yeah, he just died. Oh, he fell off screen. Maybe object permanence wasn't invented until the nineteen twenty s Just peekaboo. But nonetheless, he falls into the pit. Everyone's scandalized. And then he roars, charging out of the pit to take on his opponent. People had never seen shit like this before. He's back from the dead. Exactly. ah So Martian Gauch cleared something like $40,000 in a few months.

Speaker: Oh, wow. In modern currency, that is roughly 80 bazillion dollars. That's right. Glad you did the math on that. No problem. So he toured across the USA and was the darling of sports writers and hit that perfect spot in wrestling.

Speaker: Audiences were never quite sure if wrestling was fake or not, but Frank Gotch was real. And that's a really magical, important thing for a wrestler to grab onto where even though you know what's going on as a work or in this case, if the match is rigged or not, because working was still kind of in the process of being invented.

Speaker: This guy is real. I believe in him. He makes me believe in him. It's just like an interesting. Yeah. And so by 1910, he was genuinely the most popular athlete in the entire United States.

Speaker: Really? Yes. This is why, like, I mentioned Babe Ruth. ah But this is where I say Babe Ruth, again, his heyday was sort of a decade and a half later. But nonetheless, Frank Gotch was the number one guy in the United States in terms of sports, even though, again, what he was doing was mostly a sport.

Speaker: mostly Right. And although I like to compare ah the rest as I talk through wrestlers, I like to compare them to modern contemporaries. I don't think Hulk Hogan is a good comparison at all. Frank Gotch doesn't have one.

Speaker: He's just up completely of his time. Many other cases I talk about how wrestlers were ahead of their time. Frank Gotch feels very much of this period of the sort of, you know, pre-World War I kind of period.

Speaker: These are the crux of the work becoming sort of, you know, i mean, the whole kayfabe thing emerging. sounds like of the emergence of the idea that things could be rigged, but also real. Yeah.

Speaker: Because, again, a really key thing is everybody goes to these matches believing it may be rigged. Sure. Everyone believes that. OK. But, yeah oh my God, Frank Gotch is coming to town.

Speaker: No one's go a like ah he's not going to take a fall for anybody. That kind of thing, right? He's not going to lay down and nobody can beat him. That's how you create a kind of ah suspension of disbelief.

Speaker: And whether Frank Gotch was legit or not, we don't know. We know a lot about some future wrestlers. With Frank Gotch, mm-hmm. So, and Gotch's matches were notably fun to watch unless they were the big ones. And his most important matches almost always sucked.

Speaker: His most famous and opponent was the ah the concept of a world championship was kind of coming up about this time. And a world championship really just meant the top wrestler in America.

Speaker: But they'd call it the world title because they could they occasionally would go overseas or outside of the U.S., Well, it's kind of like how baseball has the World Series, but they've only invited like one other team from another country. yeah Exactly.

Speaker: So the Miss Universe pageant, where are the universes? Where are the aliens? Where's the lizard people? Yeah, just some Earth lady. Unless they're all lizard people. Also possible.

Speaker: Could Anyway, you are so Gene Hackenschmidt was the world champion at this time and considered this like unstoppable badass. And so Gotch has a much hyped bout about him. And this fight lasts for fucking ever.

Speaker: It goes until 1230 a.m., probably starting in the afternoon. and Oh, God. Gotch kept on fighting dirty, like so poking his eyes, scratching him up. And so Hackensmith is like bleeding from scratches and pokes ah and just gives up the match.

Speaker: Just hooking his mouth. are Yeah. Yeah. And so the match kind of sucked, but it didn't matter because Frank Gotch won and he goes off to become this beloved world champion touring all over the U.S. Hackenschmidt then psyched himself up for a big return match.

Speaker: And while training, and importantly, the the caddy guy I talked about previously, Jack Curley, he's moving out from boxing to promoting wrestling matches, and he's promoting this match. Hackenschmidt critically injures his knee right before the match, and is pressured into wrestling anyways. Oh, no!

Speaker: And so ah the crowd is restless because of the rumors of Hackenschmidt's injury. And actually, i say ah We don't know if French Gauche was legitimate or not. This one match a little different. And so the referee announced by order of the Chicago PD, all bets are off.

Speaker: Meaning quite literally, your money's coming back. We're not honoring any bets. jack Oh, that's an actual, that's where that comes from. Yeah, yeah it just literally means, nope, all bets are off. There's ah no betting.

Speaker: ah You get your money back. Wow. So the crowd is pissed. Jack Curley claimed it was because he detested gambling, which as a boxing and wrestling promoter in 1910 is unlikely. I think it was in 1908 or something. I didn't write down the date, but still.

Speaker: Their last match was a snore fest lasting like five hours. This match was over in eight minutes because Gotch went now right for Hackenschmidt's knee. Oh, and so just snaps it right off. and So Hackenschmidt is screaming in pain.

Speaker: And normally, if somebody is injured in a wrestling match, the referee calls the match off, ah at least at that point. And so Hackenschmidt's dying here, but hasn't given up. And so he leans into Hackenschmidt and then says audibly, make it a real fall. So Hackenschmidt lays down and gets pinned and cements Gotch's legacy.

Speaker: h Eight minutes after five hours, roughly, for the previous match. yeah The match took three years to book and was over in the 1911 equivalent of an eye blink. It took $96,000 at the gate.

Speaker: oh my god wow for like That era as well. Yes. Absurd. Tens of thousands of people. I don't I didn't write down the attendance figures, but a lot of people came to see these matches. And so, for example, a good night at Madison Square Garden would be 15,000 plus 17,000 and eight hours long.

Speaker: It just lasted all day. um The thing is, restless crowds back then, they were armed with tomatoes and Molotov cocktails, probably, and, like, knives. Oh, there's so many crowd riots. They're so good. Yeah, we just take to the internet and they riot. Oh, why don't we bring tomatoes back to ah ah back to ah live ah events?

Speaker: So when Frank so while Frank Gotch is ruling the sport, there's an industry surrounding it. And within this are endless scams. And this is where we get well outside of the betting and talk about where we get into some proper ah proper scams. I love this.

Speaker: So this is a nationwide con operating out of Iowa. So because, again, wrestling Midwest. So a target who the Mabre, who is the gang doing this ah gang, ah they refer to them as Mikes rather than Marks. Mark is the common term. They call them Mikes.

Speaker: They find a Mike somewhere in the U.S. and then Steerers, the people working the con, start ingratiating themselves with the mic and start spinning a story. There's a millionaire who's showing up in another town, sometimes a far away way, but it's not in the mic's town, with a big athletic event, such as a wrestling match. But it could be boxing or foot race. We'll talk wrestling.

Speaker: This is a rigged match. The millionaire's favorite prize fighter always wins, and they make money, and everyone has a great time. But the millionaire's... Yeah, exactly. um So the secretary was sick of rigged matches.

Speaker: And so the secretary had found a w ringer, his own athlete who would take out the fake champ. The plan is simple. Show up, bet against the millionaire, make a fortune. But the steerer is known to the millionaires. And if he shows up with a large bet, everyone would be wise to the double cross.

Speaker: Therefore, he needs the mic to post the bet for him. He could then hang out with rich folks, watch the big fight, and the mic doesn't have to invest any money because he's not telling the mic to bet. He's saying, I'll pay for you to go there and you post my bet for me and then just hang out, have a good time.

Speaker: The only requirement is the mic needs enough cash to fit in. Don't show up broke where you can't afford a drink. you'll ah you'll You'll be out in a second.

Speaker: Just send you a regular guy. Yeah. So the steerers would work mics for weeks, if not years, to get them to agree to the con. And when they got them, the mics were completely in because it's a very exciting thing to do.

Speaker: And also, I'm not spending any money. I'm fine because everyone's wise to scams. So if it was you show up and you bet your money, it's the laziest scam in the world. No one would believe it. The mic then travels, in one case, thousands of miles.

Speaker: ah To arrive at a fight with other mics in attendance. But they don't know their're other they don't know they're there. There, the Maybray gang would all play the part of millionaires. So the mics walk. Oh my yeah It's so elaborate. So this gang shows up. Get a fucking job. I'm sorry. Anyway. ah Right? Work. Anyway, it's not as fun. so And so they're whining the diners, the suckers in attendance. ah So this is a quote from Dave Maurer's Big Con.

Speaker: The mark is thrown into an unreal world which very closely resembles real life. Like the spectator regarding the life groups in a museum of natural history, he cannot tell where the real scene merges into the background.

Speaker: It's like a great Gatsby hallucination. Yeah. Everyone is so rich, so charming. There's booze everywhere. It's like the best time. And it completely takes people out of their element and utterly disarms them.

Speaker: Yep. And of course, they bet all of their money on hand on the fight because they get pulled right in. Mm-hmm. then the big fight takes place. And then the secretaries can't lose athlete fucking dies.

Speaker: What? What happens is the the guy who is supposed to win the fight. Well, again, the guy is supposed to double cross the promote. ah You know what I mean. The secretary's can't lose athlete takes a shot to the gut or something, bites down on a bladder or sponge soaked with blood and hits the ground bleeding from his mouth. And then a fake doctor runs to the ring. It declares him fucking dead.

Speaker: oh Oh, my God. was like, damn. Damn. They really they don't actually kill him. which be funny like We're to need another wrestler. God damn it. If only there was an easier way to do this. Look, the way America treats laborers, that wouldn't be surprise. Okay, just kill them. There's more where they come from. Yeah, exactly. ah So and then what happens is this is illegal.

Speaker: Like yeah this this fight is illegal. You're not allowed to have it. And now there's a dead man here. We're all in deep shit. So the secretary is like, I'll return your bets. Fucking scram.

Speaker: And everyone scrams. and then they skip town with all the money. Yep. Yeah. They worked this con for so much time. ah They like pulled in something like $5 million dollars doing this. Wow. Oh, my God. Back in the day when telecommunications were in their infancy. No one's talking to somebody one a mile away, right?

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. And ah so some folks traveled thousands of miles only to be had and were so taken in but after the fact that they would send money to try to help that poor dead man's family.

Speaker: Wow. That's amazing. It's such a great con. Yeah. It's just, that's cool, but man, that's evil. Oh, it's so evil. There's some comeuppance at least.

Speaker: Well, that's good. So in the mid-1910s, as we move kind of through the Frank Gotch era, a slew of top foreign wrestlers arrive in New York, fleeing Europe during the onset of the Great War. And the city goes through a wrestling boom. And one thing we'll see is rapid boom and bust cycles for wrestling. Would you call it a Wrestlemania?

Speaker: No. Okay. okay So ah promoter Samuel Rockman, I love this. um He decided that rather than doing the working class entertainment thing, which is how wrestling usually functions, he's going to advertise to the hoi polloi.

Speaker: And so he's running really classy theaters in New York and running these shows where wrestlers are doing outrageous nonsense, such as somebody would come on stage and sing opera before fighting. There's a farmer who would hypnotize his opponents.

Speaker: That's a good one. Yeah. Bring that guy back. Absolutely. Or this is the first emergence of a masked wrestler in the Americas. Oh, really? Yeah, called the Masked Marvel.

Speaker: And the Masked Marvel just would show up in the balconies and go like, bleh, I'm the Masked Marvel, and everyone would lose their fucking minds. Ha ha. And so the newspapers are like chasing him around, ah chasing him around all over the place and then trying to effectively dox this guy.

Speaker: They finally find him, find out and they find out that this guy is ah not paid very well. The top wrestlers get what's called a percentage of the gate. Talk about that more in episode two. And he was making ah like one hundred dollars a week, which is good money.

Speaker: But this is one of the key things about wrestling. Although there is good money to be made, it is so cheap to put on a wrestling show compared to the money you bring in. And so your overhead on wrestling is much smaller than in other things. And the cost on talent is a fraction.

Speaker: It's just raw profit. And that is that a key thing that's going to come up again and again is wrestlers making a decent living, but still getting cheated. Yeah. Which is why million dollar hockey players have a players association.

Speaker: Mm hmm. Yes. Because I don't care how much you think Conor McDavid makes. You should see how much Daryl Katz makes. Right. a billionaire. Some of baseball, things like that. All sports teams. God, I mean, football. Jesus. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker: So Frank Gotch is starting to wear down and he's kind of going in and out of retirement. And a new so star shows up to take the torch. ah Joe Stetcher is a major name of this point ah who comes out of the mid 1910s into the 20s.

Speaker: And he's a prodigy famous for his punishing leg scissors hold. So he'll just grab you in his thighs, which are shaped like tree trunks and squeeze the bejesus out of you. And so he's kind of a Kurt Angle character, ah not personality wise, but this tallish, good looking, pure, amazing talent.

Speaker: Sure. And so he has a huge match with Frank Gotch. And once again, Frank Gotch has a terrible fucking match ah at yeah as ah at a peak. A visibly degraded Gotch, who is like his health is starting to fail a little, wrestles Stach for a tedious five hours with almost no wrestling taking place and a non-finish at the end. Oh. so you're just standing in there, like, shoulder to shoulder, walking back and forth, like, i got you. Or just, like, hours dancing around each other in a circle, like, tapping hands, trying to get a hold in. And they they never land it. The audience are losing their mind with boredom. Well, yeah.

Speaker: And Jack Curley, again, I'll just call him a catty Curley because he was the catty bitch. um It's here that he starts to make a really permanent mark on pro wrestling. meet And so Jack Curley was starting to run Madison Square Garden at this time and had found his own as a wrestling promoter.

Speaker: And he has a big meeting of promoters and managers to start arguing that wrestling is too goddamn tedious. So with boxing illegal in much of the country, particularly in New York at that point, wrestling could be a sensation if they get it under control.

Speaker: And so they implement time limits and also invent the bane of wrestling fans everywhere. And I'm going to borrow a term from a wrestling reviewer I've genuinely been reading since I think he and I were both teenagers. Scott Keith, who is from Edmonton, lives in Saskatchewan. Like I've been reading his stuff forever. The fuck finish.

Speaker: A fuck finish is because losses. so nowadays, losses do matter in wrestling, but they don't matter like they used to. Back then, if you lost a match, your quality and value as a wrestler degraded.

Speaker: Right. Significantly. And so if you want to keep people hot, they can't lose matches. But you also can just never have big names fight each other because someone has to lose and then you lose a big name.

Speaker: The fuck finish is when the match ends inconclusively. So why do a decisive finish when you can have a time limit draw? Disqualify everybody, have a fake injury, do a count out, or just have everything fall apart for whatever reason.

Speaker: If it's inconclusive... Fans will pay to come back and see and see it in for real this time, we promise. Particularly when you're touring, this is a huge thing because you can go to a region and have the and have the local ah you know town hero not lose the match against the world champion.

Speaker: That kind of thing. So this becomes fundamental in how wrestling is put together. And Jack Gurley kind of overdoes it. So he forms what is called The Trust, which is the first wrestling syndicate that we have record of. Mm-hmm. So he organizes a a syndicate or cartel with other managers, wrestlers and promoters or as power brokers to keep the title but within within their control so that another promoter from outside can't wrest the world champion away from them.

Speaker: So the bosses are forming a union. Yes. And they did that. The very key here. And man, this is just the start of that shit. So key among these wrestlers was someone i'm going to talk about a ton. Ed Strangler Lewis, a glowering man who committed ah what I'd say is the first serious gimmick infringement because there was a guy called Evan Strangler Lewis a couple of decades earlier. Yeah.

Speaker: yeah So-called because they use a sleeper hold, which at the time looked like a spell where you were strangling somebody. And ah Ed Lewis, I'd compare him to Triple H. He invented the concept of the wrestling heel, or at least popularized it, and was a real power broker behind the scenes, very much in Triple H's way.

Speaker: So the trust existed to keep the title hot and keep other promoters out. This is perfectly illustrated by a boxing promoter. He's got a bunch of money behind him. He's going to go in and start ah ah start wrestling.

Speaker: And he sets out, gets a couple of names. I'm going to have a big match three years from now to kick off my wrestling promotion. Mm-hmm. And he, because he's got money, connections, and influence, gets a 10-year lease on Madison Square Garden, ejecting Jack Curley from that when his lease takes hold.

Speaker: That sucks. So the main event for this Garden debut would be two new names, John Pesek and Maren Plestina. ah So Pesek was kept close by Strangler Lewis and Lewis's brilliant manager, Billy Sando. There's a million names here, but I will repeat the ones that matter.

Speaker: Pesek is a gifted athlete and also a noted wrestling policeman, someone who could rough up his opponent to maintain the rules of the business. Plus the not like behind the scenes, you mean? Well, it's in a ring or. Oh, OK. Oh, kind of the guy who's going to threaten to snap your leg. Well, a kind and I'll i'll differentiate in that a hooker is somebody who specifically knows these ah at this point, not quite secret because everyone's kind of a catch wrestler at this point, but ah who knows these holes that can snap you. A policeman is just going to fuck you up.

Speaker: Oh, OK. When I talk about JBL, who Tracy knows and some fans will know that man was a wrestling policeman. okay and he uh if he and he would and like most cops uh extremely right wing pretty corrupt and would go out of hand and like straight up assault people in the ring right so plus the not to say a cab probably applies to him as well oh god of fuck jbl So Plestina is managed by Ole Marsh.

Speaker: And the key thing here is that Pesek is is in with the trust and Plestina is not. Well, Pesek's not in with the trust. He's wrestling for a different company. This is a different company. My mistake. But Pesek's big, tough guy. Plestina is an outsider. And his manager calls Plestina the trust buster and starts going at him and going at Jack Curley in the newspapers.

Speaker: So there's this huge thing going on the newspapers. This is three years passing building to this match where Plestina is going to be the guy who takes down the wrestling trust, who are jealously guarding the title and ensuring that these good, legitimate wrestlers never get a fair finish to their matches.

Speaker: This is one of those things where they let you know a little bit, but they don't let you know everything. The matches are absolutely rigged at this point. They're not saying that. What they're saying is that they can't have a decisive finish because the referee is going to throw it out on Jack Curley's orders. That's the trick. Mm-hmm.

Speaker: OK. And so that always keeps people the what's real and what's not or what's legitimate and what's not is a constant source of discussion and fans. So this goes so this is a full on war in in the press. And then two months prior to the match, a private eye gets some details on the manager, Ole Marsh, who's been running this antitrust busting thing.

Speaker: Ole March was a key member of the Maybray gang running that insane con I just talked about. Oh, okay. And he just got out of jail. So Ole March's name is immediately disgraced.

Speaker: right And then the day of the match, stories start ah circulating about how somebody's been injured. And if you recall the Frank Gotch-Hackenschmidt match, when Hackenschmidt was legitimately injured, it meant they had to rig the match. They had no choice.

Speaker: Yeah. Rather than not have the match at all, which would have been the ethical thing to do. So, oh, somebody's injured. It means the match is going to be a fraud. The ethical thing, but not the profitable thing. Yes.

Speaker: And so this depresses turnout even more. So this match, which is supposed to break the wrestling trust, is promoted for three years, has like maybe four or five thousand people show up to a fifteen thousand dollar, a fifteen thousand seat arena. Yeah. Yeah. And John Pesek then it goes, aha, I'm a cop. And rather than wrestling normally, starts wildly attacking Marin Plestina in the ring with insane dirty tricks. he's got He's kept his fingernails long and caked in goo and is like scratching his eyes.

Speaker: Oh my God. And headbutting I was joking about scratching their faces. No, no, no. Scratching their faces is a big thing they like to do. um but And so ah he leaves Pleistena and he's like headbutting him in weird places and leaves his opponent bewildered and scratched up. And the match is just tossed after 45 minutes. And this like completely Fox record is attempt to start a wrestling promotion.

Speaker: Yeah. Jack Curley didn't promote this match. He was very distant from it all, but it was obvious who was behind this. And so during all of this, New York was trying to deal with the boxing problem.

Speaker: It's too ah sketchy to be legal. It's too violent. It's too out of control. There's too much money. There's too much like unethical stuff going on. So we're going to regulate. So they pass landmark legislation and create the first state's athletic commission, which also regulate wrestling.

Speaker: Hmm. And these become ah very important as we go forward. And one of the members of this athletic commission, a man named Muldoon, is a former very serious Greco-Roman wrestler.

Speaker: And he hates this shit. Oh, I can imagine. He wants like, oh, I'm sullying my craft. Yeah, he wants real fights. And so what happens is that, first of all, they limit the number of wrestling licenses.

Speaker: And, it turns out, how many are we allowed? One. Guess who doesn't get one? Jack Curley. So Jack, cur he breaks the trust immediately. Jack Curley's out. And then Rickard's running Madison Square Garden and ah they do a big promoted match with Strangler Lewis, the world champion, against a former world champ, Stanislaus Zbysko, a legendary and well-respected Polish wrestler.

Speaker: but the athletic commission doesn't want any funny business. They forced Strangler Lewis to sign an affidavit. He would do a legitimate, ah he would put forth a legitimate effort to win.

Speaker: The match went off cleanly and nicecing ah nicely, was actually kind of exciting, but brief, and no one came out to see it. right The commission beat the trust and they killed wrestling in New York for ah ah basically a decade. madison's like Rickard ah was partnered up with someone else, a circus or an opera or something. They didn't run wrestling in the garden for years after this.

Speaker: Just killed wrestling in New York because people didn't want to see real wrestling. Right. They're used to the spectacle and they want the spectacle and it's not actually what reality. Well, how many of us have ever gone out to watch a Greco-Roman wrestling match for fun?

Speaker: Just dude two dudes on the floor for like 20 minutes. Exactly, right? There's not throwing people around. like Yeah, you see the WWE, all the AEW. It's off the top rope and all this crazy stuff. Chairs and whatever. and Yeah, Greco-Roman is just couple of guys on the floor. Yeah, exactly. For a really long time. So ah Strangler Lewis fucks off to the Midwest after this. Here, he begins to tour a new kind of act with his manager, Billy Sandow.

Speaker: And this is where the wrestling heel, which, and again, there had always been villainous wrestlers, but this is where a real heel comes into play. Billy Sandow is a cheating manager. So he's at the ringside, screaming nonsense, interfering in the match. No one's ever done this before.

Speaker: Crowds, hate it strangler lewis goes from town to town infuriating crowds as his manager openly cheats and it's during this process that they meet one of the most important men in wrestling alongside jack curly in defining what it became a man who looked like a giant baby and his name was toots but Toots, the giant man baby. If you look up Toots Mond, M-O-N-D-T, you will see a giant baby.

Speaker: ah And so he is a skilled catch wrestler and hooker and a wildly corrupt son of a bitch. I'll be damned. And a genius. Sandow is promoting and managing.

Speaker: Strangler is the world champ. And Toots is the kind of the brains of the operation, as well as the enforcer. They become known as the Gold Dress Trio. So what they do is they will work with these new upstarting ah promoters because what's happening is more and more people starting to promote wrestling in their cities.

Speaker: And they cut a deal with this promoter where they'll build up their guy. Lewis will come in and beat him where there's an inconclusive finish and move on to the next town. And they cycle this through and then start creating this elaborate system of creating storylines for the first time. Right. Where, well, you know, almost got him this time. What about next time? Oh, some. and And they're inventing every single kind of finish they can think of. Anything creative to make wrestling more exciting. And Toots invents. Actually, a ah that's a separate paragraph. I won't get ahead of myself. Yeah. And also they try out potential challenges for the Strangler and also would list wrestlers as okay or not okay if they would follow the script.

Speaker: So this is where with with this gold dust trio in the early 1920s, wrestling crystallizes into something very similar to what we see today. Right. Yeah, it sounds like it. Toots was also a bastard, subject to many complaints by wrestlers of him outright robbing them or resorting to violence, because this guy's a hooker, remember? He'll snap your arm if you don't follow his instructions exactly. Luthez, a major name later on, Oh, yeah. I know that name. Well, there you go. ah Inventor of the Thez Press. Yes. Wrote, he was a born con artist, corrupt to his soul, always looking for an angle to make a buck.

Speaker: And pro wrestling was the was the perfect venue for him. The son of a bitch would steal the cream out of your coffee. Oh, that's a great line. What a What a great line. So Toots creates what he calls slam bang Western style wrestling.

Speaker: And this is where wrestling, again, moves into these theatrics. And his idea, which was brilliant, is everyone's wrestling according to the holds they know from their own style.

Speaker: Typically catch wrestling, but also Greco-Roman and stuff like that. Greco-Roman is boring, but those suplexes are awesome. What if we just take the suplexes? What if we look at how ah the lumberjacks fight? ah Because they have like their own kind of folk wrestling in their camps where they just beat the shit out of each other. Let's do some more punches. And so he brings in every single lumberjack style wrestling whole thing. That's funny. And so they bring in the most exciting thing from each different style of wrestling.

Speaker: And that starts to create the style of pro wrestling with catch as the sort of underlying glue that keeps it all together. This is also when melodrama became the backing force behind wrestling.

Speaker: I didn't quite know what melodramas were. I knew what melodrama as a term means, but i didn't realize it was an actual form of theater. In the late 19th century, melodramas were a working class form of theater noted for obvious heroes and villains, extensive use of special effects for blood and thunder, ah which became kind of a tagline for melodramas, and sort of histrionic overacting designed to whip the audience into a frenzy.

Speaker: So these are kind of like a British pantos, but for grownups. And it's so interesting that that became where where they sort of drew their inspiration for the melodramas that they would create with professional wrestling. Because we would compare it late now. People would say, oh, professional rushing wrestling is just soap operas yeah for men, right? And it's the same thing. They're very melodrama-based as well.

Speaker: Absolutely. Yes. My uncle that I used to watch wrestling with, he often called it his soap operas or his series. Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's a lot in common. And ah particularly the you never stop producing, which is a key thing about soap operas. and Yes.

Speaker: Keep the storyline going. As many people will say, wrestling has no off-season. It should, but it doesn't. And so melodramas died out because film just showed up and just ate their lunch. Everyone went to the movies instead of melodramas.

Speaker: But those that manner of storytelling went right into professional wrestling. oh Mm-hmm. And so, all again, although there have been wrestling villains before, like, well, for example, the Terrible Turk, it was Strangler Lewis and Billy Sandoe who really mastered what being a heel meant.

Speaker: Mm-hmm. Okay. And so during this time, wrestling is advancing very quickly. Oh, sorry. One sec.

Speaker: All right. I've not been killed. that Tuberculosis. Oh. Since our Bronte series, every time anyone coughs, I'm like, are they going to This is definitely TB. We have antibiotics, Jen. We're fine. For now. That's good to know. Yeah.

Speaker: I was getting scared. Yeah, for now. Yeah. ah So wrestlers are also ratcheting up their own, their performances, employing increasingly risky moves and working more and more and more to season matches and make them more fun.

Speaker: Interpreting crowd noise, timing, playing to key parts of the audience. This really came into its own in the 1920s with these long threads beforehand. Strangler was so hated that in Chicago, knives were thrown at him by the audience.

Speaker: Oh, my God. Oh, see? actually Wow. They got knives. They got tomatoes. They should use the tomatoes. Knives. I mean, tomatoes were probably common. The knives are noteworthy. thats Knives are serious business. Right. I was joking. hold go down no And in Philly, ah there was a police escort required to get him out of the ring.

Speaker: Mm-hmm. So, and although there's always been black wrestlers, Reginald Seiki is worth mentioning during this time as the first to become a major star in the U.S. Naturally, promoters wouldn't dare announce him as being from Kansas, where he's from, and instead hailed him as an exotic menace from far off Abyssinia. Sure.

Speaker: Siki, he studied philosophy and photography and was a world traveler. And so therefore the promoters i had him wear face paint and and claimed that cook food was new to him and that he wielded a stone hammer. Oh, my God. To even do that to yourself, though, i mean, you got to be making a lot of money, I guess, but it's like.

Speaker: ah It's the in the Midwest for a black man. i You got to make a living. I get. And he was making and he was making a lot more money, probably less than white contemporaries, but he did OK. hmm. And so despite this, and also great reluctance from some other major wrestlers to face a black man, even in a work setting, looking at you, Joe Stetcher, he had a huge success that even landed several movie rows ah movie roles.

Speaker: After three months of working for Jack Curley in New York, however, he just left the country. so He's like, I'm out of here, and then went to go tour Europe and Asia, though would return a little bit to the U.S. But I thought he was just worth a little ah footnote on as ah one of the first important black wrestlers.

Speaker: Did he sort of get the bag and take off or did he realize this is not for me? I think it was get the bag. and He loved world traveling and I think it was a mix of everything. ah Good for him. Yeah.

Speaker: So perhaps the most notorious opponent of of the Strangler, who is ah the guy right now, was a new technological invention in wrestling. A big guy who can't wrestle.

Speaker: and Until that point, everybody who did this job was a wrestler who then learned to work. But Billy Sandow had an idea.

Speaker: What if you take someone who has never wrestled a day in his life and teach him how to work rather than wrestle? Sure. And so wrestling fans certainly know the type. And ah which is we've all seen like, i don't know, ah Tracy, will some of these names will be familiar, like the great Khali, the giant Gonzalez. ah Yeah. These big Ryback. Yeah.

Speaker: ah These athletes are really tall people who come in and are very impressive to look upon, but, you know, couldn't wrestle the way out of a paper bag for the most part. ah And so we meet big Wayne Munn, who is the 1920s equivalent to, don't know, maybe even the ultimate warrior, but hopefully without the ultimate warrior's personality. Yeah.

Speaker: wo He was six foot six in nineteen in the nineteen twenty s so he's a big boy and was a legitimate athlete to boot. In a manner decades ahead of his time, when he faced the Strangler, he beat him very quickly in two quick falls, throwing the world champion out of the ring and utterly shocking the crowd.

Speaker: Wow. OK. This is something that I cannot stress is ah something promoters do today to shock people is here's the new ludicrously tall guy who can't wrestle. He's going to show up and beat the unbeatable guy super fast.

Speaker: Right. it's it's It's actually strength over technique. Well, and also it's this is an awe inspiring, impressive person who was a magic aura about them is really what it comes down to. yeah Right. ah like Andre the Giant kind of thing. Yeah. Except Andre the Giant could work. But absolutely. Andre the Giant was ah also canonized in sort of his own way. But in the least, he was a legitimate worker, just also very, very, very tall.

Speaker: So yeah Big Wayne Munn then with the world title, then one to went on to decisively beat Stanislaus Zbysko, who I mentioned previously, who is an older man in his 40s. Munn was an immediate sensation, steamrolling top wrestlers and just exhilarating crowds because, again, no one had seen this before.

Speaker: So now I'll talk about Stanislaus Zbysko a little bit. This man was a legitimate wrestler strong man who came up in the carnival circuit and ah was a world champion. He was a guy who faced Frank Gotch. He was a big deal who had spent years in a Russian prison during the Great War because he's Polish.

Speaker: He returns to the U.S. and is trying to rebuild his wrestling career, but he's not in the shape he used to be. And he's a lot older. He's like our age, which is 80 million in wrestler years. So. Yeah.

Speaker: So he's in wrestling, but he has a comfortable yet undignified gig doing jobs, ah which is losing to the Gold Dust Trio's favorites. He took his pay and shut up, but the Pole's pride was clearly wounded at having to lay down for Mun, who was just beneath him.

Speaker: He's like, I could beat this guy in seconds. yeah And it didn't help that the papers were making fun of him and calling him old man. Oh, well, yeah. So, unfortunately for Billy Sandow, his idea of a counterfeit wrestler was a little too ahead of its time. Munn was such an insult to the profession that the papers began to run stories.

Speaker: ah Jack Curley returns here because he's a rival, ah complaining that Munn is a fraud. And although what is common in those days for promoters to accuse each other of being what they were, con artists and frauds, it's another thing for the insult to land.

Speaker: Munn was not a real wrestler and it was obvious. Right, right, yeah. And so Stanislaw Zbysko gets his rematch. With the press promising an execution instead of a match, like, okay, he's just going to beat the old man again. The crowd howling for a quick win, Zbysko promptly wrestled Munn to the ground and pinned him the moment the match started.

Speaker: The crowd goes bananas and Munn flees to the back, even though this is a two out of three falls match. And Billy Sandow is now ah trying to negotiate with Zabisco. And all anyone understands and all the chaos and noise is Zabisco straight up saying no.

Speaker: So Munn's the world champion. He can't just fuck off on a match. It'll destroy him. So Munn walks back and Zabisco wrestles him to the ground, takes him out, and we have a new world champion.

Speaker: All right. Zabesco then promptly loses the title on his first defense against Joe Stetcher, who's the Kurt Angle-ish, amazing, legitimate wrestler and also racist. Years later, Jack Kerr... Was Kurt Angle a racist? No, I don't believe so. Oh, okay. No.

Speaker: ah No, Kurt Angle is ah ah also sort of an arrogant guy. i'm trying to remember every wrestler's arrogant. ah no more yeah Kurt Angle is and as a very intense athlete and an all American good boy who unfortunately fell very heavy into painkiller addiction. Oh. And sort of ended his career really broken down and hurt and has kind of cleaned up a lot and is trying to establish a stable life for himself and is doing all right.

Speaker: But so he's doing fine now. Well, I hope he continues to do well. I think so. i Like, I'm fond of Kurt Angle. um Yeah. Whether or not he's a wonderful human being or not, no clue. Some messy relationship stuff, but who among us?

Speaker: Well, not me actually, but, you know, most others. Anyways, so Okay. Oh, I remember this guy. He was the all, okay, literally wearing the American flag. No, he is an Olympic gold medalist.

Speaker: I see. Now I remember. I was conflating with somebody else. And the key thing here is he wrestled as a heel with the o withhel All-American Good Boy Act because people detested that. Then later on, but anyways, years later, Jack Curley would tell friends that he promised Stanislaus Zbysko $50,000 if he took down Munn.

Speaker: It is impossible to know what exactly happened, but Zbysko was paid exactly $50,000 to lose his match against Joe Stetcher. Oh, wow. so But this is one of these threats here is, yeah, it's rigged, but what if you don't want to go along with it?

Speaker: hu And what if you're the better wrestler? So this leads us into the 30s. The systems of the Goldust Trio and Jack Curley catch fire on the U.S. And although there are ups and downs in the business, competition is springing up everywhere because the Goldust Trio system relies on stable wrestling promotions.

Speaker: So promoters are all over the country now and they are all trying to kill each other. They are fighting over territory. They are fighting over contracts for wrestlers because the Goldust Trio also were the first to contract wrestlers. So they owned them and meant they couldn't wrestle for the competition.

Speaker: And also, ah you know, as the wrestling trust did, also can do blacklisting. What if you're not OK, right? Being blacklisted sucks. Yeah. Yeah. It is like the Hollywood system, too, where they were basically indentured to a studio. Yes, exactly. Actors and actresses. Yeah.

Speaker: yeah So the territory system, as we call it, takes hold across North America and the first longstanding promotion startup in Canada and Mexico. So we start one in Ontario. Stampede Wrestling in Calgary shows up in the 50s, I think.

Speaker: And in um Mexico is the start of what is now CMLL, which is basically the invention of Lucha Libre Wrestling. oh Cool. Cool. and All right. Lots more on that later because there's some interesting labor stories there, but later episode.

Speaker: So Toots also splits from the Gold Dust Trio to go work with Jack Curley in New York. And then wrestling continues to evolve. And a new form came in the way of Gus Sonnenberg. Gus Sonnenberg, like ah Big Wayne Munn, was an athlete. ah Sonnenberg was a football player. And he wrestled like an angry cat.

Speaker: oh So well wrestlers would jockey for position. And like they if you watch one of these early matches, they all move very similarly. Sonnenberg goes man and then just throws himself at the other guy over and over and over again with the shoulder tackles ah that he calls the flying tackle. But they also turn into headbutts. He's just yeeting himself at people and often heading straight out of the ring because he's hurling himself at people with such velocity.

Speaker: Fans go nuts for this, and Sonnenberg completely changes how people approach wrestling because fast-paced, hard-hitting, and high-risk becomes more and more the norm.

Speaker: Now, the contemporary who then steps up to become possibly the highest-drawing wrestler of all time is Jim Londos. He is a gorgeous, bronze-skinned Greek guy And while Strangler Lewis was the man who defined what it meant to be a heel, Jim Londos really defined what it meant to be a baby face or face.

Speaker: Being short in stature, he perpetually wrestled matches from beneath and crowds ate up his come from behind victories. And he defeated opponents with a spectacular finishing move, which was a spinning slammy called the airplane spin, which was ludicrously showy and also required the cooperation of your opponent to pull off.

Speaker: which is another ah how much of this is real or not. it becomes more and more work as we go forward. He drew crowds that are insane. One of his early gates was 35,000 people.

Speaker: Oh, wow. The largest audience in North American history for wrestling. And in Greece, his home country, 80,000 people attended a fight of his. I'm trying to picture. I can't even imagine. How do you ever see him? To an event with 80,000 people. Like what was like, what would be BC Play Stadium? but How many? What is that? Probably 20.

Speaker: 20? Yeah. No, I think BC Place holds more. Oh, no. BC Place is a lot bigger. I'm thinking of arena rather than stadium. Okay. Yeah, because there's stadium shows. Because ah the biggest football stadiums. 54,500 is the capacity for BC Place. There you go. Huh.

Speaker: So bigger than that. Yeah. Full. Yeah. Like almost one and a half of those. Yeah. ok It's ludicrous. The biggest modern wrestling shows ah where WrestleMania or AEW's all-in shows where they run the... it's It's the biggest stadium in England. What the hell is it called?

Speaker: It's a huge deal. i got The O2 arenas. It's bigger than the O2. Wembley. I have to look it up. Wembley. They run Wembley. And ah so an AW ah get insane crowds for Wembley when they run it. But that's 80,000 plus.

Speaker: ah But this is like mass media, easy travel. You learn about things from the Internet. This stuff is regional. Yeah. Like they're just doing this in the Midwest. Yeah.

Speaker: Yeah. And if I'm just thinking, though, you're going to this, you're not it's not to have a big jumbotron either. no You're like if you're in a crowd of 80,000 people, it's like a speck. No, you're just some bleachers staring down at these specks wrestling. It's wild. you' You're probably just there to to say you were there, I guess. Try to see. Say you were there. Maybe hang around. Apparently the traffic jams were quite something. oh I could not imagine. 1930s traffic jams, 80,000 people ah in Greece is probably by foot. Right. It's nuts. Yeah.

Speaker: So Jim Londos was also the first wrestling star bigger than the promoters. Now Frank Gotch might have been, but promoters weren't the same thing back then.

Speaker: And so he knows it. Jolando's is a pain in the ass for the promoters. He wrestles on his terms and his terms only. And so he walks out on Jack Curley and Tutmont's New York operation. And so he gets in a full on feud with them that goes absolutely nuts. I love the blow by blow of this.

Speaker: So Strangler Lewis, who comes in and Strangler Lewis is getting old at this point. He's wrestling in New York. ah He's doing all right because he's such a big name. But, you know, the man's past his prime and he's wrestling an associate of long doses named Jim Steele. They jockey for position for 30 goddamn minutes until Steele's like, what if I just beat the living shit out of you?

Speaker: Yeah, what is? That's the thing. They could always do this. It's amazing that they... I mean, they couldn't always. I what you mean, though Well, and one thing I'll stress is these are the big matches, right? There's yeah countless small matches. i'll As an aside, one of wrestling's most famous managers, podcasters, and historians, and also...

Speaker: a complete piece of shit human being, Jim Cornette. But when he talks about this stuff, you tend to take him seriously, argues vehemently that during the territory system, wrestling was more popular than it is today.

Speaker: And the and the the metric by which he measured and wrestling is very popular today. We're in a golden age right now. And the metric he uses is straight turnstile. How many tickets do you sell?

Speaker: Because the reason is every single town in America is running a wrestling show once a week. And thousands go out to these because it is a normal part yeah of your experience yeah just living in town to go out and see the wrestling once a week. And so because of that, if every town is running crowds of thousands, how many tickets does that up to over the course of a year compared to the number of tickets where you have w WWE, AEW, WWE,

Speaker: TNA and then a series of indie promotions running these shows in the US where they show one show a week or two and televise it to the entire um to everything. So even though you might get, i don't know, 10,000 people to a Monday Night Raw, and i got one of those.

Speaker: What if there's a little raw in every town at once? right That is fascinating. And you know what? It makes sense because they thought, like I said, my great-grandmother, who was probably born in something like 1910 or 1915, like, why did she like wrestling so much? She loved it probably because she grew up, I mean, yes, in Canada, and actually in England. She would have grown in England, perhaps. Oh, and s all my God. The world of sports Going to the matches in person. Yeah, and I don't... No idea. i don't talk British wrestling here at all, but it is a parallel history that... um

Speaker: has its, and one of the things about the way pro wrestling comes about is pro wrestling, as far as I can tell, because there is a parallel history in the European continent, really does come into existence as an American art, where it's folk wrestling that gets popular and remains folk wrestling. It doesn't kind of get out of that Frank Gotch thing where there's probably scams and carnival stuff, but the worked matches is uniquely American and they export that.

Speaker: And then they export that to Mexico in the 30s. They export it to Japan in the 50s. And surely there's a point of export to the UK as well. But this is like genuinely pro wrestling is the only legitimate American art form that wasn't wholesale ripped off from black people.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, that's right. Because it is. you Everything else is so-called like, well, it's American jazz, blues. Right. i'm like Like, exactly. the The music and cultural products. I wonder how Hollywood comes into that.

Speaker: God, it has to come out of a bunch of minstrelsy. So ah there's. Sure it does. many Anyways, the the point here is that it is so very American. Yeah. anyways but the fact that it was people grew up even back then like i had no idea because i think about wrestling now i picture the wwe aw thinking that oh yeah it was invented was wrestling wrestling was invented in like the 80s no no no this is why it goes back and this is why a little old lady watching tv in the 1960s and 70s thinks is watching pro wrestling on tv every week that's exactly up probably seeing it in person yes

Speaker: So it's less of a shock or. That's exactly it. And also why someone like Jim Londos or Strangler Lewis or Frank Gotch are these huge names were such major stars because this is a regional thing and they're the world champion who tours through and the world champion showing up is a big deal.

Speaker: um So back to this match with Strangler Lewis where Jim Steele decides I'm just going to fuck you up. So the referee throws out the match, and I'll now quote from a local sports writer. When the referee disqualified him, ending the match on a foul instead of allowing the two men to fight to a conclusive finish, the crowd flew into a collective rage.

Speaker: From the garden's upper levels, apple cores, fountain pens, and smoldering cigarette butts came flying down into the ring as well as onto the spectators seated around it.

Speaker: Oh, my God. At least one woman fainted. At least one woman. As many as 30 separate fights broke out in the crowd. Oh, my God. It is like you how every Simpsons crowd scene kind of devolves into a riot. That is how I imagine yeah any sort of mid 19th century crowd. It's just they're going to start throwing knives and cigarette butts and tomatoes. The best one is for the next episode. And I can't wait. no.

Speaker: but But however, so this is an associate of Jim Londos because Londos and Strangler also personally fucking hate each other. Oh. So ah the promoters are feuding. Londos is above any promoter. He's working where he wants. So Jack Curley hates Londos. Toots hates Londos. And then their guy, Ed the Strangler, Lewis, hate him. um Londos' comeuppance came from a friend of Strangler's named Jumpin' Joel Civoldi, who was in the inventor of the Flying Dropkick. Also in the 1930s, lot of popular wrestling moves are invented, right? And so during the match, a simple transition. So they're just wrestling on the ground and the referee calls a fall.

Speaker: and then awards the world title to Savoldi and takes it from Londos. So the referee's crooked. He just gives them. And this is one of the first examples of the wrestling screwjob, where a wrestler is cheated out of their title by the referee ah illegitimately calling the match.

Speaker: Right, okay. The most famous of these is the Montreal Screwjob that affected Bret Hart. Is it the Montreal Screwjob? Yeah, 1990s. I know it's that term. Absolutely. I saw that live. Wild. Really? Oh my God, what Londos manages to spin away the match result where it was so obviously phony.

Speaker: Londos just takes off with his title and says, I'm still the world champion. No one really believes Savoldi's claim, but it's still like a dent and a loss to this guy who never loses. Yeah. Right.

Speaker: In response, Savoldi is then booked against a contortionist named Slagle. And Savoldi is one of Tootsman's men, and so is Slagle.

Speaker: But Slagle isn't on a double cross. So Slagle starts throwing Savoldi all over the place and keeps trying to strangle him on the mat until the baffled referee throws out the match.

Speaker: And then someone some other wrestler runs in and holds up the contortionist's hand, going, you won, buddy. And there's a photo op of him saying, look, he beat the world champion. So it's even more confusion.

Speaker: Oh, wow. Wow. this I'm just imagining this contortionist in some kind of stranglehold and is pretzeling his way out and to can't catch me. Like it just that like ah oozing his way in. Whoa, where'd go? Right, and this guy's like, I do a dropkick. What are you doing, you weirdo?

Speaker: Contortionist. This skinny little guy like, woo. So many this is during the Great Depression. And although during the early years of the Depression, wrestling was wildly popular. This is where we get that 45,000 gate for Londos.

Speaker: This drama is starting to piss everybody off. And so athletic commissions in particular, which have sprung up around the states, are furious. And state legislators are trying to figure out about all of this because there's now like three competing world title champions, as well as every rinky dink asshole in every state saying, no, I got the world title.

Speaker: And the gates that are starting to go down. Wrestlers complained about getting $4 a match. And although Launders can draw huge money, he was kind of the only one who could do it. And so to illustrate a joke that Toots Mont would tell during this time, and also how this guy's just a bastard, because he is a promoter, right? He is a wrestling boss.

Speaker: A washed-up wrestler is reduced to impersonating a gorilla for $3 at a local zoo. The wrestler jumps at the chance and does a good job impersonating the gorilla. But the tiger, he's pacing up and down in an adjoining cage, gets on the gorilla's nerves. Weighing his options, the wrestler decides to kill the tiger. Hey, you so-and-so, yelled the tiger, who's also a phony. Lay off that stuff. You're not the only broken-down wrestler working in the zoo.

Speaker: And meanwhile, he's the guy who owns all the Imagine you get laid on off and your um boss is telling jokes about like broke librarians doing this. I know. It's so shitty. I know. It's ridiculous. He's the guy who's in charge of the whole thing.

Speaker: He's the one who has them in the cages in the first place. Exactly. And he's the reason they're making four dollars. Exactly. Yeah. Look at these losers having to dance for the pittance I will deign to give them. Yes. Yes. That's ridiculous. So I'm going to talk about one more key wrestler from the 1930s who as a wrestler who just got absolutely fucked by this industry.

Speaker: The inventor of the Irish whip, which is where you throw the other wrestler and he bounces off the ropes. In this case, he used it as a way to just whip somebody on the ground into the corner to finish matches, but it evolved into that.

Speaker: And this is Dano O'Mahony, who was an impressive athlete from a small town in Cork, who was a tough study at wrestling at first, But when he got to the U.S. and started wrestling, he was wildly popular because he's this hardworking Irish immigrant. He's got this likable face and everyone's rooting for him because there's a lot of Irish immigrants, particularly in New York. Mm hmm. And wrestling is trying to clean itself up. The state commissions are creating what's called the National Wrestling Association, different from the National Wrestling Alliance, ah more in episode two, to try to establish more consistent rules in a world title. So these states commissions are all now working together. It's turning into something more structured. And this guy is coming up in this time as like this clean cut Irish guy everyone roots for.

Speaker: He beats Jim Londos in Jim Londos' first clean loss in years, which then puts him in a match for the world title, then held by Ed Don George, which is three first names and that is too many first names.

Speaker: I know. Yes. I'm like, pick one. And so 40,000 people come to see this match, which results in a legendary traffic jam and people leaving in their cars at like two in the morning from a wrestling match. Yeah. O'Mahony was not popular with the other wrestlers, though, because he gets in literally off the boat and beats the world champion and is not a wrestler.

Speaker: oh He's a worker. Oh, yeah. But like, good for him. but they don't see it that way. No, because they are all... ah Also, the promoters use the wrestlers against each other all the fucking time. And everyone's out for number one, and they're greedy and backstabbing. So wrestlers frequently take what are called liberties with him, which is getting really rough in the ring, where it's you're not necessarily injuring someone, but... But in the midst of some fake punches or some worked punches, you just sock him and maybe break a tooth. That kind of shit.

Speaker: He was once carried out unconscious from the ring at one point. and his bosses are working him to death. He travels 5,000 miles wrestling every single night for 10 nights in a row. That is insane. This culminates in a match with Dan Schickat, a skilled German wrestler who had sort of bloodied up ma O Mahoney before.

Speaker: So we're in ah March 1936, and is an aging wrestler with limited options, kind of similar to Stanislaus Zbysko. And it's noted that in this match, there's a lot of media present.

Speaker: And this should just be O Mahoney shows up and beats the old guy and moves on to the next town. It's not like a big promoted world title match. But it is a world title match because they always are. But still, little odd.

Speaker: So 15 minutes starts off of a really clunky, awful match. And then Shikat went in for the kill. Because in this day, in the mid-30s, this matters, he's a hooker.

Speaker: So he traps O'Mahoney in a hammerlock, which as a hold, us modern fans treat us like a transitional wrestling hold, not a very impressive. It's a hold that will snap your shoulder.

Speaker: So he starts demanding all Mahoney submit or he's going to break his arm. And Mahoney is screaming, this man is killing me. Please stop the match. And the referee throws out ah ends the match and awards Shikat the world title.

Speaker: And Shikat, if we're in anyone's pocket, it's it's unclear. He might have just, as they say, gone into business for himself. I don't know. But interestingly, Jack Curley, who's kind of the mustache-twirling villain behind a lot of these weird things in wrestling, it doesn't work out for him because Shikat refuses to drop the title for Curley's financial officer as financial offer and instead says, I'm going to the highest bidder.

Speaker: And so he relocates to Ohio and Curly, who has Shekhead under contract, weaponizes that and books him in arenas across the U.S. where he can't wrestle because he's in Ohio and traveling is slow. He no-shows matches everywhere and the athletic commissions bar him.

Speaker: Oh, wow. Yeah, he weaponizes the regulators against him. This turns into a giant-ass lawsuit. which is the first of its kind in wrestling. h yes yes And so the details of the lawsuit don't matter that much. Chick hat gets reinstated. Everyone kind of goes their way. What is interesting is they continue to walk this line of arguing that although there was a lot of theatricality, the wrestling matches aren't fixed.

Speaker: So you don't know what's fake and what's real. That's the key thing. They always admit, and this is a really fundamental thing, People have known that wrestling has been worked or rigged or a scam since the very beginning. It's one of the big things Dragon King Carl talks about in his omnibus.

Speaker: There is a myth that wrestling was widely believed to be true, except for like the middle class intelligent people who knew it was fake. now then And in still to this day, what you think? i think it like Do you know that stuff is fake?

Speaker: Of course. In 1989, Vince McMahon testifies to the New York Senate that wrestling is sports entertainment. And it is the first time somebody who is a promoter legally and clearly says that wrestling is a complete work.

Speaker: That's considered the death of kayfabe. Kayfabe dies at that point. That's just not the case. And one of the key things here is during all of the stuff with the court battle, there's a Tell El Expose book published in 1937 called Fall Guys, The Barnings of Bounce, which I've not read, but I want to. And it exposes a ton of how wrestling has worked.

Speaker: And the author even assumes the fans think wrestling is legitimate. And he's so wrong. It's always been known. Yes. That's exactly it. And that great grandmother, though, apparently you tell her wrestling was not real. She would flip out. Oh, no.

Speaker: Some fans. And there's always a percentage. No longer. But until I'd say until kind of the Hulk Hogan era, really. Yeah. where there was always a solid percentage of the fans, particularly the like the working class folks who go to see the grappling, who believed it was real.

Speaker: But right beside them is going to be someone who doesn't. That's the key thing. And so it's not like She wasn't gambling on it either. so So she was never what they call a smart mark. She's just a straight up mark, which are the best kinds of wrestling fans. The fans, and um I'm jumping on a point I'll get into, but I think it matters here.

Speaker: loved the gossip because they're in the newspapers shit talking each other as all these promoters are fighting. And ah there's all these like inconclusive matches. And then and then wrestlers basically refusing to lose and taking somebody down when they're supposed to fall.

Speaker: And columnists and newspapers are eating this up and the fans are addicted to it. wow Just like today. This is in the thirty s it's This is the same It's exactly the same. It's why I'm here in the first place is I love that messy bitch stuff on the back end. And so, one sec, I'm going to...

Speaker: Move on to my conclusion as I do my little rant. And so as I'm finally moving to close off on what might be one of our longest episodes ever, but yes I've had fun. I want to recenter this as a story of labor. So I want to talk about conditions because wrestling is cited a few times as being an unremarkable but solid way to make a living.

Speaker: And I will again stress how the promoters made bank. Well, the wrestlers often did not. Londos and Lewis and Gotch and people like that became genuinely wealthy. Most did not.

Speaker: Every wrestler dealt with nagging perpetual injuries and also the misery of 20th century ah wrestling ring sanitation. Both Strangler Lewis and ah the guy who threw himself like an angry cat, Gus Sonnenberg, had a miserable eye disease called trachoma, lightly brought on by having their faces rubbed against filthy wrestling mats. The disease was treated by burning away the infected tissue with chemicals or using a steel scraper. Oh, my God. ye Just scrape that stuff right out of your eyeballs. Yeah. So although the ah the apocalypse I spoke of previously was many decades away, the life expectancy for pro wrestlers was still lower than it should have been. Frank Gotch died at 40 years old of kidney failure.

Speaker: Oh, wow. Joe Stetcher, who had his great time and as his career dwindled down and he was being asked to lose to these like good looking athletes who couldn't wrestle her, attempted suicide and was committed to a mental hospital for the rest of his life.

Speaker: Oh, boy. The sad thing is that was probably better than where he could have ended up. Yeah, genuinely. Yeah. Wayne Munn, whose wrestling career collapsed after his humiliating loss, died at 35 years old again from kidney failure. Because they're drinking too. Or are these injuries? um We don't know. It is speculated that there was something going on in the wrestling rings that caused the kidney problems.

Speaker: Interesting. ah The real hard drinking kind of comes a little later. Although I will say that, ah who was I talking about? One of them ah really did become a serious. Oh, yeah. So Gus Sonnenberg. I'll go back to his story. Gus Sonnenberg does become an alcoholic. um Dan O'Mahony, the Irish whip, ah enjoyed a decent life after his world title loss, but did pass at 38 from a car accident visiting his home in Ireland.

Speaker: um The black wrestler and world traveler Reginald Seke passed of a heart attack at 49. And easy the kayfabe over this guy was so strong, they listed his birthplace as Africa on his death certificate.

Speaker: Oh, no. Really? God. Wow. Okay. And I'm going to have a quote from Gus Sonnenberg. I have hated myself and everybody else connected with the sport many a time. But after all, I make a lot of money and I'd be a fool not to make it while I can. Wrestlers don't last very long, you know, and when they're through being famous, they're still just wrestlers and there isn't any place for them in the scheme of things.

Speaker: Oh, and he passes from leukemia at 46 years old. I probably won't blame the leukemia on wrestling. Many others lived long lives. Strangler Lewis ah lived to a ripe old age. um Toots lived forever.

Speaker: yeah He died in the 70s, it looks like. Yeah. Yeah. Toots Ma died in the 70s. And so it's not as bad as it would become, but it's a very dangerous sport. Many instances of people dying in the ring. And so wrestling is a work, but it is also work and is hard and brutal and it can destroy your body and mind, even your soul, according to a few particularly jaded people.

Speaker: And I think it's self-evident in the what I've talked about so far, why union organizing did not happen in this backbiting insane chaos I just described. You need people to be in the same place, in the same locality for a while.

Speaker: And we're going to get to the end into that with the next episode with the formation of the National Wrestling Alliance, which will cost wrestlers everything. Oh, interesting. And there we go.

Speaker: Wow, good. That was fascinating. I had no idea. That was really interesting. Thank you. I was delighted to find out all this stuff because I didn't know most of this, genuinely. I know all this stuff after 1980. Prior something, something was good.

Speaker: Exactly. that's why, again, just having, again, like I said, mentioning having heard stories, oh, yeah, your great-grandmother was all into wrestling. Like, I just i couldn't imagine it because I'm like what are you talking about? This is the key. It came out, like, later. And it's like, oh, no, no, no. these They would have grown up with this as, like, a folk tradition. And then became popular in the 20th century. That's the key thing. Yeah. was completely erased. Yeah. And then rebuilt by the wwe WWE in a way that is very centering the w WWE. Yes. So they do bring up names like Frank Gotch and put him in their Hall of Fame. It's not really understood by wrestling fans in a way where baseball fans understand exactly how important Babe Ruth was.

Speaker: oh yeah Frank Gotch was the most popular athlete in the country and possibly the first mega popular athlete. So there is interesting. Pro wrestling is so important to American identity. And again, it is very American in a way that a lot of stuff isn't. So anyways, I have a lot more ah reading and writing to do, but I'm excited to get to part two on this. Awesome. So am Yeah. Fascinating. Thanks, Dave. That was amazing. Thank you, both of you. And ah thank you to all the audience who listened to, again, what may be our longest episode.

Speaker: I think Pseudodoxia Epidemica maybe was longer. Yeah, that's fair. Excellent. I think they were close anyways. They're pretty close. Anyway. Let's stop talking and let Jen keep the crown. Bye, everyone.

Speaker: Bye. Bye.

Speaker: Thank you for listening to The Wonder Camera. Find us under The Wonder Camera on Blue Sky, YouTube, and Instagram. can