The WAWLI (Wrestling As We Liked It) Papers No.  437

AN ECLECTIC WRITER LOOKS AT WRESTLING, CIRCA 1985

(ED. NOTE—Raphael "Ray" Tennenbaum wrote the following back in 1985. It is believed to be archived on a web site devoted to a wide variety of his eclectic writings. An opinion, as regards his wrestling scholarship, will follow the issues devoted to this entertaining piece, which winds up with an entertaining chat involving the game’s all-time top performer, Buddy (Nature Boy) Rogers, aka Herman Rohde. In other words, if you like this, you might love the rest of his cyberspace archive, said to be at: http://www.ray-field.com/index.html)

By Ray Tennenbaum

A few jogged through the crowd to get to the scalpers in front of Madison Square Garden, but most of the wrestling fans streaming down Thirty-second Street were walking at a patient, unzippered pace, lingering in the unusual April-like warmth of the evening. An Hispanic teenager, anxious and calm, walked his girlfriend across Seventh Avenue, past a wary, huddled, sixtyish couple; a crew of postal workers exited a bar, tickets in hand; a group of observant Jewish men, black-suited and bearded, kidded one another as they crossed the concrete plaza.

Inside the Garden, leaning on one of the blue sawhorses that funneled traffic down the corridor, a red-eyed uniformed security guard was getting yelled at from behind by a supervisor wearing a business suit and wielding a walkie-talkie: "See? He’s doin’ his job, that’s why I’m not yellin’ at him!," said the supervisor as he indicated the guard’s partner, who was just then calling out, "Step this way!" But the first guard protested mildly, without turning back, "I’m doin’ my job," through a bleary, oblivious smile.

Ahead, in front of an entry to the adjoining Felt Forum, which had sold out all 2,000 seats for a simultaneous closed-circuit telecast, a red-jacketed usher eyed one better-heeled customer and said, "There’s no seats left close to the screen, but if you want to work something out with this guy," he indicates another usher, "maybe another seat could be set up."

Soon after the start of the first match in the three-hour-long card, the T.V cameras feeding the screens at the Felt Forum picked out a few of the recognizable faces dotting ringside: Andy Warhol, television actors Danny DeVito and Joe Piscopo (Mr. T, star of a popular NBC show, would make a surprise appearance later on), and NBC Sports announcer Bob Costas, who was on hand to handle the ring introductions for the "main event" (which is going to be featured on an hour-long broadcast "special," called "The War to Settle the Score," on the Music Television Channel, a national cable television network). The match is between Hulk

Hogan, the World Wrestling Federation’s six-foot, eight-inch defending heavyweight champion (seen at the top of the MTV show screaming frantically: "I am out of control! I am not responsible anymore!") and challenger "Rowdy" Roddy Piper.

MTV’s presentation was a giddy climax to the months-long "Rock and Wrestling" campaign. "The War to Settle the Score" showed Gloria Steinem, Geraldine Ferraro, and many pop-music stars unanimously voicing their desire that Hogan win. Tonight’s MTV extravaganza also aired some broadsides Piper had delivered before against women and rock and roll on the WWF’s syndicated television programs.

Over the next few weeks, features and reports proclaiming wrestling’s burgeoning popularity appeared almost everywhere, thanks largely to the WWF’s aggressive (and unprecedented, for wrestling) publicity campaign. Frank Haller, of the New York-based public relations firm of Bozell & Jacobs, who directed the campaign for the WWF, boasted: "I’m talking about thousands and thousands of stories—and I’m not talking about one-paragraph filler—I’m talking about major feature treatment, all over the country."

Many of the stories focused on the World Wrestling Federation, and credited Vince McMahon, Jr., its lone promoter and one of its featured announcers, with having expanded wrestling’s audience by coupling promotions such as "Rock and Wrestling" with an aggressive, spendthrift expansion of the WWF outward from the Northeast. Newsweek wrote in its story that "Madison Square Garden regularly sells out its 26,000 seats for each monthly show." (This is false, however, according to Dave Meltzer, who says that from March through November, 1984, only two cards sold out Madison Square Garden; a crowd of 14,513 in August, ‘84 was "the lowest in years" for wrestling at the Garden.) Sports Illustrated ran a lengthy story on wrestling, featuring Hulk Hogan on the cover of what turned out to be the second-biggest seller of the year.

Some coverage noted that McMahon’s initiative had begun in earnest late in 1983, when, having bought several regional promotions outright, and culled others’ talent, he negotiated with many television stations — offering, on occasion, a percentage of local houses—in order to replace the established promotional telecast with his own. McMahon’s expanded "network" of independents, in concert with the proliferation of his shows on cable-television, gave him "87% coverage" of American television homes, according to information supplied the media by Frank Tomeo, Titan’s national television ad sales representative.

Articles about pro wrestling’s popularity had appeared earlier: James P. Forkan’s "Sports Marketing" column in the Advertising Age dated July 30, 1984 had detailed the WWF’s enormous broadcast popularity, while noting that "the one thing wrestling doesn’t yet have a hold on is the interest of national advertisers." Based on figures supplied by Tomeo, Forkan wrote that attendance at live wrestling events "rose last year by 32% to 9.5 million, a percentage topped only by the National Football League." (These tallies, however, are open to question. Tomeo’s authority was, apparently, The Daily Racing Form, which keeps track of annual attendance figures in each sport: Since 1982, the source for the Form’s wrestling figures has been Bert Randolph Sugar, a sportswriter and the author of several glossy picture books about professional wrestling, one of which has sold over five hundred thousand copies, according to Sugar. From 9.5 million in 1983, attendance rose to 12.91 million in ‘84, according to the Sugar/Form numbers. Sugar says that he got his figures from state athletic commissions; but Meltzer—"Not every state has an athletic commission, and the records aren’t kept very well in most of the ones that do"—estimated that attendance in 1983 was actually 12.6 million, and had dropped to around 10 million in 1984.)

In December, the Philadelphia Daily News ran an exhaustive, four-part investigation of professional wrestling by sports columnist Ray Didinger. Didinger talked with fans, athletic commissioners, legislators, and performers, including former wrestlers Eddy Mansfield and Jim Wilson, who in October had testified before a committee of the Georgia House of Representatives investigating wrestling practices.

Mansfield and Wilson each contended that a blacklist had prevented him from wrestling; Wilson (a former professional football player) said that his career had suffered after he had declined the advances of a homosexual promoter, and, citing his own abortive effort at promoting in Atlanta’s Omni Arena, contended that promoters commonly secure exclusive arrangements with arenas, in violation of antitrust laws.

But the wrestling story that got the most attention was aired on ABC-TV’s weekly newsmagazine, "20/20," just three days after the WWF’s Washington’s Birthday card at the Garden. ABC consumer reporter John Stossel began the show by identifying himself as a former high school wrestler, and spoke with both Mansfield and Wilson—who affirmed that promoters arrange the outcome of each matches with the wrestlers beforehand, and that the holds, throws, and punches used by each wrestler are performed with the victim’s cooperation.

Midway through the report, Stossel was shown playing a tape of a bout for Eddy Mansfield, asking, "Is this real wrestling?"

"No, it’s not real," said Mansfield, who is an engaging, charming talker. "I mean, if somebody believed that, they’d be stupid." (Mansfield, who during his career was known as the "Continental Lover," seems to have many of the attributes of a successful wrestler: He has blue eyes and a cute spoiled-child’s face, with dirty-blonde curls that make him look like a well-muscled Harpo Marx.)

Then Mansfield took Stossel into the ring for a remarkable demonstration of wrestling’s Kama Sutra. After giving a brief lesson in stagefighting, Mansfield debunked several of the commonest throws, including the "body slam" (in which a standing wrestler appears to pick up another in order to throw him on his back), by allowing the diminutive reporter to perform them on himself. ("He did half the work," said Stossel in a voice-over.) Mansfield also drew a razor blade across his forehead, saying that wrestlers are paid extra for drawing their blood during matches.

Finally, the feature closed by showing an encounter between Stossel and wrestler Dave "Dr. D" Schults (a former tag-team partner of Mansfield’s) taped after Schults had stepped out of the ring during a Garden card late in December. Stossel, microphone in hand, was seen talking with an angry-looking, six- and-a-half foot tall, somewhat blonde-bearded wrestler. (The segment’s producer, Bernie Cohen, recalled later, "I had started the interview with Schults. And Schults was acting very nasty to me, but then John walked over to me, and I said, ‘John, you finish this.’ John still accuses me of deliberately handing him the mike. But I’d figured it was an act—these guys do an act all the time.")

A wrestler like David Schults is more accustomed to being interviewed on-camera by a wrestling promoter or an announcer paid by one—not a network television reporter asking hostile questions. Schults was flushed and sweaty with exertion, having just emerged a loser from a ring encounter against Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki:

STOSSEL: Is this a good business?

SCHULTS: Yeah, it’s a good business. I wouldn’t be in it if it wasn’t.

STOSSEL: Why is it a good business?

SCHULTS: Because only the tough survive, that’s the reason you ain’t in it. And this punk holding the camera, the reason he ain’t in it. The reason these rednecks out here ain’t in it, because it’s a tough business.

STOSSEL: That’s terrific.

SCHULTS: Why, is that all you got?

STOSSEL: I’ll ask you the standard questions, you know.

SCHULTS: The standard question.

STOSSEL: I think this is fake.

SCHULTS: You think this is fake? [hits Stossel on ear, Stossel falls down] What’s that, is that fake? Huh? What the hell’s wrong with you? That’s an open-handed slap, huh? You think it’s fake, you -- [hits Stossel on other ear].

MAN: Easy, easy.

SCHULTS: Huh, what do you mean? Fake. What the hell is the matter with you?

In a mock-"personal story" segment aired on a WWF telecast six months before, Schults had been depicted behaving like a mean s.o.b. to his "wife" and "children." Weeks before the confrontation, one wrestler had told Ray Didinger, "Some guys know when to let the ring go. Schults doesn’t. We let him be."

But a month later in the Village Voice, freelance writer Dan Bischoff concluded his wrestling story (and a somewhat distorted account of the incident) by writing, "But he [Stossel] deserved it." Bischoff continued by posing a worthy question, one which seemed to be on many people’s minds: "In a post-McMahon world, the real question about wrestling isn’t ‘Is it fake?’ but ‘Is it art?’"

The reaction of David Wolff, who, as the manager of pop singer Cyndi Lauper, was perhaps the man most responsible for Rock N’ Wrestling, was quite mild. Wolff said, "If you’re gonna do that—but you’ve got to show the other side, you’ve got to show really the meaningful side. And I don’t think 20/20 did that. I think they were very narrowminded in their approach. In my dealings with the World Wrestling Federation, they’ve been up- front, professional, gentlemanly, and very positive about everything. And we never talked about fixing matches or doing any of that nonsense. We just talked about how can we, together, turn on the public." (Wolff also said, "I love wrestling, I love Rock and Roll, and I love the hybrid form of entertainment that we’re creating, marrying the two industries. What I love the most is the fact that the people love it. And that’s why I do it.")

Shortly after NBC launched "Saturday Night’s Main Event" in partnership with McMahon, some nine months after the 20/20 report, an NBC television executive said, ". . . the 20/20 report was, A) totally aimed at the fact that it aired during a sweeps period—‘let’s get people to the T.V., period, no matter what,’—and B) to do a story on ‘Is professional wrestling fixed?’ to me is about as interesting as ‘Are women who are seen walking on Sunset Boulevard, at 3:30 in the morning, hookers?’"

20/20’s report didn’t hurt WWF attendance. Oddly, since late in 1984, Vince McMahon and several Titan spokesmen had been downplaying wrestling’s pretense at authenticity in low-key fashion. "We don’t ballyhoo the fact that it’s not a sport," Frank Tomeo had told Advertising Age, "but the people vote with their bucks." Vince McMahon was quoted in the Los Angeles Times: "It really doesn’t matter to me whether someone believes that wrestling is fake or not." Five weeks after the report aired, a publicist hired by Titan commented: "You’d have to be brain-damaged to think this stuff is real." Said the NBC executive: "Anybody who’s dumb enough to look at wrestling as sport deserves major brain surgery."

The degree to which wrestling matches are choreographed is a trade secret as celebrated as the recipe for Coca-Cola. Wrestling has always been more secretive than any other sport or entertainment industry. Wrote Didinger, who exhausted every possible means to interview McMahon: "Newsmen are treated like KGB agents."

If he does get to talk with an insider, a journalist is liable to get himself hooked by some sort of rumor: Some thirty years ago, columnist Dan Parker of the New York Daily Mirror broke a story that two wrestlers, Buddy Rogers and Billy Darnell, were actually brothers—a fact which, in a business as nepotitic as wrestling, would not have been terribly remarkable; in 1985, a story was released by at least one WWF publicist to the effect that Hulk Hogan and another WWF wrestler named Brutus Beefcake were also kin. In fact Rogers and Darnell were merely friends, and Hogan and Beefcake are also thought to be unrelated by a promoter for whom both performed.

"I’d ask a promoter a question," recalled Didinger, "and he’d go on and on about something that didn’t really have anything to do with what I’d asked. And I began wondering, ‘Why don’t I get any straight answers?,’ and then I realized, ‘I’m dealing with a whole business that’s a lie.’"

"Everyone lies to you," said Bruce Newman, who wrote Sports Illustrated’s wrestling story. "After a while, you start to get the feeling that it’s all a joke, and you’re the butt of it."

No one knows how many fans think that the fights they watch in the arenas are genuine. Based on his conversation with wrestling fans, Didinger estimated that about one-fifth of all fans "know it’s all bull, they like it because it’s like watching the Three Stooges on steroids." A similar proportion are "fanatical believers in all of it," said Didinger, while the remainder concede, "’Yeah, I know most of it’s fake, but once in a while, when the championship is on the line, they really go at it’."

Asking this last sort of fan if the contests are "faked" is like questioning a small child about the existence of Santa Claus. As the child might take his questioner by the hand and point out photographs and other likenesses of St. Nick, the wrestling fan will recall brutal episodes from the ring: "I’m a true wrestling fan, and I know fact from theory," said Norman Dicks of the Bronx, a few days after the 20/20 feature. "They’ve got grudge matches, it’s only human nature, you know?

A guy hits you with a foreign object, or tries to defeat you by breaking the rules—the other guy’ll keep the grudge." Dicks, who is also a boxing fan, allowed that some of the matches seem excessively flashy, "but the promoter has to sell tickets. Some of it is showmanship, some of it is for real, some of it is not so real." Fans who have a narrower notion of "fixed" may have seen a wrestler lose a match thanks to a spuriously incompetent referee—that match was fixed.

Many have pointed out that the proportion of "sophisticated" fans is probably relatively high in New York. This type of sports fan may take wrestling’s authenticity as seriously he might, say, a prostitute’s sincerity; a group of friends, young men a few years out of college, laughed at the question as we stood outside the Garden: "But it’s not fake. It’s not fake at all!" said one. "These are highly trained athletes! It’s real, man, if it wasn’t would we be here now?" Another declaimed, "Anyone who thinks that wrestling is fake is the same kind of person who thinks that the N.F.L. isn’t fixed."

Another sports fan standing in front of the Garden said in a soft West Indian accent: "No, I don’t think that the matches are fake. It’s just like in any other sport—at times there’s not the kind of enthusiasm that you find at other times."

Roy Shire, a retired wrestling promoter who now raises livestock in California, said: "When I wrestled in New York, people used to come right up to me and say to me, ‘You know I saw you in the match in the Garden on Monday night,’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah? Are you a wrestling fan?’

"They’d say, ‘Yeah, but I don’t believe in wrestling, it’s all phony.’

"And I’d say, ‘Well, why do you go?’

"They’d say: ‘Well, it’s a great show. I just like to see what’s gonna happen. It’s a great show, but it’s a bunch of bullshit, it’s phony as hell.’

"I would say if you walked down the street, and met a hundred people, and you interviewed a hundred people, I would say that ninety out of the hundred would say that wrestling was fake. Ten out of the hundred would say that it’s real.

"See, a lot of times fans would come to San Francisco, and they’d come up to me and they’d say, ‘Roy—hey, that main event was great.’ I’d say, ‘Glad you liked it,’ you know, cause now I’ve got to be a nice guy.

"So they say, you know, ‘Those preliminary matches, I didn’t believe them, I didn’t believe anything about those preliminary matches, but that main event, that was for real.’

"Because, you see, in the main event, you always had the best boys in the main event. That’s not true anymore. Years ago it was true. Your main-event guys were more convincing, and everything they did, they convinced the people. Like they throw a punch at the guy, it would convince the people that the punch really hurt the guy."

Just when wrestling began to be taken at less than face value by knowledgeable sports fans is difficult to judge. In fact, since cinching the outcomes of wagered contests may itself be the world’s fifth or sixth oldest profession, professional wrestling’s historical authenticity is nearly impossible to document. The development of the sport of competitive wrestling—the use of strength, balance, quickness, and coordination to overwhelm an opponent and keep him down is ancient and universal; but in an even-looking match, a skillfully cooperative loser would have always been able to conceal his acquiescence without arousing suspicion.

Wrestling shares with boxing not only the "squared circle," but a long, tainted past (although as boxing overshadowed wrestling, so did its controversies). Promoters of one will often venture into the other, and "mixed matches" have been around at least since 1876, when John L. Sullivan fought wrestler William Muldoon (known as "The Greatest Roman," Muldoon later acted in a touring production of As You Like It, and eventually became a New York State Athletic Commissioner). According to one account, the match was ended when fans rushed the ring, "fearing for the safety of both athletes." (Unfortunately they weren’t as solicitous at a 1975 mixed match between Muhammed Ali and Japanese wrestler Inoko Aoki (sic), an exhibition which even the wrestling magazines found repellent, though it ended in a decision for Aoki; Meltzer blamed this bout for a subsequent slump in attendance at wrestling events in Japan.)

(To be continued in WAWLI Papers No. 438)
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The WAWLI (Wrestling As We Liked It) Papers No.  438

A LENGTHY LOOK AT WRESTLING HISTORY, CONTINUED...

While corruption in boxing led to severe restrictions that by 1900 had made prizefighting in New York virtually unpromotable, wrestling enjoyed some excellent years before anyone thought to question it. Newspaper accounts of these big-time matches in cities in the U.S. and Europe are often as inconclusive as the fights themselves seem to have been. There is a trail of standoffs throughout these old stories—an inordinate number of the contests seem to end in disqualifications, or with gory, dramatic windups (a gravely injured wrestler is rushed to the hospital, for example) that are still common.

Myths about old-time wrestling survive today. For instance, an article in a recent issue of The Sporting News paid tribute to Chicago’s Comiskey Park, by way of citing the 1911 match held there between Frank Gotch and "The Russian Bear (sic)," George Hackenschmidt, describing the wrestlers as "perhaps the finest athletes who ever graced the sport, long before it degenerated into theatrics." The record differs—a day before the match, the New York Times reported scant wagering in Chicago; the following day the Times described the Russian’s showing as "pitiful," noting, "The crowd decreed that he had ‘quit,’ but the defeated challenger, through copious tears, averred that he had entered the arena with a wrenched knee."

And a 1937 book about wrestling, Fall Guys, written by a man named Marcus Griffin, gives yet another perspective. (The book’s full title is "Fall Guys: The Barnums of Bounce—The inside story of the Wrestling Business, America’s most profitable and best organized professional sport.") Frank Gotch was promoted by a man named Jack Curley, and together they were largely responsible for wrestling’s heyday in the early years of this century. In Griffin’s description, Gotch was a cowardly bully: "Gotch did ‘business’ with the more capable bonecrushers whom he met, and dominated the lesser lights through a fiendish delight in breaking bones and maiming less fortunate and skilled adversaries."

The first contest between then-European champion George Hackenschmidt and the Iowa-born Gotch had taken place in Chicago a few years earlier at a pavilion near the Stock Yards. "The olfactory odor from the Yards has never since equalled that left by the contest’s aftermath," Griffin writes. "It was one of the most disgraceful exhibitions ever witnessed by a capacity audience of enthusiastic mat devotees, and it started the ball rolling toward the general discrediting of wrestlers and grapplers."

The rematch was even worse. Three weeks before the bout, one of Hackenschmidt’s training partners—a former Gotch second—stepped on the Russian’s knee. "I lay like a log for six hours," Hackenschmidt later wrote. Hackenschmidt wanted to back out, but Jack Curley prevailed upon him to continue, and went so far as to arrange for a double to perform the roadwork for the Russian late at night, at a site far enough from the street to prevent newspapermen from detecting the switch. By the day of the match, Hackenschmidt’s knee had not yet healed; he bitterly recalled that he wrestled on one leg, and that Gotch (who is today listed as the first World Heavyweight Titleholder by the National

Wrestling Alliance ) deserved credit for neither of his falls, since he had put himself down. Griffin writes that the public outcry about the presence of legions of pickpockets and gamblers outside the park gave rise to a scandal in the city’s police department, and that the match itself was bad enough to have virtually destroyed wrestling in Chicago for years.

There was often a trace of legitimate competition behind wrestling back then. A champion might duck a qualified opponent—unless the challenger had the backing of a powerful enough promoter, in which case he might be granted a chance to "shoot"—to wrestle for real—against the champion privately. If he won, or made a good showing, the challenger might get to wrestle him in a big arena, setting up a hot rivalry. But there was another danger for the champ, especially if the wrestlers were backed by two different managers or promoters, for a challenger would often agree to lose beforehand, and then start shooting in the match, and take a chance on his ability—known as "hooking."

Because a victory would give his promoter his own new star, there was a good deal of physical intimidation to the game.

Though few promoters were really pure, the newspapers provided an occasional forum for whistle-blowing by those who found themselves shut out. As a result, several states implemented commissions to oversee the ring sports, though they frequently did everything but.

Thus in 1915, the New York Times reported: "in the hope that wrestling can be freed from the ‘hippodromes’ and ‘fakes’ which have been perpetrated upon the public, a movement has been started to have a State commission appointed to govern the game," and six years later, the New York State Athletic Commission was born. In 1920, then-State Senator Jimmy Walker succeeded in passing legislation creating the New York

State Boxing Commission. Before the Walker bill, which paved the way for entrepeneur Tex Rickard to stage many of Jack Dempsey’s bouts at Madison Square Garden (sic), prizefight promoters had been restricted to "private clubs" and prohibited from selling tickets; decisions were outlawed, and contests limited to ten rounds in duration. A year later, another bill was passed replacing the boxing commission with an Athletic Commission to assume jurisdiction over wrestling, as well as boxing. (One might think that any man who took on a task as weighty as insuring "fair, sportsmanlike, and scientific wrestling contests" in New York State in 1921 would have deserved a pay raise, but the new slate of Commissioners was to be the first to serve without salary.)

In December, 1923, the Commission denied Rickard a license to promote wrestling in the Garden, apparently because a competing promotion run by Jack Curley and Matty Zimmerman at the 71^st Regiment Armory had failed to stir up business. "The License Committee does not think it would be fair to Curley and Zimmerman, under the circumstances, to grant a rival club a permit," said Commissioner William J. McCormick; Rickard did not protest. (Actually, Curley’s permit to promote wrestling had been revoked a year or so before; but late in January, 1924, the Commission granted him a new license. Two months later, a man named J.B. Feinberg sent a letter to the Commission alleging that Curley was acting unethically by serving as both manager and promoter for wrestlers. Feinberg listed "shooters" who, he insisted, could beat any of the wrestlers in Curley’s stable, and would neither "lay down" nor "talk business." The charges, however, were dismissed.) Griffin noted Curley’s shrewdness in staging numerous cards in charitable association with Mrs. William Randolph Hearst’s Milk Fund—which also gave him leverage over his partners, since he pretended to his associates that this connection gave him some pull with the Hearst newspapers.

In the late ‘20s (sic) a man named Billy Sandow (Griffin refers to him sarcastically as "The Brain") united with a younger wrestler and promoter named Joe "Toots" Mondt, and together they promoted a wrestler named Ed "Strangler" Lewis into a nationwide attraction. Lewis was by all accounts one of the most capable shooters that the wrestling game has ever seen.

Mondt had a notion that the wrestling promotion could become a touring operation, something like a vaudeville company. (For his part, Sandow perfected the ever-popular interracial matchup: "’The Brain’ paired Germans and Frenchmen, Greeks and Russians, Chinamen and Americans, Japs and Chinamen, Englishman and Irish, Indians and Cowboys, westerners and easterners, and one town favorite against another," wrote Griffin.)

"He had a very brilliant mind as far as matchmaking was concerned," former NWA president Sam Muchnick said of Mondt, who remained a force in wrestling until late into the 1950s. Inspired, according to Griffin, by James Figg, an English bareknuckled fighter of the eighteenth century who often defeated wrestlers "by the simple process of first knocking them out and then pinning their shoulders," Mondt decided to add fisticuffs: "We’ll take the best features of boxing and the holds from Greco-Roman, combine these with the old time lumber camp style of fighting, and call it ‘Slam Bang Western-Style Wrestling.’"

But Mondt’s most important contribution to professional wrestling was probably his perfection of the "finish"—the scripted conclusion of matches. Many of the finishes Mondt invented are still used today—Griffin describes one that appears in about every other card: two contestants "bump their heads together, fall to the mat, are unable to continue, and are counted out by the referee, with the bout called a draw. The variation of this finish is for one wrestler to recover consciousness in sufficient time to be declared the victor."

Sandow, Lewis, and Mondt ("the Gold Dust Trio") pushed aside Curley—as well as Rudy and Ernie Dusek, a pair of Southern wrestler-promoters (sic), and a host of others—and came to wield enormous influence throughout the large Northern cities. They were the first to bring football players into the ring. (Both Wayne "Big" Munn, a Nebraska player, champion in 1925, and Gus Sonnenberg, a Dartmouth star, champ in 1928 (sic), were poor wrestlers, but solid gate attractions.) Lewis seems to have been a formidable enough shooter to ward off challenges to his supremacy, and Mondt and Sandow were quite skillful at dodging not only hooks, but antitrust allegations.

The twenties—the "Golden Age of Sports"—were when "good- versus-evil" scenarios first began to tell. Actually, fan favorites and villains had been played off one another for decades, if not for centuries; it was certainly common in the mid-nineteenth century for a barnstorming wrestler’s "front man" to swing into a small town with a carnival, show off his star’s muscular talent against a good-looking stooge or two, take bets on a match against a local favorite, and then take steps to guarantee the most desirable outcome. (True to wrestling’s carnival heritage, arena dressing facilities for professional wrestlers still divide "heroes" from "villains," just as separate locker rooms are provided for the home and visiting teams of conventional sports.)

When big-city promoters started soliciting tickets instead of wagers (presumably, bettors turned to other sports, such as boxing) they nurtured a different following: Fans who would regularly stake the price of a seat in the arena merely to enjoy the events, or to see if a score would be settled. The favorite’s loss to a hated villain no longer cinched bets, but sold-out rematches, in all probability—hence, "scientific wrestling."

The most popular script is still used: first, the "good guy" ("babyface" in wrestlers’ argot; or "fan favorite" to the magazines) begins the match by trying "scientific" tactics against his opponent; but the "bad guy" ("heel," or "rulebreaker") gains advantage by cheating; good guy becomes enraged at his disadvantage, finally turning cheating tactics against bad guy. (It should be noted, however, that the distinction between "scientific wrestler" and "rulebreaker" today is a virtual anachronism in many promotions.)

One figure in the New York wrestling scene was a diminutive Jewish immigrant from Lithuania named Jack Pfefer. At a time when promoters’ sole means of advertisement were posters and handbills, Pfefer made himself a pet of newspaper writers. "He represented the best and the worst things about wrestling," recalled veteran promoter Paul Boesch. In 1931 A.J. Liebling wrote quaintly about Pfefer in the New York World-Telegram; complete with Pfefer’s fanciful account of his periodic expeditions to faraway Russia, which he made "equipped with a derby and a picture of Mae West . . . . Once Mr. Pfefer gets the derby over the wrestler’s ears, preventing a belated development of the embryo brain, he holds the picture in front of the captive’s nose, and walks rapidly until he gets to the boat, and the wrestler follows him with docility."

Pfefer made many enemies in his unsuccessful efforts to dominate New York wrestling. On one wall in his New York office hung photographs of deceased wrestlers, some with malicious remarks written on them. One of them was a wrestler who, convinced Pfefer had cheated him, hung him from a window of a New York hotel by his ankles and held him there until he extracted payment. "It depends, sometimes it’s the Piccadilly Hotel; sometimes it’s the office that used to be in the Times building," said Boesch, chuckling.

A celebrated gimmick of the ‘thirties—pitting opponents in a ring filled with fish—now seems a sly acknowledgement of professional wrestling’s telltale aroma. Though the statute that denoted wrestling matches as "exhibitions" rather than "contests," did not go onto the books for another twenty-two years, in 1930 the Athletic Commission announced that it had sent out a bulletin requiring promoters to list their events as "shows" unless the Commission had approved otherwise. This did not seem to disappoint many fans, who were listening to radio broadcasts in such numbers that in 1935 the Athletic Commission recommended that New York levy a tax on the profits garnered by radio broadcasts.

The mid-thirties were the era of Jim Londos, "The Golden Greek," one of the worst wrestlers of his era, but quite good-looking. Londos began in wrestling as the designated loser in a scam he ran in a few southern states: His associates would begin a contest, and then Londos—splattered with plaster and debris, like a laborer just off the job—approached the ring, and boasted of his superiority. After Londos (Griffin refers to him as "The Wrestling Plasterer") had deked the gilpins into betting against the incumbent, he would, of course, lose.

Between 1948 and 1955, each of the three major television networks broadcast wrestling programs at one time or another (the first and longest-running show was aired by the old DuMont network, originally from the Marigold Arena in Chicago). Wrestling and boxing are both nocturnal, relatively brief, and confined to a small area, making them the most handily producible of sporting events for television. While the league sports were concerned that broadcasting live events would damage gate attendance, television paid off for wrestling.

"No one knew much about television in those days," said Verne Gagne. "I remember the first match I had in the East was in Troy, New York in the early ‘fifties. We drove in from Buffalo that night, and we couldn’t get near the arena, it was so crowded. We didn’t know what else was playing in town; we didn’t realize that all those people were there for us. When I got out of the cab, I was just mobbed—it was like Elvis Presley would be a few years later."

Gorgeous George’s success gave "camp" its modern meaning and brought forth a host of playful characters. The interview had come to stay: Wrestlers named Golden Superman, Dracula, and Ali Baba compensated for a lack of athletic ability or personality by successfully projecting a tailor-made television character "on the mike" (or "on the stick") as wrestlers say. (An exception was one "Mute Mike," a "deaf-and-dumb" wrestler of the early-T.V. era who relayed protests to the referee in sign language, miming cries of distress by pointing a finger at his open mouth.) Antonino Rocca’s leaping, whirling maneuvers eventually helped to begin the transformation of the wrestling exhibition from relatively slowly-paced displays of strength into a much faster, acrobatically sensational show.

In 1950, St. Louis promoter Sam Muchnick became president of the National Wrestling Alliance, a trade association which had been formed in 1949 by six Midwestern promoters at a meeting in Waterloo, Iowa, who ostensibly sought only to exchange talent between regions and to facilitate the naming of a national champion, booked out of the office of the president. During his twenty-five years as NWA president, Muchnick, a former sportswriter for the St. Louis Times, became known as something of a statesman. Within a few years of its founding, the NWA counted 38 members from all parts of the country. (After a Justice Department antitrust investigation, in 1956 the NWA’s leading members signed a consent decree enjoining them from arranging exclusive contracts with arenas or "blacklisting" wrestlers or promoters; many intramural territorial disputes were resolved within the Alliance itself.)

In New York, the Johnston brothers, Walter and Charlie, helped bring wrestling back to Madison Square Garden after an 11-year absence, with the help of Toots Mondt. (In 1949, one writer described Mondt as looking "like a mountainous cherub. His face is serene and angelic and he gives the appearance of always being seated on some fleecy cloud somewhere.") Mondt, whose stable included Antonino Rocca, was described by Muchnick as having "a very brilliant mind as far as matchmaking was concerned."

Different reasons are given for wrestling’s precipitous loss of popularity around the country in the mid-fifties. Gagne feels that T.V. overexposure did in wrestling; Sam Muchnick said, "People just started going to other pursuits, doing other things"; the phenomenon of a babyface named Elvis Presley in 1955 doubtless drew younger fans away.

It’s likely that wrestling had exhausted its fans’ patience and curiosity along with its inventory of gimmicks—acts like Gorgeous George’s had sputtered by 1953. To turn up the "heat," some promotions occasionally featured main event "extras"—rewarding the winner with, for example, the right to shear the loser in the middle of the ring. (After losing one such "hair match" in Toronto in 1958, Gorgeous George put up his wife’s hair in the following week’s rematch.)

Wrestling did not suffer in New York as it did elsewhere. In the words of former wrestler Ted Lewin, "it just went underground." Lewin recalled a riot that broke out in St. Nicholas Arena during a main event between a pair of wrestlers named "Mr. Israel" and "Hans Schmidt"—"a real Holocaust scenario . . . There were Hasidic Jews in there throwing stuff at them, too."

Much of this "heat" (fan emotion) was raised because of the promotional war raging over New York City, a war which was won by Vincent McMahon, son of one of the boxing matchmakers for the first Madison Square Garden. McMahon eventually won the war, and took over the Garden in the late ‘fifties, leaving the smaller arenas around the city—St. Nicholas Arena in East Harlem, Ridgewood Grove in Brooklyn, and Jamaica Arena—to Mondt’s organization.

Main-events in New York during the ‘fifties often targeted Hispanic audiences. "By the time I left New York, I hated Puerto Ricans—and it wasn’t just me, it was every bad guy," said Roy Shire, now a cattle rancher in Northern California. Shire recalled several fights after events, including one in which he and another heel were forced to hide in a garbage can. "Most of the people who came to the Garden just came to see the finish . . . Nobody believed it except the Puerto Ricans."

On one November evening in 1957, a wrestling match in Madison Square Garden erupted into a riot after a violent finish to a tag-team match between Rocca and Edouard Carpentier against Dick "The Bruiser" Afflis and "Doctor" Jerry Graham. The incident made a vivid impression on sportswriter Gordon S. White, Jr., who now writes about golf and college basketball for the New York Times, and was covering the event that night:

"Rocca got hurt, I believe, to the point where it wasn’t part of the act. Blood began to flow, and they immediately began to hit a little harder than they were supposed to, or something. And Rocca got, obviously, a little pissed off . . . And he grabbed Graham—and this just couldn’t be in an act. (Things were beginning to be thrown by then, I believe.)

"Rocca just put his right arm around Graham’s head, and from the middle of the ring, ran him right into a ringpost. Head-first, the top of his head. And the blood was now pouring down Graham’s face. The people started coming down the aisle towards the ring, and that’s when you’re in trouble. And it got totally out of hand.

"I’ve covered riots in other sporting events other than that. That was the worst riot situation I was ever in, because—had we not gotten the hell out of there, we could have been very seriously hurt. Those big wooden chairs were flying towards the ring.

Verne Gagne, who was also in the audience that evening, remembered that "it was like watching the lemmings go over." A few days later, State Athletic Commissioner Julius Helfand levied fines totaling $2,600 on the four wrestlers. (Oddly, current Deputy Commissioner Marvin Kohn was with the Athletic Commission then, but does not remember the incident at all, although it made the back cover of the next day’s New York Daily News, as well as Life Magazine).

Perhaps news of this incident elicited this reaction from the Soviet Union (as reported by the Associated Press a month later):

MOSCOW, Dec. 22 -- The Russians don’t think professional wrestling is a sport. They look upon it as just another evil of capitalism.

"We associate the word ‘sports’ with youth, strength, beauty, friendship, and smiles," the newspaper Soviet Sports said today.

"But the wolfish laws of capitalism, where strength is determined by a checkbook, turns honest competitions into distorted ones in America.

"These laws cripple men and breed base instincts . . . . There are no hold barred in this struggle—bribery, blackmail, and even murder."

(To be continued in The WAWLI Papers No. 439)
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The WAWLI (Wrestling As We Liked It) Papers No.  439

A LENGTHY LOOK AT WRESTLING HISTORY, CONTINUED...

(ED. NOTE—The Ray Tennenbaum piece, with a number of corrections stemming largely from spelling errors, continues. At the end of the series, The WAWLI editorial board will offer a critical review of the article.)

Roy Shire recalled wrestling in Yonkers back in the mid-1950s as part of a tag team: "We were wrestling Perez and Rocca, and Jerry Graham starts the match. (Jerry Graham was another one of those guys who didn’t know anything much about wrestling, he was just a big show guy, big mouth.) So he goes out there, and he tries to get Perez to ‘sell’—which means register to the people that you’re hurt. But no matter what Graham does to Perez, he won’t show them that he’s hurt.

"So he comes over and tags me and he says, ‘Ah, shit, I’m gettin’ the hell out of here, you go in and wrestle.’ I say, ‘What’s the matter?’

"He says, ‘Ah, that son of a bitch, no matter what I do, the guy won’t sell. I punch him, he won’t register.’

"I said, ‘Oh, give me that son of a bitch.’

"So I went in there, and he tried it on me. I leg-dived him, I bar-armed that bastard," said Shire, a one-time high school state champion, then later, while he served in the Coast Guard an all-Service champion. "And so I rode him all over like a piece of paper, and then I said, ‘All right, you little son of a bitch, you better sell, or I’m going to kick your brains out’—he didn’t know how to wrestle, they brought him in because he was a Puerto Rican. And they beat us, just like they did every night.

"A couple of days later I walked into the office, and Kola Kwariani got a hold of me, he was a Russian guy." (Kwariani, described in one magazine article as a "Slavic Buddha," also owned a cat named Pushkin.)

"’What you try do to Perez?,’ he tells me.

"And so I tried to explain to him, you know? I said, ‘Hey, to make the show look a little better—when he made that big comeback, and he sold for us, it would have been greater!’

"Kwariani says, ‘I don’t care, you make him look like piece shit! From now on, if you ever do that again, you’re done! In fact, you got one week off, with no goddamn money!’

"I said, ‘Aw come on, Kola,’ and he said, ‘Two weeks off for you! You bastard!’

"I said, ‘You mean you’re gonna give me two weeks off ‘cause I made that asshole look crazy?’ He said, ‘That’s right! He brings the Puerto Ricans. You don’t bring the Puerto Ricans!’

"Of course, all the other guys in the territory are sayin’, ‘Boy, we’d better make Perez look good, or we’ll be in the same fucking’ boat.’"

"Wrestling always had that reputation of being run out of a cigar-box," recalled Ted Lewin, "although it may just have been that the box was a little bigger than the wrestlers thought it was." Lewin also remembered that "some of the wrestlers didn’t like that wrestling took the heat for being rigged, given the way boxing was in the ‘fifties."

The loss of network prime-time television programming sent promoters scampering to barter for local time slots, and presaged the splintering of the NWA: The independent television station got a cost-free hour of programming in which to air its own commercials, while the promoter could advertise his own product. Verne Gagne recalled that the only air time he could get was on Sunday mornings, and he had to sell vitamins to finance the program. Gagne (who, the story goes, had been demanding a shot at the NWA title) split off and banded together with several other promoters to form the American Wrestling Association, which eventually came to include a few Far Western promotions, along with its original base in the northern Midwest.

In the East, after the DuMont network broke up in the late fifties, McMahon held onto several T.V. outlets. In 1963 he founded the World Wide Wrestling Federation by naming Buddy "Nature Boy" Rogers as his champion. In May of the same year, Bruno Sammartino began an uninterrupted eight-year reign as WWWF champion by beating Rogers.

Finding that their weekend-morning telecasts were competing with cartoon programs, some promoters began designing shows that appealed to children. (At one time, unaccompanied youngsters under the age of 16 were prohibited from attending wrestling matches in New York State; the minimum age was subsequently changed to 14, and finally to eight, some seven years ago.) And so, many of the fans under thirty-five who are said to be regularly watching wrestling on television in such impressive numbers have been watching T.V. wrestling since they were young children; if, perhaps, only occasionally, on rainy weekend mornings.

Television wrestling’s kiddie-show angle also explains why so many of wrestling’s villains look and sound more like scary uncles or cartoon bullies—blustering, deranged, or neurotic—than barroom brawlers. The delight with which many wrestlers play contemptible heels in interviews makes for a great deal of energetic comedy: "Rowdy" Roddy Piper had been effective switching between roles as a heel and as a babyface in the Carolinas and the West Coast before joining the WWF, but he is the most effective as a jeering blatherskite: by turns a Russian sympathizer, and a racist xenophobe. When he first came to the WWF,

Piper was used exclusively as an interviewer—evidently it was felt that at six-foot-one, he was too short to wrestle in main events—on his own talk-show, "Piper’s Pit," playing a sycophant for guest villains, or lashing out at fan favorites. (Piper has a few competitors for best actor, including Gorgeous Jimmy Garvin, a vain, whining heel who brings his girlfriend to the ring with him.) A good performer can enliven even an ancient routine: when bad-guy Bobby "The Weasel" Heenan became a manager, he tried to change his epithet to "The Brain"; when arena fans start chanting "Weasel!" at him, Heenan, poised at ringside like a pompous small-time hood, eggs them on with gestures of vexation.

The choice of a wrestler to be a promotion’s flagship babyface is often as much a matter of fashion as of personality or ability; thus the arrival of pro football late in the 1920s carried a few former football stars to wrestling championships. (Until fairly recently, scores of professional football players moonlighted as wrestlers in the off-season.) Bruno Sammartino’s massive popularity during the 1960s—Sammartino is still greeted enthusiastically by fans in many cities—attests equally to his own charisma and to Vince McMahon, Sr.’s television packaging. Sammartino successfully projected a sturdy, blameless virility and in New York, especially, benefited from the momentary absence of a stellar Italian athlete—a DiMaggio or a Marciano—from the national scene. (In lean times, New York promotions have tended to name Hispanic champions like Pedro Morales or Mil Mascaras.)

Current WWF champ Hulk Hogan presents an unusual case; whether his current popularity is due to the break he got playing a fearsome wrestler in the third of Sylvester Stallone’s "Rocky" movies (where Mr. T co-starred, also as a villain), or to a national weightlifting fad (though steroids are so popular that Hogan’s musclebound physique would not be very remarkable without his height), or to the heartfelt garrulity of his interviews, or the music that is played over arena loudspeakers immediately before he enters and tears off his shirt (for a long time it was a song from "Rocky III"), he has never drawn well in a city where he appears with too much regularity. Hogan seems to function best as a kind of instant memory—he sparks a flash of excitement as soon as fans find themselves in the same arena with him.

Dave Meltzer thinks his charm doesn’t run as deep as Sammartino’s: "The fans loved Bruno in a different way than Hulk. I mean, the fans go bananas when Hulk comes in the door, but they don’t live and die with him. I don’t know if you’ve heard about the night Bruno lost the title in 1971, but everyone sat and cried. They said you could hear a pin drop in the Garden. If Hulk Hogan lost the title, I don’t think people would be crying."

Once a passably competent ring worker, Hogan appears nowadays to be very limited as an athlete: His matches do not last longer than fifteen minutes, and his repertoire is limited to a couple of throws, including the now-famous "leg drop" in which he jumps several feet in the air and lands sitting on the canvas, with the crook of his knee falling across his opponent’s neck.

Shire complains, "How can Hogan be in shape, when all he does is go around the goddamned ring, raisin’ his fists up—what we call ‘beating the people.’ You know, when I wrestled, and I worked for Al Haft, if you did that with Al Haft, boy, you wouldn’t wrestle more than a week. He’d say, ‘Wait a minute, the people are seeing you to wrestle, great moves, flying around the ring, taking bumps, et cetera, -- you don’t have any time to be beating the goddamn public out there.’ That’s a cheap way of getting heat, of getting response.

"You know, Hogan—he does something, he turns to the crowd, right? And he raises his hands up, and his fists, and he’s shaking ‘em, and the crowd goes nuts. Cheap way of getting a reaction. You couldn’t do that years ago, most promoters wouldn’t go for it. So consequently, he wrestles about two minutes, then he spends about three minutes doin’ that while he’s relaxing. So he’s not in shape." (Sam Muchnick said of wrestlers today, "A lot of the guys—they can’t wrestle, but they start pestering the audience in order to get a reaction.")

One wrestler said: "Actually the music is what goes over, the rock song is what really got the people going. The song was over and the shirt was off, there wasn’t a lot left to watch."

Many of the WWF’s shenanigans were inspired by the antics of the late comedian Andy Kaufman, who frequently appeared on television talk shows in order to bait a professional wrestler into a convincing fracas, and then entered the ring for a few dozen matches around Tennessee in 1977. "T.N.T," the WWF’s mock talk show, which was borrowed from Kaufman, was at least partially responsible for getting WWF wrestling over with many "sophisticated" fans. According to one story, Andy Kaufman initially approached Vince McMahon Jr. about getting into the ring, but McMahon declined his offer, saying that it had no place in professional wrestling.

The appearance of a popular television actor (who is very popular with children as the result of one of NBC’s most successful prime-time T.V. shows) in several highly-touted bouts only helped the WWF’s popularity.

Mr. T has been a professional wrestling fan since he was a child, and several promoters have reported that they had rejected out of hand his entreaties to allow him to perform in the ring.

In December of 1984, Mr. T began showing up near the ring at WWF events, and a few months later, he was seen on WWF promotional telecasts. Few wrestlers welcomed him—while Mr. T was seated at ringside during a December card in Los Angeles, David Schults challenged him to come into the ring, and not as part of the act. Mr. T declined. Backstage at a subsequent card there, a WWF agent was forced to have Schults arrested to prevent an incident after Schults began telling other wrestlers that he was going to go after him. When the television star finally made his professional wrestling debut in a main event at Madison Square Garden as Hulk Hogan’s babyface partner, and reportedly was paid more for his single round of wrestling than others on the card now make in half a year, the reactions of wrestlers—who generally spend years playing smaller circuits before they hit a big- time promotion like the WWF—ranged from chagrin to disgust. (Of course, Hollywood comedians such as Chaplin, W.C. Fields, and Abbott and Costello used to incorporate wrestling gags in their films. And many wrestlers would undoubtedly rather act in Hollywood—as did former pro grapplers Nat Pendleton and Mike Mazurki—but the only other actor ever to jump into the ring was Andy Kaufman, who played a petty heel who got thrashed in every match.)

The commonest gripe about the WWF is that its matches rely more on flashy, recognizable personalities than on skillful, acrobatic athletes. One wrestler may be more willing than another to risk his body for sensational effect—somersaulting over the top rope and landing on the floor outside the ring, for example. The work rate in the WWF is quite low—perhaps as a consequence of the hectic schedule.

Wrestling’s profitablity has generally relied exclusively upon gate receipts and concession sales of souvenirs. Except for revenues gained from television in the ‘fifties (and from radio, earlier) the media had served mostly to advertise wrestling’s live product, especially after the demise of network T.V. wrestling programs. Since then most promotions have forsworn televising main events, preferring to entice viewers into the arena with modest "free sample" matches, taped in studios, that show off main-event talent beating more or less anonymous wrestlers.

As a new generation of promoters replaced the old NWA powers, promotional formulas became more sophisticated, and so wrestling changed somewhat in many territories, particularly in the East and the South.

But the first angle that Roy Shire broadcast on television to build up fan interest in the Bay Area two and a half decades ago does not differ in kind from modern "campaigns" and "marketing concepts."

Shire detailed how he got started: "I went in, and with a friend of mine who was in promotion, flew out west here. We got a television out here—Channel 2, which was the big independent—and we got on at nine o’clock on Friday nights—how much better can you get? Gateway Chevrolet sponsored us, and though they’d had tape on before then, we started doing the live show.

"And I brought Bill Welch out, gave him a piece of the action—I don’t know if you ever heard of Bill Welch or not, he used to be the commentator for the Divorce Court on T.V. years ago, so he had the credibility. Fantastic announcer—he was kind of a celebrity, and at that time, he did all the West Coast football games, like UCLA, you know, or USC, on games that were going around the country. See? So the guy was known. He said, ‘I’ll do it if you give me a piece of the action, plus a salary.’ I says, ‘Man, you got it.’ So he started in with me.

"And with all that going, coming into a town that had no television—I wrote the script for my wrestlers, tellin’ ‘em what to say on television.

"Nobody had ever come to San Francisco and said they didn’t like San Francisco. Everyone just came out here and fell in love with the city.

"Well, I got Ray Stevens—him and I had wrestled together for a while, up until I started promoting—I brought him out. And I wrote his script, and I had him call San Francisco "Fogsville." Said all the girls were ugly as hell, and just knocked and lambasted San Francisco like you couldn’t believe—in those days you could get by with a lot of stuff you couldn’t get by with today.

"So then I worked an angle on television, and I walked into the Cow Palace, and everybody says, ‘Aw, shit, he ain’t gonna draw.’ Even the management says, ‘What you gonna draw here, Roy?’

"I said, ‘What’s the place seat?’ He says, ‘16,000.’ I says, ‘We’ll fill it.’ He laughed at me, says: ‘Not wrestling.’

"We came in, we didn’t draw sixteen—we drew something like 17,000. We turned six, seven thousand away from the doors. They were scalping tickets for 50 dollars outside—this is back in ‘60, friend.

"I ran television for six weeks before I opened in town. See, I was working an angle on them. What I did was, I took a guy out of retirement: Bill Melby, who had won third in Mr. America, and ‘Best Legs.’ A bodybuilder and a wrestler—good-looking S.O.B., from Salt Lake, a friend of mine from wrestling, but he’d quit and was building apartment buildings. And he was close—I said, ‘Melby, you know you’ve gotta come back.’ I said, ‘I’ll feature you, and you’ll make some money. You know, I’m only gonna be running the T.V. on Friday nights, and the Cow Palace every couple of weeks, ‘till I open the whole territory, so why don’t you come out and give it a try?’

"So I convinced him to do it. Meantime, I’m bringing a guy in from the Indianapolis territory, which was Jim Barnett’s at the time, and he was a Japanese guy named Mitsu Arakawa. He beat everybody with a stomach claw.

"Well every week we would would carry the guy out—Arakawa would give him the stomach claw, and he’d give up. And Arakawa’d run back, and give the guy the stomach claw two, three times after the guy’d give up, and they’d carry him out on the stretcher.

"Now Melby, with this beautiful body, abdominal section—anybody’d get him in the stomach, he’d never sell it. I’d make guys keep hittin’ him in the stomach, and he’d flex his muscles, and he wouldn’t sell it to him. So everybody knows now that he’s got a tough abdominal section, right? So I get Melby on television, two weeks before the fourth week.

"The fourth week he comes on the television, after Arakawa wrestles, and Melby says, ‘You know, I have been watching this now for one month.’ And he says, ‘This guy is making me sick.’ (I’ve got Arakawa with Cowboy Ellis, and I’ve got Melby with someone else, I don’t remember who it was. This is two main events.) And he said, ‘One of these days, he’s goin’ to keep doin’ this, and I’m gonna run into this ring and just kick the living heck out of him.’

"And Bill Welch says, ‘Now you can’t do that, you just can’t do that.’

"He says, ‘If he does that next week, I’m gonna do it to him!’ See, well, this is the buildup. Next week, sure enough, Arakawa puts the stomach claw on the guy, and the guy’s in pain, screamin’ and hollerin’, and after takin’ him off, Arakawa jumps out of the ring, puts the stomach claw on him—on the floor, the cameras are on him, boy. And out of the dressing room, here comes Melby! Comes running in and—pow, pow! he beats the shit out of him, and Arakawa runs in the ring. We want to capture it on the T.V. and make it look better. Melby jumps on the ring, and hits him, pow, pow!, -- down Arakawa goes. Then, Arakawa chops him in the stomach, puts the stomach claw on him—and everybody says, ‘Oh boy, he’s got Melby!’ Everybody’s groaning now, you know? Melby’s straining, you can see his abdominal section coming out—we zoom in on it, ‘cause I’m standing there telling the camera guys exactly what to do. And Melby’s just standing there, nothin’s happenin’—Arakawa gets up, looks, you know that surprised look that Japanese have, you see ‘em in the comic deals—and he puts a stomach claw on him, and again, Melby stiffens up his muscles again, and nothin’ happens.

"Arakawa looks at him, that funny expression again, puts it on him again, nothing happens. And then Melby comes back, starts kickin’ the shit out of him, and Arakawa runs right out of the ring, with Melby right after him.

"So I come running behind the camera, I jump on the television, I say, ‘You know, in all my days of wrestling’—I was still wrestling—‘I have never seen Arakawa run from nobody, I mean from nobody. I mean nobody can do this to this guy.’ And I said, ‘You know what? I’m gonna go back into the dressing room, and I’m gonna try to change this match, for March 4, and see if Melby and Arakawa will wrestle one another in a main event.’

"So I run off, now we have a match, I come back at the intermission, and we come back out, and I say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen—I did it, I did it! I got the match changed!’

"Arakawa says, ‘Nobody can do this to me! I lose face! I lose face! I can’t afford to lose face, my ancestors’ and all this bullshit. He says, ‘Give me contract, I sign!’ He signs the contract. And then rushes off, and Melby comes on, and he signs the contract.

"Now, I got—cause tickets aren’t moving too good—I got about ten days to sell the tickets. You know, I went in to the match that afternoon at twelve o’clock—we had served $32,000 in the kill. And those tickets were two, three, and four dollar tickets. We sold out—we had $53,500. That was a sellout, and I mean, we had, something like two thousand standin’ in the aisles. That gimmick did it.

"Well, you see, the reason that Vince McMahon is doing so great is not because of his manipulation or his expertise of promoting, or anything else, of knowing the business, it’s strictly that he has got the T.V. that goes national. Over everyplace, and he has the next prestigious thing coming, that it’s coming from the Garden, you know, or affiliated with the Garden, which is probably the most prestigious arena in the United States.

"Not because he is a great promoter. He’s not that great a promoter. But if you’ve got T.V., and you go national, you know, and people are seeing those wrestlers, week in and week out, then you come along—that’s the scenario of our business—you put a guy on T.V. and you get people to like him or hate him, then you put him in a town, and the people that have seen him on T.V. for seven, eight, ten weeks or months or ten weeks or whatever, long enough to either you really like him, or really hate him, you bring him in the people’ll pay their money at the box office to see him. That is the essence of our business. Has been. Like I’d go when I was promoting—take Las Vegas, say.

"I went in, I would make the tape here in San Francisco. I put it on, I run it for about ten weeks. And I got the people liking and disliking guys. And then I took a good match, and I put it on in the Convention Center down there, you know? I made nothing but money.

"And I used to always run anywhere from every two to four weeks, in all my big towns. I didn’t want to overdo it—it’s like cake, if you eat too much of it, you lose the taste of it. So I’d work a angle, bring the thing back, and draw money again. I’d do this all over—I did it in Anchorage, Alaska, did it in Honolulu, you know, and I did it in Phoenix, Las Vegas, you know, to name a few towns that I did this.

"I’d just take that tape and run it, and I’d cut from the tape for that market—it’s very simple. You take a master tape: If I’m making a tape for the Cow Palace, which is my master tape, I’d have the wrestlers come in, and interview the ones that are in the main event at the Cow Palace. And then, when I go and make the tape for say Las Vegas, I had the spot in there, say three minutes, that was blank. Where the interview had been done for the Cow Palace by, say, Pat Patterson. Well then—but Pat is not in the main event in Las Vegas—say, Joe Blow’s in it. Well, I put Joe Blow in his place, talking about the match in Las Vegas . . . .

"So you make custom tapes for everything, you know? And the guy’s there sayin’ ‘I’ll kill that sonofabitch!,’ and the other guy sayin’ ‘He ain’t gonna kill me!’

"The essence of the whole deal: ‘You kill me, and I kill you.’"

(To be continued in The WAWLI Papers No. 440)
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The WAWLI (Wrestling As We Liked It) Papers No.  440

A LENGTHY LOOK AT WRESTLING HISTORY, CONTINUED...

The wrestling "season" begins roughly in November and lasts through mid-April; in many areas, the biggest night of the year for wrestling comes on a family holiday such as Thanksgiving, or Christmas.

The advertised main event is what brings in the fans. Quite a few promotions will on occasion "main-event" two good guys in the ring against one another, or likewise feature two heels—more often than not, in both cases one wrestler is actually hated more than the other—but the WWF always advertises main events which feature a battle between personifications of "good" and "evil": a pair of contestants fighting for, say, the pride of the free world.

Or the main event might be a "Battle Royal": all the wrestlers from the undercards meet en masse in the ring (looking like a Muscle Beach party moved out of the rain), until the one who jettisons his last remaining rival is declared the winner. Shire, who is said to have had the best Battle Royals in the country, explained the buildup: "Well, you bring in the best guys, you give ‘em a lot of money, and they talk about it—and the biggest thing is that everyone’s scared to go into it. Which is not true, but—you know, and the guys go out, and say, ‘Well, I don’t know if I want to go out or not,’—they’re hesitant about goin’, ‘cause of gettin’ hurt. With all that hyping before, everyone thought, ‘Well, geez, a guy’s gonna get killed in there.’ I always got somebody hurt—you know, hospital deal or whatever. Consequently it had that atmosphere of brutality, and that kind of thing, that the fans love."

Promoters embellish rivalries any number of ways: if, say, the last sellout main-event matchup of Dreadnaught versus Flaming Tommy ended with both wrestlers disqualified for leaving the ring, the promoter might announce that next month’s rematch will be held inside a steel cage to prevent either wrestler from escaping. New York promotions generally draw the line at steel cages; but elsewhere there are "no stopping for blood" matches and "loser-leave-town" matches. Matches in which contestants are strapped together invariably lead to a bloody finish; there are bouts held on platforms high above the ring, or with purse money at the top of a pole. Promotions that are more wholesome enhance their main events with harmless penalties, such as as forcing the loser to wear a costume (a diaper, for instance), but Meltzer recalls a series of "hangman’s noose" matches held in Florida during the summer of 1984, in which the object was to hang the loser: "They did draw—the fans who were out there were either so sick that they believed it, or maybe they considered it campy to watch someone kill himself . . . Normally what would happen is the good guy would win, and then all the bad guys would jump in, and they’d still try to hang the guy who won, until his good-guy friends would save him, and he’d say something like, ‘Thank you, Dusty, for saving my life.’"

Ordinarily, however, having filled the arena on the strength of a main event, the promoter’s next objective is to get the fans to come back for the next card. As in any business, indifference, laziness, complacency, or cynicism may not necessarily be hazardous; but generally, if the talent and the booker click, and the area has a dedicated, steady following, things don’t go badly for a promotion until it runs out of angles or "finishes."

The booking process is at the heart of wrestling’s secrecy. Jay West, a ring announcer for Georgia Championship Wrestling, commented: "The people behind the scenes, the big folks, they’ve always been very, very protective of how they do what they do. And they have always thought that the fans were incredibly stupid, and this is why it was so silly for them to be so protective around somebody like me—you know, for a long, long time I was never allowed to see how matches were made, or anything, even though I worked for them for almost eight years."

Arranging the array of matches and selecting the winners and the "finishes" is the job of the booker. He is also responsible for devising the rivalries which are promoted on television interviews, which set the stage for the arena. The biggest promotions might have more than one booker, but the scripts for shows in large arenas are the responsibility of its number-one booker. (The lesser cards that big-time promotions stage in armories, or high school or college gyms are usually booked by one of the wrestlers, or a representative of the office—a "sub-booker," as it were, who may handle other duties, such as making sure the boys show up sober. These "spot shows" are usually modest, reprising one or two matches with a name or two from the last big-city show, or rehearsing for the next big one. The WWF seems to shuttle the same two or three road shows—changing them once every one or two months—into different cities around the country.)

Vince McMahon, Jr. is said to "do the finishes" for WWF events in the larger arenas. It’s likely that he dreams up the bigger angles, like "Rock and Wrestling," while others help put them into action—dressing the undercards, for example, and perhaps even the main events—then submitting them for McMahon’s approval.

Some fans prefer promotions that put together "logical" cards, fashioned with a regard for common sense and a concern for continuity. Shire, who was titled "The Professor" during his wrestling career, has often said that he "preached logic" as a promoter. Meltzer commented on Shire’s ability: "It was a real well-run promotion. And it consistently drew well, the Cow Palace was a real great—for the size of the city they drew real great crowds, always. I mean, a crowd of 5,000 at the Cow Palace, that never happened. Always consistent, 8 to12 thousand.

"All of the matches on the card always made sense. If a guy won a match, he’d be moved up on the card; if a guy lost, he wouldn’t. Every match was important, because the guy on the preliminary match, if he won two straight preliminary matches, he’d be moving up to a main event, and then if he won that, he might get a title shot. No one came in and was in the main event the first time.

"Every match on the card was important, the title matches were always long, and they always had good endings. He was really sharp at endings, and the rematch always made sense. (Promoters now—I’ll give you an example—cage matches: Of all the gimmick matches, the number-one draw is the cage match. Sometimes they’ll just throw in a cage match, to draw. If Shire had a cage match, it was because the two guys were fighting in the stands the week before, and that’s why he had the cage match, to keep ‘em in the ring. If he had a match where there was no stopping for blood, it was because the guys were bleeding all over the place the card before. His gimmicks always made sense.)"

Wrestlers have always had an idea of their opponents’ repertoire of throws, and after touring a circuit for a few months, improvising a series of lumps becomes quite simple. WWF bouts seemed more rehearsed and less improvised than before; there were perhaps other reasons for the dissatisfaction of longtime fans, but in many WWF matches, "advantage time" seems to be fully scripted out. With less emphasis on athleticism, the role of the WWF’s bookers has apparently become more important.

Another complaint about WWF cards concerns the preliminary bouts, which by and large feature freaky, flashy, or unathletic characters. A preliminary which creates too much excitement too soon might upstage the main event, bringing the crowd’s enthusiasm ("heat") to a premature climax. If the main event that night features Hulk Hogan, who is a notoriously unathletic performer (but, of course, a heavy "fan favorite," thanks to his notoriety) the chances are good that an acrobatic good guy on the undercard will diminish Hogan’s impact on the crowd. And so in many of the undercards, often the most dramatic moment comes when a wrestler steps through the ring ropes and walks around the perimeter of the platform, because he’ll be disqualified if he stays out for longer than the referee’s count.

"All I’m doing," Vince McMahon, Jr. told Newsweek in March, "is filling a marketing niche for a wholesome show at a reasonable cost." People have been describing wrestling cards as "morality plays" for some forty years. The WWF’s Washington’s Birthday card would be more accurately described as a serial spectacle, or a variation on the theme of humiliation. Events and matches patch together elements appropriate to soap operas or snuff films.

To a degree, hostility animates the crowd at every sporting event. Unfortunately for franchise owners of perpetual also-rans in baseball, basketball, football, and hockey, ordinary sporting events cannot guarantee that a great competitive performance or a favorable outcome for the home team will mitigate fans’ discontent at not having their way.

Much of cardmaking consists of experimenting with old formulas. Even when a promoter chanced upon an innovation, it might have taken him a while to discern what it was that he had found, develop it into something that might not be perceptible as a gimmick, as such, and tailor its use to a given region.

The fun seems to derive from creating and shifting various opposing forces in the audience—here, between confusion and resolution; there, boredom and fascination; yonder, isolation and reassurance. This kind of pairing-game pits wrestlers (or their reputations) off one another only in a secondary way—the fans who are used to good guy/bad guy look for these roles in every encounter, and not much deeper. Thus a card may parade two dozen wrestlers in an evening, but often there seem to be really only two wrestlers on the fans’ minds.

Nor is it essential that every fan in the arena hate the villains. A heel whose sullen or arrogant plight evokes sympathy among certain of its fans can be used to great advantage—to introduce new angles, for instance. (Fans who thought that "Rock and Wrestling" was a reprehensible notion were gratified to hear the WWF’s evildoers saying "rock has no place in wrestling.")

The fans entering the Felt Forum this evening to watch "The War To Settle the Score" were handed a sheet listing the night’s events; a simple souvenir providing the simple pleasure of recognition. Unfortunately, a disclaimer printed at the bottom asserting a promoter’s "right to make suitable substitutions" when "scheduled talent is unable to appear" makes the WWF’s handbill almost useless. Cast and order of matches often fail to appear as advertised; some promotions go so far as to advertise main-event talent which is long gone. (And the thoroughly distorted account of the results of the Washington’s Birthday card given by a Titan booker over the phone a few weeks later suggests that "circumstances beyond the control of the promoter" include his memory.)

Likely the cardmaker decides the order as the night progresses—in the WWF, a wrestler himself often won’t find out who he is matched against until a few minutes before he goes on—keeping the crowd in suspense as he watches to guess what it will want next.

At eight o’clock in the Felt Forum, not a straggler was to be seen. The house seemed to have quieted itself by the time the anthem came on, but after the lights darkened to allow the pair of screens in front to come alive with an aspect of the ring inside the Garden, the first match was a few seconds in progress before several fans realized that the sound wasn’t working. There was patient muttering for half a minute before the yelling started, until finally the voices of play-by-play announcers Gene Okerlund and Gorilla Monsoon could be heard over the background noises of the Garden crowd.

The biggest difference between arena wrestling bouts and the ones shown on the syndicated television shows of most promotions are the matchups themselves. There are few "good guy-bad guy" pairings on T.V. shows; instead, a T.V. bout will usually feature a top name—whether hero or villain—paired against a "T.V. loser," one of an assortment of wrestlers who are hired to perform in the taping sessions once every few weeks. (Most every wrestling star seems to have gotten his start this way, so some of these lesser-known wrestlers probably nurture hopes of moving up in the promotional ladder.) In the WWF’s T.V. matches, the better-known wrestler invariably wins. Members of the audience in the arena or studio where a T.V. show is taped often like to yell "Chickenshit!" or "Loser!" at the entrance of one of the more familiar scrubs, -- "job boys" to wrestlers, who also refer to them by names such as "Gibronis" or "Joe Blows."

These lower-echelon performers—who are never interviewed on television, never get written about in the magazines, and are paid much less than the "top boys"—are often featured in the first few matches of wrestling cards. Unfortunately, perhaps, for these wrestlers, a crowd anticipating the talent that has been promoted more aggressively tends to get impatient after a while, especially if the matches are slow, confusing, or inconclusive.

The first match, unmentioned in the program, was between Rick "Quick Draw" McGraw and a much taller, blonde-haired, bearded veteran named Moondog Spot, brother of Moondog Rex. A murmuring passed through the crowd as it recognized McGraw, a babyface of rather modest renown, who has been out of action for several months with a broken neck. Sure enough, when the rulebreaking Spot begins to get the better of McGraw with a few lackadaisical forearm smashes to the latter’s chest, commentator Monsoon ascribes McGraw’s weak defense to "ring rust." Eventually McGraw lost his temper, except too late; he got a few shots back against Spot, but before he could gain an advantage the bell signaled the end of the twenty-minute time limit, and so the match ended in a draw.

Up next was a veteran "scrub" named "The Unpredictable" Johnny Rodz, whose nickname refers as much the status of his role (which shifts beween minor good guy, when he is facing an overpowering heel, and minor heel, when he is battling a fan favorite) as to his ring demeanor, and another Hispanic scrub named Jose Luis Rivera. The match is of some interest for pitting two wrestlers whose reputations are slightly tarnished: each is more often seen as fodder for a bigger name, but each, when left to his own devices—that is, if wrestling another wrestler who is only as recognizable or less so than himself—will become a moderately strong rulebreaker. His seniority makes Rodz something of a favorite; moreover as an arrogant, petty scoundrel he is a competent performer, pounding his opponent with bent elbows. For his part, Rivera suffers his licks with admirable patience until at one point, after Rodz had succeeded in tossing him out of the ring and proceeded to strut around the ring—grinning and lifting his arms triumphantly—Rivera climbed back onto the top turnbuckle (the padded collar covering the point at which each of the three ropes is lashed to the four ringposts) and jumps him from behind. Rodz, miffed, redoubled his own effort and appeared to bite Rivera at one point. Eventually Rodz won.

A screen graphic introduced a match between David Sammartino and Moondog Rex. Sammartino, the son of "Wrestling’s Living Legend," does not seem to have emerged from his father’s shadow, and he seems rather self-conscious in the ring; sadly, he is sometimes booed (but never when appearing in a tag-team with Bruno). His contract with the WWF was said to have been the result of the out-of-court settlement negotiated between Bruno and Vince McMahon, Jr. after the former filed a nonpayment suit against the WWF. Tonight he earned a victory over Rex, but not without being thrown out of the ring at one point ("I think he might have a nosebleed," commented Monsoon.)

According to Shire and others, the heel "leads" the match—that is, he tells the "babyface" what to do. Shire, discussing "high spots" and "ring psychology," elaborated on how this works: "Say the guy’s got a headlock on the guy, and he’s punishing the guy. And he’s punishing him, and the fans now react—how can the fans get out of a headlock? I mean, there’s not much action to it.

"So now the fans are quieted down—that’s when you do it, when the fans are nice and quiet, and their throats are rested, ‘cause if they keep hollerin’ all night they get hoarse, and they can’t holler anymore. (This is what I call psychology; you bring ‘em up, you set ‘em down, bring ‘em up, set ‘em down.) So now, here comes the high spot. Everybody’s settled, no screaming.

"I’m the bad guy, you’re the good guy. So I got the headlock on you. You throw me into the ropes. I come off, I give you one tackle. I give you two tackles. And then, I go to give you the third tackle, you drop down,

I jump over you. I hit the rope, I come off, I’m gonna give you the next tackle, but you dropkick me. And when I go down, you snatch the headlock on me, take me over. That’s what we call a high spot. The people just rise to it. You see, that’s all action. . . .

"I’d go into a match and have a good match-up. And the crowd—when I’d say, ‘Okay, let’s settle down, let’s settle down now,’ that meant I didn’t want any noise, so I’d tell the wrestler, ‘Get a hold on me. Get a leglock,’ an armlock, a headlock, whatever. ‘Let’s settle the people down.’ Now they would be settled down for two or three or four minutes. And you could drop a pin in the place and there’s no noise going—a little bit, not much.

"And I’d say, ‘Okay, let’s bring ‘em to their feet.’

"And then I would make my move—maybe chop meat. People’d start yelling, and then we’d go into high spots, and I’d go flying all over the ring, you know—lyin’ upside down on the top ropes, you name it. And boy, we’d have them screaming, the whole goddamned arena’d be screaming.

"And then, when I figured they’d screamed long enough, I’d say, ‘Okay, so I’m gonna get a hold on you now. We’re gonna settle it down’—so that next time we do this, they’ll be rested, they’ll be able to react.

"See, if you keep doing this constantly, cutting meat, and the high spots, pretty soon the people have yelled so much that they can’t yell anymore and they’re going hoarse. No matter what you do, you can’t get a reaction. So then when you get finally to the finish, which is the high spot of the whole match, and the people don’t react to it because they’re hoarse and tired or whatever, at the end of match, the people say, ‘Oh that was a lousy match.’ All because they didn’t react to the finish."

(To be continued in The WAWLI Papers No. 441)
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The WAWLI (Wrestling As We Liked It) Papers No.  441

A LENGTHY LOOK AT WRESTLING HISTORY, CONTINUED...

The prospect of a sequence of unannounced bouts involving wrestlers as forgettable as Rodz and Rivera has quieted the fans. Vince McMahon boasted to Newsweek that "you won’t sit there feeling bored," but so far tonight, the first hour has been taken up with three rather hopeless matches. At this point, the main event seemed far, far away, and the crowd started getting restless; one distracted fan in back at the Felt

Forum began to entertain himself by experimenting with the beam of his pocket flashlight to see if it will reach the floor, the backs of other specators, the ceiling of the auditorium. Another fan seemed intent upon securing the armrest to the left of his seat, at the expense of another customer—who, however, yielded his elbow to the pressure.

Everyone in the Felt Forum perked up noticeably as soon as Hillbilly Jim’s name flashed on the television screen. Jim is a youthful, strapping, big-shouldered character who wears a furry beard, overalls, a worn leather hat, and a rather overbearing grin. The fans have taken to the Southerner because he has been cast as one of their own—for months he had been seen seated at ringside rooting for good guys during WWF telecasts, and then during one of Hulk Hogan’s matches, when the champ was suffering at the hands of one villain or another, big Jim rushed through the ropes to help his hero. (Meltzer said that before coming to the WWF, Jim—whose real name is Harley Daniel—had wrestled both in Memphis and Calgary; since he had also made his Canadian entrance as a face in the crowd, Calgary’s television fans who watch the WWF show had been subjected to his debut twice.)

Jim’s opponent was not Rene Goulet, as both the program and Titan’s spokesman claimed, but a morose-looking heel named Charlie Fulton. Fulton has been around for a long time, so when Jim (who got a big laugh when he had to be reminded by the referee to remove his hat) extended his paw for a friendly handshake, he declined; whether out of miscreance or prudence was unclear—Jim appeared to be around eight inches taller—but Jim’s friendliness persisted for another minute or so, until Fulton charged across the ring into the ropes and bounced off of them back towards his opponent in order to hit him, but to no avail. After trying the same move again, unsuccessfully, Fulton attempted to pick Jim up for a bodyslam three times in succession. This made Jim chortle mightily, whereupon he picked up Fulton and tossed him onto his back a few times.

After a few minutes of this, Fulton decided to slip under the bottom rope to take an apparent "breather." Fulton, evidently deciding that an equalizer might bring this jolly hayseed with a sixty-pound advantage down to size, slipped a hand down the front of his wrestling trunks to get at something he seemed to have hidden there. It was a strange moment—the audience recognized the "foreign object" ploy immediately, and they gasped as one to see the pathetic desperation to which a career of losing scrub matches to bigger, unflappable musclemen had driven Fulton. Yet Jim wasn’t bothered; he just threw Fulton down a few more times and finally picked him up in a bear hug.

The next match was dreary, but the crowd’s disappointment evaporated as soon as rock singer Cyndi Lauper’s theme song piped over the loudspeakers to herald her appearance, along with her charge, WWF Ladies’ Champion Wendi Richter. Opposing her is challenger Lelani Kai, whose career is supervised by the Fabulous Moolah—and from this point on in, no contestant who appeared could not have been instantly identifiable to every paying customer.

It has been said that The Fabulous Moolah, who owned the Ladies’ Belt for about 25 years, virtually destroyed women’s wrestling in her capacity as a handler of women wrestlers for promotions around the country. But thanks to Lauper, girl-wrestling underwent something of a renaissance.

Ladies’ matches, once prohibited in New York, generally turn into catfights, with much scratching and hairpulling. Lady wrestlers often prove to be more acrobatic performers, taking more risks; where men lift and fall in a slow, pronounced rhythm, the ladies’ bodies whip around rapidly in a flurry of tossing curls. (It is said that some of the girl wrestlers of Japan are among the best athletes, male or female, in wrestling today.) Yet the suspicion remains that the point of ladies’ matches is to display as much moving flesh as possible, and even perhaps to suggest that each contestants’ tight-fitting suit is on the verge of giving way. Which didn’t happen that night. Instead, Richter lost her title, because Moolah cheated, and Lauper seemed very upset.

Then Paul "Mr. Wonderful" Orndorff, who’d been heard making derogatory comments about blacks on WWF telecasts, dispensed with black wrestler Tony Atlas without much trouble, to the fans’ chagrin. The high point of Atlas’ career came in 1982, when he emerged victorious from a "battle royale" and thereby earned the right to face then-WWF champ Bob Backlund in a title match. What was unusual about their match was perhaps not that Atlas was the only good-guy that Backlund (who is white) had ever wrestled in the WWF—rather that it virtually coincided with a highly publicized boxing match on June 11, 1982, between heavyweight champion Larry Holmes, who is black, and contender Gerry Cooney, who is white. Boxing fans will recall that Cooney had been regarded as a "comer" until he was knocked out by Holmes in the thirteenth round; wrestling fans remember that Backlund appeared to thrash Atlas rather soundly.

Another later preliminary pitted bad-guy contender Don "The Magnificent" Muraco against a less familiar Italian import with a face as sweet as his name, Salvatore Bellomo. A few weeks afterward, Hogan—who is frequently photographed wearing a silver cross on a chain around his neck—referred to Muraco as "that Prince of Darkness," but his chances tonight against Bellomo looked pretty good to the fans in the back of the Felt Forum; during the ring introduction, one commented, "Muraco loves to eat Italian!"

Escorting The Magnificent One to the ring, in full dress, is his newfound manager, Mr. Fuji, the WWF’s perennial Japanese villain (who explained in a WWF Magazine interview that "to avenge Japanese honor" for the loss of World War II, he dresses formally as Emperor Hirohito did for the signing of the surrender in 1945). Mr. Fuji also wears a seemingly benign smile that invariably is described as a "sadistic grin" by broadcast announcers, who now credit him with schooling Muraco in the finer points of brutality, though Muraco has long been a villain, or "rulebreaker" in the argot.

Middle-aged wrestlers frequently become managers. Generally it is a younger performer whose prosperity is placed in the hands of some rulebreaker emeritus, and so when the rising star’s face becomes glazed over with arrogance and he begins baiting referees in the ring, and kicking, the wrestling magazines blame his downfall on the wicked manager’s skill in brainwashing and "mind control." (Nevertheless, advertisements in many of the magazines encourage the ambitious reader to purchase books that will help develop his own talent for "controlling minds"; other full-page ads in the magazines sell good-luck charms, wrestling-trivia games, and scents said to have aphrodisiac qualities.)

Ordinary rulebreakers merely scowl, gouge, punch, and elbow, but when a big, quick athlete as strong as the linebacker-like Muraco (a former surfer from Hawaii) is cast as a top-ranked cheat, he can be maneuvered into an enormous attraction before he wins a title. In the WWF, a skilled rulebreaker like Muraco is almost never matched against another rulebreaker; however by winning a given match against a good guy ("fan favorite") he may serve to ease another wrestler, whose popularity is waning, or who has fallen into the promoter’s disfavor, down a rung—or, since fan favorites seldom wrestle one another, either, he might dethrone a champion to facilitate a title change: in 1983 a skilled rulebreaker called The Iron Sheik (a former wrestler on the Iranian Olympic team) beat Bob Backlund for the WWF title a few weeks before he surrendered the crown to Hulk Hogan. In due time, a rulebreaker can even become a fan favorite, once he feuds with his manager or renounces his cynical past (or if he moves into another territory, or if the fans stop hating him; many fans like heroes with tainted pasts—like Hogan, or Dusty Rhodes—the best).

The skilled rulebreaker is frequently called upon to put the crowd into fearful awe by handling an overmatched nobody with casual sadism. Muraco and Bellomo join battle by trading forearm smashes, with Muraco gaining a quick advantage, soon tossing Bellomo around like a salad. A few arm-twists later, Muraco, with a toothy sneer of indifference for the fans (who taunt him with cries of "Beach bum!") circles to one side of his fallen enemy and hoists him by the hips over one shoulder in preparation for a reverse "piledriver."

The piledriver is a maneuver which involves turning your opponent upside-down and dropping him on his head. First Muraco let Bellomo down a notch from his shoulder, suspending him so that the feckless Italian hangs suspended, legs sticking up in the air: chest against Muraco’s stomach, head between Magnificent thighs. But before dropping his knees to bring the crown of Bellomo’s head crashing beneath a combined body-weight of 490 pounds, Muraco paused grinning, and, placing his free hand behind the scalp of the dangling victim, pushed Bellomo’s face into the crotch of his trunks. Finally the drop: Muraco fell kneeling, astride Bellomo’s head, Bellomo bounced limply away, and then Muraco walked over to braid their legs together in a "figure-four leglock." Muraco unflexed his calves, cuing Bellomo to grimace and quickly hold palms aloft to signal his submission.

Then it was hero Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka’s turn, against "Cowboy" Bob Orton. Snuka, a dark-skinned South Sea Islander whom Verne Gagne brought from Hawaii, used to be incredibly popular in New York, and has now been embroiled in a feud with Piper, though for some reason Orton has become the object of his anger.

At its best, Snuka’s performance of the move that gave him his nickname—in which he climbed to the top rope and leapt perhaps fifteen feet above the ring—used to be one of wrestling’s most exciting moves and helped make him one of New York’s most popular wrestlers. But Snuka’s ability seems to have suffered since the death of a woman named Nancy Argintino after she was found injured in his motel room in Whitehall, Pa. in May, 1983. (Two months before, it had taken nine deputies to arrest Snuka at a motel near Syracuse, New York, when police answered a report of a woman screaming; after Snuka was charged with four counts of assault and resisting arrest, police identified the woman as Ms. Argintino, according to the New York Post.) Nevertheless, New York fans still greet him with spontaneous enthusiasm. Snuka beat Orton in a frenzied match in which the latter appeared to hurt his arm (when Orton, who plays Piper’s "bodyguard" came back down the runway later that evening, he wore a cast on his arm). When a crowd, which jumped and shouted when Snuka pinned Orton, is as worked up as the one in the Felt Forum, it is nearly impossible not to get caught up in the excitement.

Riding the crest of the enthusiasm will be the youthful tag-team duo of Barry Windham and Mike Rotundo, who are managed by a WWF veteran named Captain Lou Albano. Albano is a gravelly-voiced, slobbish character who used to be one of a "dark triumvirate" of heel-managers in the WWF—the other two were Fred Blassie, who still manages, and the late Grand Wizard, who wore sunglasses and a lame turban, and in real life was a partner of Vince McMahon, Sr. named Ernie Roth. For some wrestling fans who had enjoyed his performances as a heel, the WWF’s rehabilitation of Albano’s character after various forays into film and television acting was the last straw. Tonight, he, too carries a "grudge" against Piper.

Both Windham (the son of a wrestler) and Rotundo are big, All- American gridstar types. In the ring, Rotundo is cast as a younger brother who tends to get himself into scrapes from which Rotundo must save him. Windham seems to appeal to young girls. He is probably not championship material; not because of his athletic ability (he has only demonstrated a few ordinary throws in the WWF, but he is said to have put on some good shows while wrestling for Jim Crockett in the Carolinas), but because his radiant features—he wears long bangs of genuine-looking blonde hair—simply make him so good-looking that with sufficient individual exposure he might upstage all the other babyfaces in a WWF card. "Never a great wrestler—never a main-event boy, always a semi-windup guy, strictly for a top-of-the-preliminary match," is how one former wrestler described the wrestling career of a handsome, blonde-haired fellow named George Scott, the booker for the WWF (Scott is described as Vince McMahon’s best friend), who used to wrestle in a tag-team with his real-life brother Sandy. The description also fits Windham—a typical Windham-Rotundo win is so rapid that the crowd scarcely sees more than a flash of blonde hair grabbing his opponent and yanking him around the ring. In the WWF, Windham and Rotundo seldom wrestle as good as they look.

Their opponents tonight are a pair of masked villains named "The Assassin" and "The Spoiler." Thanks to grim associations with executioners and criminals, the mask has always been a great gimmick for heels at least as far back as nineteenth-century France. Rookie wrestlers breaking into the big time often wear the mask; or an established wrestler might wear one if he had been kicked out of town in last week’s match. Skilled good-guys who have worn the mask recently are Mil Mascaras, Mr. Wrestling, and Mr. Wrestling II; and, way back when, the angel who tested "Biblical" Jacob—who of course also gained a "title" in the match, preliminary to an anxiously-awaited reunion with his disenfranchised brother. But like most everything in wrestling, the mask serves manifold purposes: fans naturally wonder what it is about his past that would force this man to cover his face, since nowadays the masked guys don’t do anything that other wrestlers don’t.

But whether the wrestler who hides his face is good or evil, for every fan watching him, the masked performer signifies an individual whose face is invisible, and so the cipher becomes a token of the fan himself: And here is why the masked wrestler is so useful in a card—the notface is yours, since yours is the only face in the arena which cannot be seen.

Assassin and Spoiler didn’t seem to struggle so much as concede to Windham and Rotundo, who beat them in less than three minutes. It wasn’t clear if this was the reason for the crowd’s hysteria, or whether the imminent approach of the long-awaited main event had done the trick. Enthusiasm and occasional riots notwithstanding, wrestling crowds are by and large relatively placid; in part because more children are in attendance than at, for instance, a hockey game. Moreover, speaking of beer sales at the Garden, an employee of concessioneer Harry M. Stevens, Inc. described adult wrestling fans as "basically sober; they don’t come to drink."

No, they were there—along with a nationwide television audience for the MTV special, which cut from its taped segments and joined the Garden card at this point—to see the challenger, Piper, enter first, splendidly: dressed in a kilt and a "Hulkamania" t-shirt (which he tore to bits, in the manner made famous by Hogan) and an electric guitar. When he wrestled in the Mid-Atlantic circuit for Jim Crockett Promotions, Piper’s "gimmick" was a set of bagpipes, which he carried to the ring to underscore the Scottish heritage of his character; tonight, for the benefit of the national MTV audience, he took the guitar—the hidden gimmick all along—and smashed it against a ringpost. Following Piper was his "bodyguard," "Cowboy" Bob Orton, whose leather vest and cowboy hat seem to help make him look about as friendly as a gas jockey working the lobster shift again. In the Felt Forum, fewer booed than watched quietly as Orton and Piper hung around the ring, chuckling, perhaps anxious.

If all goes right at the end of the night, the crowd’s excitement, which has been stoked with these queerly compelling, violent pas-de-deux—each wrestler trading supremacy, each taking turns submitting his body to the other’s violent whim, like longtime lovers playing a risky bedroom game—will turn into fascination when it sees the babyface borrow the heel’s tactics, losing his innocence. Here is where all of wrestling’s sexual angles converge—ordinary ones, such as exposed, sweaty flesh; forced ones, like long, bleached hair, or kilts. ("See," explained Shire, "your main event is like having sex with a girl, okay? A lot of it is because wrestlers could always understand sex when I told ‘em, ‘It’s like having an orgasm in sex.’ That’s the epitome of the night as far as the fan is concerned.") The memory of humiliation and anonymity is still fresh in the fans’ minds; the ultimate stakes are oblivion and catastrophe.

Who will submit? Why? Suddenly the Felt Forum screen yielded a closeup of Hogan stalking down the runway towards the ring, and the sound system burst into Hogan’s theme song, borrowed from Rocky III (about Hogan, one wrestler said, "actually the music is what goes over, the rock song is what gets the people going") and the crowd finally boiled. Flanking the champ was a sternfaced Albano (who had gotten mad at Piper after the last card) and Cyndi Lauper, also indignant, along with her boyfriend.

Perhaps few of even the most sophisticated fans understand why they might have found the WWF’s finishes so appealing. Maybe it’s because, dressed punkishly, with her hair dyed red, Lauper might look like someone’s sister; a little nutty, but probably nice. Albano seemed like your uncle who finally has quit drinking and straightened himself out. Dwarfing them, at six-eight, Hogan (who stopped to say hello to his famous friend, NBC television star Mr. T, seated at ringside) looks like an eight- year-old child’s ideal Pop, late from work, who has come home to find that someone has been picking on his children, and trying to confuse them.

Meantime, bad-daddy Piper and his drinking buddy have been leering in self-congratulation, and certainly not doing a thing to undo everyone’s conviction that they had orchestrated every note of injustice that had been sounded in the match.

It might not have taken much to stir the crowd, which was so worked up that the match had scarcely begun before Hogan had quickly undergone the babyface’s obligatory loss of temper: he and Piper began dispensing frenzied armwhips against each other—and so here, finally, was the climax.

Among the booker’s considerations in working out a finish for a big card seem to be what the fans’ mood has been in the past, and what it might be in the next few months. The outcome that seems to bring the most fans back for the next installment is when the favorite loses the main event "by disqualification," because, as every wrestling fan knows, you can’t lose the title by "dq."

("The big finishes are very, very intricate; even a minor change in it can cause a change in something that’s three or four weeks away," said Jay West. "This is part of the skills of the guys, being able to make that finish come off exactly as it’s supposed to. I saw several thousand matches while I was working for them, and you know, mistakes are gonna be made; say a guy’s gonna to come off the rope, and he’s supposed to power-slam the guy, and that’s supposed to be it—but you’ll get your foot caught in the rope, or somethin’ll happen, and you can’t make the finish come off that way.

"Well, rather than technically tryin’ to come up with somethin’ in their head, they’ll go right back and do the exact same thing again, which is very, very obvious to the fans that have been comin’ for years. Even to the hard-cores, it is going to seem very, very unusual for a guy to do the exact same finish again."

Hogan took the advantage initially, even slamming Piper once. Piper came back and took Hogan down, and a minute later, wrapped an arm around the champion’s neck: the notorious "sleeper-hold," favorite of millions. Hogan drooped, and seemed about to lose until the camera zoomed in on his arm, which slowly raised itself, one finger held aloft. Hogan—roused, furious—began trembling with rage.

Naturally, once the babyface makes his comeback, the fans must be primed for the rematch. This night, after the referee got "knocked out" (or "bumped," in the trade) in order to prevent anything from actually being decided, a bunch of the performers from the undercards (including Hulk Hogan’s famous friend, NBC television star Mr. T) jumped back into the ring. Finally, what looked like a coterie of Garden security guards and a bunch of Titan personnel, including George Scott—broke into the ring to wrap things up.

It was 10:58 when the fans began filing out of the Felt Forum.

(To be continued in The WAWLI Papers No. 442)
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The WAWLI (Wrestling As We Liked It) Papers No.  442

A LENGTHY LOOK AT WRESTLING HISTORY, CONTINUED...

The figure-four leglock (used by many wrestlers, most notably Ric Flair these days) was popularized in the ‘forties by "Nature Boy" Buddy Rogers, the postwar era’s greatest skilled rulebreaker. "Buddy Rogers wasn’t vicious," recalls Al Wrobel of Wrestling’s Main Event Magazine, "but he could mix it up, and if a wrestler started in with dirty tricks, he could give it right back to him. He was a very strong, athletic wrestler." Bill Apter, of T.V. Sports Magazines: "Buddy Rogers kept himself in perfect physical condition, knew how to handle each opponent, and probably was one of the most intelligent wrestlers in the ring. He was very colorful, with his golden blonde hair, and the ‘Strut.’"

Said Roy Shire: "Buddy Rogers. There’s another guy I don’t like. He’s a no-good ass. He couldn’t beat my wife. He was lucky, though, in wrestling. He had a great body. He really had a nice, pleasing body. He was no Mr. America, but a damn good body, probably one of the best workers in the ring. I don’t mean a good wrestler, I mean he couldn’t beat my wife. But in the ring he was so convincing. He did great things in the ring."

"Oh, hey—I’m gonna tell you somethin’ about Rogers, he ain’t got a gut in his fuckin’ body, he couldn’t—he didn’t know a hammerlock from a padlock; he was a connivin’, cutthroat sonofabitch when he was in the business. As a person he was a no-good bastard. Around him—aw, greatest guy in the fuckin’ world, you know, ‘Ho, hey man!’—anything you’d say he’d go for. But he’d stab you behind your fuckin’ back.

"But the thing that he had—in the fuckin’ ring, he was the greatest in the fuckin’ business in the ring. A great performer."

"I invented the book of the rulebreaker," confesses Buddy Rogers today. "But—as life went on, I seen the light, and sort of went the other way. I will admit, it’s easier getting along this way, yes it is."

Rogers was born "Herman Rhode" in Camden, New Jersey (he is fluent in the German he learned from his immigrant parents) and says he began wrestling at the local YMCA when he was 8. Ten years later in 1939 he won his professional debut at the Garden Pier in Atlantic City, and proceeded through victories in his first 47 matches before losing to Ed "Strangler" Lewis in Philadelphia in 1941. Rogers captured scores of sectional titles in his 24-year career before he won the NWA heavyweight title before a packed Comiskey Park on June 30, 1961. Two years later he captured the first championship of Vince McMahon, Sr.’s fledgling World-Wide Wrestling Federation, only to relinquish it shortly after, losing to Bruno Sammartino at Madison Square Garden in a match that lasted only forty-seven seconds. Rogers retired back to his home in

Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a few miles from Camden, where he has lived since, with occasional stints at the mike: his WWF interview show, called "Rogers’ Corner," only lasted a few weeks in 1983 before Vince McMahon, Jr. pulled it for a WWF Magazine show. Rogers has since appeared on Verne Gagne’s telecasts. <