by Graeme Kent
In reality, Roeber never had a great deal of luck as a professional athlete. For a time he secured a post as a sparring partner to the world heavyweight boxing champion Bob Fitzsimmons, who would beat him up as a regular occurrence and, just to make sure that he had his attention, would set his pet lion on to the grappler. Matters were almost as bad in the wrestling ring. One night at Madison Square Garden, Roeber was matched against Hassan Noroatah in a Greco-Roman bout. After a bad-tempered contest, Noroatah was disqualified for diving at his opponent’s legs and then sitting on his face. In the ensuing riot Roeber sustained further injuries, while an over-excited policeman battered Noroatah with his stick.
While he was waiting to embark upon his planned tour of the hinterland, Muldoon experienced a stroke of luck, achieving notoriety when he took part in one of the longest wrestling matches ever recorded, a monumental six hours against Clarence Whistler, a one-time foundry labourer, in New York for a side stake advertised as being $600 a-side. Their match began shortly before nine in the evening and the contestants were still at it until almost four o’clock the following morning. It was a dreadfully dull affair, with Muldoon doing hardly any of the attacking. He later claimed that his opponent had soaked his hair in ammonia and kept rubbing his head into Muldoon’s eyes in an effort to blind him. After what seemed an eternity, most of the spectators had left the wrestlers to their endeavours and had retired to the bar, when suddenly all the house lights went out. The gas had been turned off. The Spectator of 27 January 1881 described the events that followed:
The proprietor was turning off the gas as the only means for putting an end to the protracted battle… Everyone hurried down to the bar room. Muldoon and Whistler each protested they did not want a drawn battle and that they were anxious and willing to finish the match under any condition. Finally the lights in the bar room went out and then everybody went home.
To cash in on their newfound notoriety, Muldoon and Whistler, although disliking one another intensely, left Roeber behind and went on tour together with the Muldoon and Whistler Combination, in which they gave displays of strength and posing, and wrestled each other in exhibition contests. Muldoon gave his customary imitations of famous classical statuary, while Whistler, billed as the Kansas Cyclone, simulated military rifle drill, using an iron bar 8ft long and weighing 140lbs in place of a rifle. He also lifted and walked with an iron weight, which he claimed weighed 1,350lbs. He ended his display by forming a wrestler’s bridge, with his head on one chair and feet on another, while weights, which were said to exceed 2,000lbs, were piled on to his chest. Whistler was a hard man. One reporter wrote that he had once seen him deliberately pull an opponent’s arm out of joint in a contest.
A further drawback to harmony on the tour was that despite his earlier defeat at the hands of the Iron Duke, the bad-tempered Whistler was convinced that he had the beating of the other grappler, as the Sporting News reported:
Whistler carried a small arsenal about with him. He had a seven-shooter, a wicked looking weapon, and was always poking it under Muldoon’s nose, and telling the latter how he would blow him to Kingdom Come. ‘Muldoon there considers himself a great wrestler,’ Whistler would say, ‘but he’s a cub compared to me. I can lick him any way you take him: wrestling, boxing, rough-and-tumble, any way you like. And you can bet I’m running this show too. Ain’t I, Bill?’ And Bill would nod.
Understandably, Muldoon later admitted that it had been the happiest day of his life when the show had folded and the other wrestler had departed to Australia leaving Muldoon to return to New York.
Whistler did not last long in his new home. He died in Melbourne in 1885, soon after his arrival there. He was thirty years old. Just before his death he had defeated the highly regarded William Miller, celebrating with a three-week bender. During his monumental binge, to entertain his friends Whistler lifted heavy tables with his teeth and claimed to have drunk up to thirty bottles of champagne a day, occasionally chewing and swallowing the glasses.
On Sunday, 11 October, Whistler visited a doctor and was diagnosed with a severe inflammation of the right lung. The wrestler admitted that his rowdy lifestyle could have contributed to his ill health and contritely took to his bed. He recovered temporarily but later relapsed and died. The official diagnosis was that Whistler’s heart, lungs and kidneys had all been adversely affected by his lifestyle and that a bout of pneumonia had finished him off. Rumours persisted that the glass he had chewed so vaingloriously had perforated his vital organs. Others suggested that quaffing thirty bottles of the contemporary Australian champagne could in itself be pretty lethal.
His obituary in the New York Times of 4 December 1885 referred to his brutality:
It is a notorious fact that all wrestlers, except perhaps Joe Acton, were afraid that in his rage Whistler, whose neck hold was terrible, might kill them.
William Muldoon was contemplating disassociating himself gradually from the hurly-burly mainstream of championship bouts in order to concentrate on his more profitable tent shows and theatrical tours. His decision to leave the ring was hastened by a series of ring scandals occurring on a tour he undertook of the western seaboard of the USA. At last the Iron Man had overreached himself – or so it seemed. Ostensibly Muldoon had gone to California to participate in a tour of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, in which he played Charles the Wrestler in a company headed by the Polish star Madame Helena Modjeska. She and her husband spent nine months of every year touring the USA with a repertoire of classics. The company travelled by rail, road and steamship and put on eight performances a week.
As was his custom, Muldoon, who was then twenty-eight, utilised his spare time by arranging wrestling matches in which he defended his title against local hopefuls. So strong was his entrepreneurial streak that he also began to send for his cronies from the east in order to establish a mini wrestling empire on the western seaboard. Among the former colleagues and opponents he summoned were his old nemesis Clarence Whistler, soon to leave for Australia, Edwin Bibby, the Scots Donald Dinnie and Duncan C. Ross, Theodore Bauer and, in the words of the Californian Daily Alta, ‘a Cornishman called Pasco they dug up somewhere in Arizona’.
At first, all seemed to go well. The syndicate hired halls, put on their wrestling and strongman shows and watched the proceeds accumulate in their bank accounts. As the Los Angeles Herald put it, ‘the shekels began to pour into the coffers of this athletic constellation, of which Muldoon was the bright star’.
Then quite suddenly it all went wrong. Whether Muldoon had allowed familiarity to breed contempt, or whether the native Californian public was not as gullible as the promoter had hoped, is not clear. Certainly a number of the imported grapplers were only putting on lacklustre performances in the ring, and were showing too clearly by their conspicuous lack of effort the contempt they felt for the marks, or punters, paying at the box office. Indignant audiences began to get restless and then openly hostile. Local newspapers took up their cause with a will, under such headlines as ‘Two Tired Wrestlers’, ‘Whistler–Muldoon Fiasco’, ‘The Fatal Fiasco’, ‘Shameless’ and ‘Fraud’.
For a while Muldoon seemed to lose his hitherto sure touch. He was arrested for striking a reporter who accused him of fixing the results of the contests he was promoting. The reporter wrote that such exhibitions were nothing but ‘frauds and hippodroming’ and that their promoter was both parsimonious and oleaginous. Released upon bail, the wrestler was promptly rearrested when it was rumoured that he was making plans to leave the state. He also became involved in a series of public squabbles with the wrestlers under contract to him, who were alarmed at the way in which the labyrinthine scams seemed about to unravel to their disadvantage.
He fell out with Edwin Bibby, who had arrived in California with only $100 to his name. Bibby informed Muldoon that for the sake of newspaper publicity he would back himself with a sidestake against the champion, as long as he was guaranteed the return of this money after he had lost in his title challenge
. He explained that the $100 was all he had in the world to get back to New York to pursue what he laughingly termed his career. He also asked Muldoon to lend him another $500, so that he could bet on those matches whose results had been preordained. Then, as the press and police closed in, claimed Muldoon in the Daily Alta, ‘Bibby disappeared suddenly, not desiring to answer any disagreeable questions.’
Clarence Whistler was equally as demanding. Before he left New York for San Francisco, hoping to equip himself for his forthcoming Australian tour, he insisted that Muldoon send him enough money with which to purchase a new suit, so that he would look smart upon his arrival. Reluctantly the champion did so. Whistler then spent all the sartorial money on a three-day binge. He finally arrived for the fight, as drunk as ever, greeting Muldoon with the words, ‘Billy, am I going to make it hot for you tonight!’ In the event, the Kansas Cyclone proved to be more of a gentle zephyr and in no condition to perform his ring duties. The resulting contest was a stinker, with Muldoon being forced to hold his opponent up in case he dropped to the floor out of sheer exhaustion. The Sacramento Daily Union reported, ‘The spectators suddenly realised that they had been duped and expressed their indignation in no gentle tones.’
Donald Dinnie then made his contribution, such as it was. He had already lost once to Muldoon in the ongoing west-coast scam and was disgruntled because the champion had hurt him to an unnecessary degree during their contest. As Muldoon later complained to a reporter from the Daily Alta, ‘Dinnie said he was anxious for another match, if I wouldn’t be so rough on him, as the heavy floors in the last match had jarred him very much.’
Muldoon agreed to be gentle with his opponent the next time around but when the Scot arrived at the Mechanics’ Hall in Oregon on the night of 12 October 1883, their first bout of the three advertised lasted only seven minutes. At its conclusion Dinnie stalked out of the ring, claiming to be hurt. He refused to emerge from his dressing room for the rest of the scheduled programme. The crowd had already gathered and paid its money, which Muldoon and his associate promoter, a man called Stechhan, refused to repay. Addressing the baying mob from the ring, Muldoon shrugged and said that he was perfectly prepared to wrestle; it was his opponent who was skulking backstage. The protestors must take their grievances up with Dinnie
There was almost a riot, which was put down by the arrival of a squad of policemen. They carried the piteously protesting Donald Dinnie off with them after co-promoter Stechhan had preferred charges against him for obtaining money under false pretences. Dinnie did not have enough cash on him to post a bail bond and was forced to spend the night in the local gaol. The next morning the Sacramento Daily Union described the whole evening’s proceedings as ‘a shameless fraud and wrangle’.
Somehow Muldoon extricated himself from his problems and returned with relief to New York, but his reputation had been badly damaged by the adverse publicity in California. The Californian Daily Alta pointed out on 6 June 1884, ‘Muldoon left this coast with his pockets bulging with the golden harvest from an over-confident public.’ It was estimated that the champion had made something like $40,000 from his Californian wrestling promotions, of which about half was sheer profit for him.
Muldoon went on wrestling for a time but began to withdraw from the actual matchmaking and promotion of bouts. Both in and out of the ring the champion could still hold his own against Whistler (who later left for Australia, arriving in Melbourne in 1885) and many other tough customers in the city who kept issuing challenges. He had to in order to stay in business. Another frequent opponent among his peers was William Miller, who challenged all comers to a riot of competitive sports all on the same night, defying any man to stand up to him for ten rounds of boxing, one fall or submission at wrestling, a one-handed dumbbell lifting contest and finally a bout with the singlesticks. It is not known if anyone was hardy enough to accept this combined challenge. The versatile Miller also at one time held the Australian deep water wrestling championship, in which the contestants grappled in 4ft of water and a bout was deemed over when one of the men had his head held under the surface until he quit or drowned.
Miller, a pragmatic character, preferred to fight only for money, but if push came to shove he was prepared to take on those who could not afford a sidestake: ‘I usually ask someone who is after fighting me, “If we ain’t getting paid, why should we fight?” If that doesn’t put them off, I just go straight at them.’
By now Muldoon was often absent on tours, presenting exhibitions rather than actual contests. With a troupe of strongmen, wrestlers and boxers he toured the theatres, music halls and carnival tents, introducing displays of physical might to new audiences at every stop along the railroads now sweeping across the nation. In the 1880s, he toured with the song and dance men Frank B. Sheridan and Joe Flynn, in ‘William Muldoon’s Variety Players’, which also included the boxer John L. Sullivan. As well as wrestling, a scantily clad Muldoon did a solo spot under blazing spotlights, performing a series of classical poses: the Dying Gladiator, Atlas holding up the world, and others.
From time to time, to avoid being forgotten in the metropolis, Muldoon took care to return to New York. In 1887, he appeared in a Broadway play as a gladiator in a production of Spartacus. The New York Sun of 17 April 1887 described Muldoon’s entrance:
For if ever a human deserved to be likened to a splendid Bengal tiger, that human was William Muldoon. About his every movement there was something truly suggestive of the grace and classic power of the tiger.
To ensure a more permanent presence in the city Muldoon ensured that a large portrait of him was put in the entrance of Madison Square Garden.
In 1887, Muldoon gave up his wrestling title in order to concentrate on making the really big money. In the process, almost inadvertently, he cemented his reputation and set the foundations for his career as the first Father of Physical Education and the early King of the Strong Men, just two of the titles he was soon to have bestowed upon him in the USA.
He owed much of this early advancement to his acquaintanceship with John L. Sullivan, the Boston Strong Boy, the last bareknuckle boxing champion of the world, who dominated the prize ring for a decade between 1882 and 1892.
Sullivan was a boisterous, hard-drinking, pig-headed hard man, with a distinct aversion to training and a supreme confidence in the efficacy of his rushing style and tremendous right swing to make up for his lack of skill. He had just been matched to defend his title in a fight to the finish against Jake Kilrain in Richberg, Mississippi. Having already toured with Muldoon’s tent show, the two men knew each other, and, with Muldoon’s help, the champion bareknuckle fighter also got himself involved lucratively in the ‘living statuary’ or ‘model statuary’ posing routines, depicting Perseus slaying Medusa and other figures from the classical world. In this manner Sullivan travelled with the Lester and Allen minstrel show for the 1885–86 season. It was a lucrative gig and the fighter was not ungrateful. He received $500 a week for twenty weeks, although, bearing in mind the champion’s reputation as a drunkard, a clause in his contract stated that he was to be fined $700 every time he missed a show.
Muldoon occasionally made guest appearances in these posing routines. He and Sullivan would smear their torsos with a mixture of zinc oxide and rose water, covered with white powder to bring up their muscular definition. They stood on pedestals as they moved from pose to pose.
When their man was matched against Kilrain, Sullivan’s backers were at their wits’ end as to how to get the champion back into shape. He was pounds overweight, his wind had gone and he was a drink-sodden wreck. Added to this, it was a well-known fact that Sullivan, whose natural habitat was a saloon, detested trainers and never paid any attention to their advice or ministrations.
To everyone’s surprise, William Muldoon agreed to take on the onerous chore. He had first come across Sullivan years before when the latter had been a young fighter frequenting Harry Hill’s New York bar. He knew how tough and brave the heavyweight wa
s, if only he could be brought into shape. Muldoon informed the champion’s acolytes that he would do his best to prepare him for the bout. He required a fee of $10,000 if Sullivan retained his title, but would accept nothing if the Boston man lost. There was one major stipulation. Sullivan would have to put himself completely in the Iron Man’s hands and do everything that was ordered of him.
It was a sign of the apprehension in the champion’s camp that all Sullivan’s patrons agreed eagerly to the terms. Even the fighter himself acquiesced, however reluctantly. Thus began one of the most spartan and demanding physical development regimes recorded in the history of the prize ring.
Muldoon took Sullivan and a few sparring partners to the wilds of a farm he had inherited near Belfast, a village in the western region of New York state. It was a desolate spot, not improved by its proximity to a cemetery. An Olean New York Democrat reporter, trying in vain to secure an interview with the trainer and forced to resort to penning a think-piece, said: ‘It must be somewhat galling to the brawny proprietor of the place to sit on his veranda, gaze over at the city of the dead, and realise that even his physical perfection must finally succumb to the grim wrestler Death.’
The trainer was under no illusions about the magnitude of the task ahead of him. On the first day of training, he described the champion as ‘a drunken, bloated, helpless mass of flesh and bone and without a single dollar in his pocket’ (Brooklyn Eagle, 14 July 1890).
For his part, the down-on-his-luck champion was already wondering what he had let himself in for. He was soon to find out. Systematically Muldoon proceeded to divest Sullivan of his layers of fat and much of his dignity in order to begin to build up his strength and stamina. He forced the boxer to rise early in the morning, work out with dumbbells before breakfast, rest for a while and then change into heavy clothing before attacking a heavy punchbag, skip, throw heavy balls to a partner and go for excruciatingly long walks and runs across the rough countryside or swim in the buff in flooded rivers and lakes. To assert his physical superiority, the older but much fitter Muldoon would wrestle regularly with Sullivan, and pin the unfit boxer almost at will. They lived largely off a diet of roast meat and stale bread, with the occasional luxury of a glass of ale. When the journalist Nelly Bly visited him, Sullivan complained morosely, ‘I eat nothing fattening, I have oatmeal for breakfast and meat and bread for dinner and cold meat and stale bread for supper.’ His self-pitying remarks and a few caustic asides from Muldoon were printed in a lengthy article by Bly in the New York World of 26 May 1889.
