Champion of the World

by Chad Dundas

  It wasn’t the same thing, and she told him so, but she knew she couldn’t stop him. If this was what he wanted to do, no one could keep him from it. The wind kicked up another notch, whipping her dress against her legs. “I’ll think about it,” she said. “So long as you promise me you’ll think about it, too. I mean, really think.”

  He nodded, squinting one eye at her, looking boyish and sad and annoyed with the breeze all at once. “In any case,” he said, “I don’t think we’re going to figure it all out standing here in the cold. You know what I’m thinking of? That little speakeasy we found right when we got here. That little shack on the edge of town. You know?”

  She said she did.

  “I bet that place is open,” he said. “I bet they’ve got a card game going, too.”

  “It’s possible,” she said.

  “How about we take a ride into town?” he said. “See what’s happening.”

  “Would that be smart?” she said.

  “It would be fun,” he said.

  Standing hip to hip, they turned and were about to walk up out of the water when they heard a low growl coming out of the north. Lifting their faces, they watched as an airplane skirted over the tree line on the opposite side of the lake, dipping its wings slightly as it righted its course along the water. The sight of it stopped her breathing and she took Pepper’s cold, callused hand in hers. The plane’s body was painted sunny yellow, and it flew so low it seemed to shake the ground with the great slapping of its propeller. She shaded her eyes and as it got closer she saw the sleek, slippery mole head of the pilot slung low in the cockpit. As the plane zoomed over top of them, trees quaking and water trembling, the pilot turned, fixing the gaze of his figure-eight goggles down at them. There was an awkward moment, like they were all surprised to see each other there, before Pepper raised his hand and waved.

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  On Wrestling

  Discerning wrestling fans likely noticed early on that this book plays fast and loose with parts of the sport’s history. Certainly, the novel shouldn’t be read as a strict historical account. Just as the principal characters and events are fictional, certain details of wrestling’s place during the early twentieth century had to be fudged a bit. For example, in the real world it seems unlikely that by 1921 Pepper Van Dean would be quite so naïve about a group of wrestling promoters conspiring to fix a world title bout. However, given modern professional wrestling’s on-again, off-again relationship with the truth, I hope Champion of the World can be forgiven for taking a few liberties.

  Readers interested in exploring nonfiction accounts of wrestling’s murky past should peruse Scott M. Beekman’s Ringside: A History of Professional Wrestling in America or Mark S. Hewitt’s wonderfully detailed Catch Wrestling: A Wild and Wooly Look at the Early Days of Pro Wrestling in America. Marcus Griffin’s 1937 book Fall Guys: The Barnums of Bounce is also required reading, providing a fascinating look at the grapplers of the time. In addition, Jonathan Snowden’s fine Shooters: The Toughest Men in Professional Wrestling offers character studies of America’s toughest wrestlers, from Frank Gotch to modern stars like Brock Lesnar and Kurt Angle.

  Even the most scholarly tomes, though, leave ample gray areas. The truth is, nobody knows for sure exactly when wrestling crossed the line from legitimate athletic contest to scripted performance. Certainly, wrestling’s early American practitioners were exceedingly skilled, exceedingly ruthless men who wouldn’t take that kind of transformation lightly. For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries their reputations were as fearsome, authentic men of sport. Many of our early presidents—including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln—were avid wrestlers, and some credit victory in a high-profile 1831 match with helping launch Lincoln’s political career. Later, Theodore Roosevelt and other proponents of “muscular Christianity” backed it as healthy exercise in the face of increasingly sedentary lifestyles.

  As America’s modern sporting culture took shape during the Industrial Revolution, wrestling shifted from a largely rural, working-class pursuit to a nationwide powerhouse appealing to middle- and upper-class consumers. The rise of sports-minded national publications like the Spirit of the Times and the Police Gazette helped establish wrestlers as popular stars from coast to coast. Constant barnstorming tours made the sport immensely profitable and helped expand regional grappling styles like New England’s collar-and-elbow, the brutal rough-and-tumble style of the Wild West, European Greco-Roman and British catch-as-catch-can (usually shortened to catch wrestling today).

  Wrestling was a popular leisure activity in the Union army camps of the Civil War, and the gatherings served as a melting pot for grappling techniques. There, American wrestlers from far-flung towns mingled with each other and with European imports, who brought their own disparate styles with them across the Atlantic. By the late 1800s, mixed-style bouts were common and the marathon push-and-pull sessions of the collar-and-elbow and Greco-Roman styles began to wane in popularity. With its faster pace and more visceral appeal, catch wrestling took the lead, borrowing the most effective techniques from other Western forms and incorporating aspects of Asian martial arts as well.

  Most likely, a certain amount of chicanery was always afoot. Owing to its carnival roots and a tradition of showmanship dating back to ancient Rome, the wrestling business was perpetually flush with con men. In an era of limited media and lax government oversight, the truth was frequently stretched in the name of making a buck. The barnstorming tours and circus troupes wrestlers used to make their money were rife with fixed matches. By 1905 the Police Gazette trumpeted that the outcomes of “90 percent” of professional wrestling bouts were predetermined, though at the time that may have been hyperbole, written in the magazine’s notoriously over-the-top style.

  If wrestling had indeed morphed into such a widespread (and public) swindle so early on, it’s hard to understand why sportswriters continued to report on it with more or less straight faces for at least another twenty years. A glance at newspaper wrestling results in the late 1910s reveals the appearance of cartoonish characters like the Masked Marvel, but staid written accounts differentiating some matches as “obvious fixes” and others as “on the level”—not to mention the fact that wrestlers could be arrested on fraud charges for participating in faked bouts—imply that at least an expectation of legitimacy persisted well into the 1920s.

  Few wrestling writers question the rise of Frank Gotch as anything but authentic. It was Gotch’s mentor, Martin “Farmer” Burns, who popularized the hangman’s drop carnival trick performed by Pepper during the early part of this book. Popular legend says Burns was so incensed about a loss via chokehold early in his career that he embarked on a vigorous physical fitness regimen focused on strengthening his neck muscles. The 165-pound Iowa native eventually sported a 20-inch neck and began performing the hangman’s drop while on carnival tours across the United States. Burns could reportedly withstand a six-foot drop from a platform with a noose around his neck, hang for three minutes and whistle “Yankee Doodle” before finally returning to earth.

  Also renowned as a wrestling coach, Burns plucked Gotch out of obscurity after defeating the young heavyweight in a challenge match in 1899. Under Burns’s tutelage, Gotch came quickly to national prominence, winning the American heavyweight championship from Tom Jenkins in Bellingham, Washington, in 1904 and the world title from Estonian strongman Georg Hackenschmidt in 1908 at Dexter Park Pavilion in Chicago. Known for his brutal catch wrestling style, Gotch capitalized on his celebrity as world champion better than perhaps any wrestler before him. He launched a number of successful exhibition tours at home and overseas, sold workout brochures and wrestling manuals and starred onstage in “All About a Bout,” a play that ended nightly with a worked match between Gotch and his manager, Emil Klank.

  Newspapers portrayed Gotch as a patriotic American hero in the wake of his victory over Hackenschmidt, and that ima
ge only intensified after African-American fighter Jack Johnson won the world heavyweight boxing championship near the end of 1908. Long cast as villain in the press, Johnson’s title reign touched off significant turmoil nationwide. White Americans turned away from boxing and the sport’s temporary decline helped lift the fortunes of both wrestling and football. There were even some public calls for Gotch to don gloves and fight Johnson. The wrestler steadfastly ignored those cries, though he did help get Jim Jeffries in shape for his 1910 loss to Johnson in the “Fight of the Century.”

  Like boxing, the elite levels of wrestling remained strictly segregated for much of the early 1900s. Nineteenth-century Greco-Roman champion William Muldoon—perhaps America’s first true wrestling star—was close friends with boxing titlist John L. Sullivan, and both men steadfastly adhered to each sport’s long-standing “color bar.” So did Gotch, though reports indicate he took on African-American grappler Silas Archer during a barnstorming tour of Alaska early in his career. It should be noted that on that trip Gotch wrestled under an assumed name.

  From 1908 to 1911, Gotch set about expeditiously expunging the heavyweight ranks of all its top (white) talent. His dominance was so thorough and credible challengers so scarce that promoters began to fear wrestling’s popularity was in decline. In late 1910, Gotch announced he wanted a rematch with Hackenschmidt, who had complained loudly in the European press that Gotch had greased himself with oil during their first bout. The rematch—held at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in front of thirty thousand spectators on September 4, 1911—is largely considered the end of professional wrestling’s early golden age.

  In that bout, Gotch defeated Hackenschmidt via straight falls after less than thirty minutes of disastrous action. On the heels of a massive promotional buildup, Hackenschmidt’s performance was so poor that it spawned numerous match-fixing accusations. Later the European champion said he entered the ring hobbled by a knee injury and unable to give his best. There were also rumors that Gotch paid one of Hackenschmidt’s training partners to cripple him during a pre-match workout, but those stories have been largely discounted by wrestling historians.

  In any case, the public had seemingly had its fill of wrestling. When Gotch retired in 1913, the sport slipped into disarray as a gaggle of different promoters rushed to prop up lesser champions in his place. It took nearly a decade for wrestling to find its legs, and by the time it did, the action in the ring had become almost completely scripted. Gotch periodically appeared in comeback matches, but nothing major materialized before his sudden death in 1917 at age thirty-nine. The official cause was uremic poisoning, but speculation persists that he had syphilis.

  New York impresario Jack Curley established himself as the most successful post-Gotch wrestling promoter. Forging business relationships with the best midwestern talent, he made Joe Stecher, Earl Caddock, and Ed “Strangler” Lewis the top draws at Madison Square Garden as they traded the title back and forth during the years surrounding World War I. It’s theorized that Stecher’s victory over Lewis in 1916 was wrestling’s last wholly on-the-level championship bout. Soon, though, Lewis fell out with Curley, won the title back from Stecher and took it with him when he joined up with promoters Billy Sandow and Joe “Toots” Mondt.

  Lewis, Sandow and Mondt were known as the Gold Dust Trio and, though the business was likely already mostly rigged, are regarded as the architects of modern professional wrestling. Together they implemented many staples of today’s histrionic business, including its wild “slam-bang” style, frequently controversial outcomes and wrestlers working a series of matches with increasingly dire stakes. Under the new system, championships weren’t awarded to the best, most skilled wrestlers but to the men capable of generating the most revenue. Still, promoters kept on hand a number of able catch wrestlers—called “shooters”—to sort out athletes who balked at doing their bidding in the ring. In April 1925, wrestler Stanislaus Zbyszko conspired with Curley to steal the heavyweight title away from the Gold Dust Trio, and with it control of much of the industry. By the 1930s the hard-nosed, no-frills professional wrestling popular at the turn of the century was gone for good, replaced by the scripted theatrics and ballyhoo of the modern hustle. Along with a cadre of promoters east of the Mississippi, Curley instituted the territory system that would serve as wrestling’s organizational structure until cable television and Vince McMahon’s powerful World Wrestling Federation usurped it during the 1980s.

  Legitimate wrestling became the domain of amateurs, though the art of catch-as-catch-can survived and has even experienced a renaissance during the last few decades. Today, submission wrestling tournaments are common, but still appeal only to small, niche audiences. The best modern analogue to early American wrestling—and the wrestling that occurs in this book—could be mixed martial arts fighting. Catch wrestling practitioners like Josh Barnett, Frank and Ken Shamrock and Kazushi Sakuraba all became MMA stars during the 1990s and early 2000s. Many of these contemporary grapplers trace their lineage back to the wrestling legends of the late nineteenth century.

  On Bootlegging

  Montana bootleggers were smuggling alcohol across the border from Canada as early as the 1870s, when they began bringing whiskey into the northern town of Fort Benton via steamboat to trade with local Native American tribes. Understaffed border agencies and Canadian Mounties had trouble monitoring the comings and goings in the rugged, isolated terrain, so for decades liquor, opium and illegal immigrants (mostly Chinese laborers) trafficked across the border more or less unchecked. The illicit trade went both ways, as western U.S. states and Canadian provinces each experimented with various ways to regulate alcohol during the early 1900s. In addition, Canadian farmers often found it less expensive to buy cars and field equipment in America and then brave the region’s remote roads to secretly drive them back across the border.

  Statewide prohibition took effect in Montana at the beginning of 1919, after most neighboring states had already gone dry. Rural counties overwhelmingly approved the move in a 1916 vote, while its three most urban counties (Deer Lodge, Lewis and Clark and Silver Bow) all voted against. At the time of the alcohol ban, the state’s largest city of Butte—near where much of this novel is set—had a population around 60,000 and was known as a hardscrabble, “wide-open” town that boasted some 250 taverns. The county government there collected more than a quarter million dollars annually from license fees and property taxes for drinking establishments.

  Montana women had earned the right to vote in 1914, and the state’s well-organized wing of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was instrumental in the passage of statewide sanctions. Just as it did nationwide, Prohibition ushered in a decade of sweeping social change in Montana. Before Prohibition, saloons were regarded as the domain of men, while women did their drinking at home. The new laws changed that, as law-abiding bars were shuttered and more clandestine spaces took their place. Moonshining was common, and Montana’s speakeasies, blind pigs and nightclubs welcomed women and ethnic groups that had previously been shunned. Women took to bootlegging alongside male counterparts and on their own. For some Montana women, Prohibition served as an introduction to the working world, providing a crash course in how to successfully run a business.

  In urbanized settings like Butte, saloons played an important multifaceted role prior to Prohibition. For a city populated largely by immigrant mine workers, the neighborhood tavern often doubled as the bank, post office and employment agency. In Butte’s many Irish, Slavic, German and Italian enclaves, the saloon was the place to hear news from home, and many stocked foreign language newspapers. Bars in poor neighborhoods often kept a pot of stew or soup bubbling, so men gathered there not only to have a drink after work but to get a hot meal.

  Likewise, drinking provided the bedrock of many social activities for Butte’s wealthy elite. The city’s exclusive Silver Bow Club, founded by copper king William A. Clark in 1882, charged its members a $50 entrance
fee and $60 in annual dues. The club’s four-story location, built in 1905, featured opulent furnishings, a cigar lounge and a full-service kitchen, but most members went there for the bar. Considering the local tavern’s central place in society, it’s no surprise that cities like Butte did everything they could to sidestep new alcohol regulations. Some of the city’s saloons closed or were converted into “soft drink parlors,” but many merely changed their names and continued selling booze on the sly. The uptown Crown Bar, for example, became the Crown Cigar Store and kept right on serving.

  As the need for liquor grew and in-state stockpiles dwindled, Canadian border towns like Lethbridge, Moose Jaw, Medicine Hat and Govenlock became the sites of large export houses. American rumrunners ferried loads of liquor over the border by car and truck, traveling roads that were little more than glorified horse trails, often at high speeds, in all weather, sometimes at night. Hijackings were common and occasionally deadly, especially for independent bootleggers operating without the protection of larger crime syndicates. Locals cooked liquor to supplement family incomes and a handful small-town businessmen—like C. W. “Shorty” Young of Havre—ruled their communities as homegrown organized crime kings.

  By the time the whole country went dry in 1920, many Montanans already believed the laws were unenforceable. The state was just too big and too wild to adequately police. Federal Prohibition agents joined the battle with state authorities, and some Montana counties hired Pinkertons or Burns International Detective Agency operatives to help corral bootleggers. Yet still the illegal liquor flowed, while the state government reported significant revenue losses in 1921 and 1922.