by Josh Gross
Inside LeBell’s locker room, final rules were hammered out for the five-round contest. Savage’s people agreed to let LeBell grapple as he pleased, but he couldn’t strike at all. To confirm what he could or couldn’t do, LeBell pulled out a picture-heavy instructional book he penned that sold for $3.95 via mail order in Black Belt magazine.
“Can I pick him up over my head like this?” he wondered, pointing to a photo in The Handbook of Judo. Savage’s handlers were amused. “Can I choke him?” asked LeBell, placing his hands over his throat in “a comical way.” An L.A.-based lawyer who travelled with LeBell to Utah, Dewey Lawes Falcone, told him to quit screwing around. But “Judo” Gene couldn’t help himself. He was always the type to push buttons. “They’re laughing,” he remembered. “They’re just all happy that he’s going to knock me out.”
LeBell was familiar with the reaction. In Amarillo, Tex., where he wrestled professionally and took mixed-style fights for cash, most of LeBell’s challengers came from a nearby army base or the cow town’s dusty bar crowd. Locals received $100. Out-of-towners, $50. They, too, felt good about their chances. Then LeBell’s sadistic reality set in as he racked up ring time, an experience that lent him confidence ahead of the match in Salt Lake City.
Prohibited from striking, LeBell had to figure out how to navigate his way past Savage’s strikes to get inside and clinch. To make matters more difficult, Savage wore a gi top designed for karate, which meant it was constructed of lighter material than the judo uniform and more difficult to grip. And it was slathered in Vaseline, according to LeBell. The grappler’s plan to induce Savage to come at him was only reinforced after LeBell felt the boxer’s power as a punch to the stomach snapped the judo man’s obi—the black belt that tied together his kimono. “I towed broken down motorcycles with them. I’ve never had ’em stretch or break on me, but when this guy hit me it broke right in half,” LeBell said. “This guy hit pretty hard. You could do it a thousand times, I don’t think it would happen again. He just hit me right.” LeBell alleged that underneath Savage’s thin gloves he wore metal plates. Arms in tight, Savage was tentative to attack with anything but distance-controlling jabs, and LeBell, willing but unable to trade strikes, bided his time.
Inevitably LeBell found what he was looking for and locked up in a clinch—a result-defining position in any unarmed combat scenario. A modern boxer clinches to avoid getting hit, and referees are tasked to break up fighters, make them take three steps back, and hope they come out swinging. Wrestling is based very simply on tying up an opponent on the inside. Invariably the clinch favors anyone who knows how to grapple, which most successful boxers did quite well before the Marquess of Queensberry rules superseded London Prize Ring rules in 1867, essentially removing wrestling as part of the skill set required to win bouts. No longer did boxers need to know how to grapple above the waist and throw opponents to the floor. Clinching and holding remained relevant, mostly as a defensive mechanism, but the ability to grapple for takedowns, a benefit of going at it bare-knuckle, was engineered out of the sport.
When Jack Johnson operated atop the boxing heap, his clinch game was derived from the grappling techniques of wrestlers like William Muldoon, a famous athlete and fitness nut tasked with whipping into shape the last London Prize Ring rules champion, party boy John L. Sullivan. Part of the straight-laced Muldoon’s regimen for Sullivan was wrestling. Between competition and sparring, boxers seemed to get the message. Corbett, who supplanted Sullivan as the sport transitioned to a gloved affair, said as much when asked by a reader of his syndicated column.
“Ninety-nine times out of one hundred the wrestler would win,” Corbett wrote in 1919. “About the only chance for victory the fighter would have would be to shoot over a knockout punch before the echo of the first gong handled away. If it landed, he would win. But if he missed, he’d be gone. And every ring fan knows that the scoring of a one-punch knockout is almost a miracle achievement in pugilism. Years ago Bob Fitzsimmons attempted to battle the debate. Fitz was a powerful man, almost a Hercules. His strength was prodigious. And Fitz knew quite a bit about wrestling—and how to avoid holds and how to break them. So he scoffed when someone remarked that in a contest between a wrestler and a boxer that the former would win.”
Ernest Roeber, a European and American Greco-Roman heavyweight champion, ended up stretching Fitzsimmons straight.
Rules defining boxing became hyperfocused on one aspect of the discipline—molding the acts of punching and defending punching into the “sweet science.” Boxers still use clinch skills traceable to the days of London prizefighting, though so degraded is the notion of boxers maintaining meaningful clinch games, that a modern-day question persists about whether Ronda Rousey would throw Floyd Mayweather Jr.—the best boxer of his time and a stone heavier than the female judoka—on his head in a real confrontation. By the early 1960s, boxers hadn’t needed to earnestly practice holds in the clinch for nearly a century. Those tricks managed to survive through grappling-based systems, like judo and catch-as-catch-can, which LeBell practiced at a masterful level.
During the fourth round, despite aggravating an old shoulder injury earlier in the fight when Savage awkwardly shucked him off in the clinch, LeBell set up for the kill. “Judo” Gene dropped his left arm, baited Savage to throw a right cross, deftly maneuvered underneath the punch, and tossed his opponent to canvas. LeBell clung to the boxer’s back and Savage, unaware of what else to do, grabbed a thumb to sink his teeth into it. LeBell threatened Savage. If the boxer bit him, LeBell promised, Savage would lose an eye. That’s when a rear-naked choke was set and LeBell made good on his promise from the television broadcast the night before. The referee, a local doctor, didn’t know how to react when LeBell strangled Savage unconscious. He hadn’t worked a fight that included impeding blood circulation to the brain as an option. Media reports indicated the boxer was out cold for almost twenty minutes, an absurd length that these days would require at least a siren-filled ride to the hospital.
Adding insult to injury, LeBell “accidentally” stepped on Savage’s chest as he walked away. He winked. This incensed a riled-up crowd, already uncomfortable with the idea that boxing was bested by an Asian martial art. Well before Savage came to his senses, the Salt Lake City crowd grew spiteful. Chairs and cushions flew. A fan attempted to stab LeBell after he stepped out of the ring. The martial artist half-parried the attack and moved past his assailant, but he got stuck nevertheless. “I kept on going but it went through me,” LeBell said. “It was pretty big.” Still, the judo man survived, won the day, and martial artists rejoiced.
With LeBell assigned as the referee, and Ali facing Inoki, the martial arts community reacted in 1976 as if a great opportunity to score another big win over boxing was theirs for the taking. “The way it was billed, we were so excited,” said William Viola Sr., a martial artist out of Pittsburgh, who bought all-in on the attraction. “The catch wrestler, Inoki, would actually be able to use all his skills. Ali was the boxer and he’d box. The buildup was unbelievable.”
Unlike all-time great Jack Dempsey, Ali actually agreed to take on a mixed-style test. He wanted it and so did Inoki, and in the end their rules weren’t so different than what Dempsey and Lewis floated to the public during the 1920s. Ali laid down and Inoki accepted a challenge to determine the best fighter in the world. Yet many English-speaking boxing scribes maligned the heavyweight champion for participating in a “farce”—otherwise known as something great boxers have always been connected with.
ROUND THREE
Marcus Griffin, in 1937, authored an apparent attempt to uncover the world of professional wrestling. Whether Griffin acted as a reporter or a flack is up for debate, as are reported events strewn throughout the pages of his book, Fall Guys: The Barnums of Bounce—The Inside Story of the Wrestling Business, America’s Most Profitable and Best Organized Professional Sport. Sorting fact from fiction in the wrestling world did not come easy then, and it still doesn’t. Wrestling is as un
derhanded and shifty a business as there ever was. Indisputable, however, is that Fall Guys exposed the wrestling world to the public in a way it hadn’t been before, and that Griffin earned full credit for coining the “Gold Dust Trio.”
No one uttered that term prior to Griffin’s work being published, but everyone in the pro wrestling world remembered it afterwards. The group nickname stuck because in many ways the Gold Dust Trio bridged pro wrestling’s lingering competitive nerve, the roots of catch-as-catch-can, to part-of-an-angle exhibitions indicative of WWE’s product in 2016.
“Strangler” Lewis, Billy Sandow, and one of the smartest pro wrestling people that ever lived, Joe “Toots” Mondt— whom Griffin, a newspaperman, was rumored to be on the payroll of from 1933 to 1937, and whose interviews were used as Fall Guys’ main source—changed pro wrestling. Mondt’s shift in ring philosophy and practice, Sandow’s approach to consolidating wrestlers under exclusive contracts, and Lewis’ star power, when combined, were that meaningful.
Mondt, a young wrestler, booked matches, plotted storylines, and envisioned an open style that blended elements of combat sports without the trouble of sport—an impediment, from time to time, to exciting wrestling action. Body slams and suplexes were mixed in with fisticuffs and grappling, laying the framework for a charged-up, vaudevilleinspired creation: “Slam Bang Western-Style Wrestling.” This wasn’t dumb luck. Even in his youth, Mondt possessed a wealth of knowledge regarding many forms of competitive combat sports.
Compared to wrestling during the previous decade, when crowds sat through hours-long grappling matches, Mondt’s creation was a huge hit with fans, in part because of the finishes he engineered. More than a revamping of the style of wrestling, Mondt, Sandow, and Lewis established a troupe of wrestlers who traveled like the circuses Mondt worked as a teenager, where he crossed paths with the man who taught him how to wrestle, fellow Iowan Martin “Farmer” Burns.
It took some research, according to Griffin’s account, before Mondt unearthed the story of James Figg, through which he explained to Sandow and Lewis what he wanted to accomplish. Figg, a fistic nonconformist whom Jack Dempsey called the father of modern boxing, was one of the first cross-trained fighters. During the second decade of the eighteenth century, the Briton was considered the best prizefighter on the planet. He could box a wrestler. Grapple a boxer. He could fight in the clinch. This was the basis for “Figg’s Fighting,” a style that became well-known throughout the British Isles as his reputation grew.
Sandow and Lewis saw the light, and within a few months the wrestling gates grew as members of the establishment, four promoters in the Northeast known as “The Trust,” quickly felt the pinch of hard competition.
Even before being publicly rebuffed by Dempsey, “Strangler” Lewis, the man most Americans accepted as the best heavyweight wrestler at the time, toured the country as the tip of the Gold Dust spear. The best wrestlers, like Lewis, actually knew what they were doing, and sometimes painfully implemented their knowledge against other presumably tough men. Up until the 1920s, the hierarchy of wrestling was based around whoever was perceived to be the best shooter and hooker, because if push came to shove, the guy who knew best how to push and shove was going to walk away with the belt. Choreographed outcomes, which became standard operating procedure as the Gold Dust Trio’s influence grew, needed two willing participants. If the guy tabbed to drop the belt didn’t follow the plan, or if wrestlers went off script, a price needed to be paid.
Mondt, a legitimate hooker, was brought into Lewis’ camp based on the Farmer’s recommendation in 1919. The pair sparred and worked out, leaving Lewis to feel that when he needed a “copper,” a pro wrestling euphemism for “enforcer,” Mondt along with tough guys Stanislaus Zbyszko and “Tiger Man” John Pesek could ably handle the job.
Pesek preferred wrestling for sport over show, but was vicious in defense of the Gold Dust Trio when required. After a match on November 14, 1921, at Madison Square Garden, Pesek and his manager Larney Lichtenstein of Chicago had their licenses revoked by the New York State Athletic Commission, then chaired by William Muldoon. Pesek mauled a reputed “trustbuster,” Marin Plestina, who was known for spotty cooperation when it came to laying down to promotions and their champions. Pesek butted and gouged Plestina in his eyes before being disqualified. The big Serbian was laid up in his room at the Hotel Lenox for several days nursing an abrasion of the cornea, and Pesek never wrestled in New York again.
Pesek and many of the wrestlers under contract to Sandow came and went, yet finding a place to work during this time wasn’t a problem. If the consolidation of talent was troublesome for anyone, it was promoters used to doing business with their controlling interests and mechanisms in place. As the trio cobbled together a set of wrestlers, booked venues, and promoted across the country, the “Strangler” Lewis business grew strong—though not so much the industry as a whole. Lewis held on to the title that mattered, except when it suited the business not to, and since fans might grow weary of the same man as reigning champion month after month, year after year, it sometimes made sense for him to drop the belt. Everything was predetermined, mostly due to Mondt’s handiwork. Groups of promoters got the message, and because fans passed through turnstiles to watch, this new brand of wrestling was widely adopted. Even with Mondt dictating matches and outcomes, and Sandow controlling talent, the trio wouldn’t easily own a field that had been crafted by some of the hardest men of the last hundred years. This is the stock folks like Joe Stecher came from. Stecher, a pig farmer who subdued his animals like many of the men he beat, by scissoring them between his legs, was every bit as dangerous as “Strangler” Lewis, and had the backing of entrenched powers the trio sought to overtake.
“Strangler” and Stecher famously wrestled to a fivehour draw during a shoot match in Omaha, Neb., on July 4, 1916. The bout, with Stecher the titleholder, drew great criticism from press who covered the slow, uneventful contest. These were the types of matches Mondt wanted to rid wrestling of, though that would not come without its share of unintended consequences. Mondt wanted the wrestlers to work less, so he established time limits. Extended grappling sessions were all but removed. For the most part, wrestling manifested into pantomime fighting.
Until Griffin’s book, most fans and media operated as if the matches were legitimate when for years they weren’t. Anyone who said otherwise broke “kayfabe,” wrestlespeak for the portrayal of what was real or true, and hookers had an easy remedy for that. Joints were always there for twisting. Arteries always good for pinching. But pro wrestling was shifting from showcasing athletes well versed in the foundation of the game—the damaging catch-as-catch-can stylings of pioneers Lewis, Gotch, and Burns—to those playing off showmanship and characters who could create “heat” with the audience.
A couple days before Muhammad Ali—technically he was Cassius Clay, and remained so until 1964—made his first ring appearance in Las Vegas, a ten-round decision over Duke Sabedong, the nineteen-year-old from Louisville, Ky., reformatted his mind as to how he wanted people reacting to him.
During a live radio interview to promote Ali’s seventh fight, the boxer, sitting beside beloved matchmaker Mel Greb, responded somewhat meekly about himself, considering the reputation he went on to earn. A year removed from winning a gold medal in Rome, Ali was joined in studio by iconic pro wrestler “Gorgeous” George Wagner, a champion at talking, annoying people, and creating headlines, but not much else as it pertained to wrestling. Thankfully for George, he was in a profession that rewarded such abilities.
The night before Ali took to the Convention Center on June 26, 1961, against Sabedong, a six-foot-six Hawaiian, George faced Freddie Blassie in the same building. George and Blassie were two of the best-known wrestlers working out of the Los Angeles territory at the time. Much had changed about pro wrestling since the Gold Dust Trio days, and while Blassie could handle himself some, George was the sort of wrestler who would have been tied in knots had “Strangler” Le
wis or Joe Stecher placed their hands on him. “Gorgeous” George represented a consequence of pro wrestling’s push to campiness, a true departure from the submission wrestling techniques born out of Greece and Japan and countless corners of the world, to a showy mindless form of entertainment that fills the gap between television commercials. George was primarily a character pushed to the top of cards based on his charisma and drawing power. After pro wrestling prioritized selling and showmanship over honest-to-goodness skills, the conditions were set for wrestlers like George to emerge.
Well past the peak of George’s career—when the TV boom during the late 1940s demanded content to draw in viewers, all three networks featured pro wrestling on their airwaves, and business received a surprising boost that jolted it out of a considerable lull— the 220-pound “Human Orchid” still made the most out of getting people to hate him. George was a drunk by the summer of 1961. His liver was shot, and he was two Christmases from dying, broke, of a heart attack. It was coincidence or fate that Mel Greb put the wrestler in the same room with the fresh-faced, smooth-skinned African American Ali.
“I’ll kill him; I’ll tear his arm off,” George ranted about his opponent, the classic Freddie Blassie. “If this bum beats me, I’ll crawl across the ring and cut off my hair, but it’s not gonna happen because I’m the greatest wrestler in the world.”
Ali absorbed what was in front of him and considered how much he wanted to see “Gorgeous” George in action. No matter what happened, the boxer felt as if something unmissable was about to go down and he needed to watch a man who proclaimed he’d win because he was the prettier wrestler.
