The Strongest Men on Earth

by Graeme Kent

  Not since the celebrated Captain Barclay supervised the physical rehabilitation of the bareknuckle fighter and heavyweight champion Englishman Tom Cribb, had there been such a gruelling preparation. Over a period of ten weeks, Barclay had chased his man up hills by throwing stones at him until the excess weight drained away, but Muldoon went to limits not even Captain Barclay would dream of. For a start, his period of preparation lasted for three months. To make matters even worse, he ordered both local tavern owners to refuse to serve the Boston Strong Boy with alcohol whenever the fighter attempted to break training and slip out of the camp – a frequent occurrence.

  Sullivan almost went berserk. Not only was he being forced to go cold turkey when it came to quitting his beloved spirits, his physical conditioner was treating him like a dog into the bargain. Muldoon insulted his charge, humiliated him and constantly raised the bar when it came to demanding more physical output from the constantly sweating prizefighter. The urban Sullivan hated the oppressive solitude and boredom of the countryside, and, to make matters worse, was frightened of cows. But whenever the fighter deserted from the camp the inexorable Muldoon chased the boxer down and brought him back.

  To the amazement of almost everyone involved, this kill-orcure regimen devised by Muldoon worked. At the beginning of the training period, John L. Sullivan weighed 245lbs and found it difficult to perform more than a dozen consecutive jumps with a skipping rope. By the time Muldoon broke camp the heavyweight was an almost svelte 207lbs and could have scaled half a stone less if Muldoon had not taken pity on him in the days immediately before the fight and eased up on the roadwork. The champion could now execute hundreds of skipping jumps in a day.

  The fight occurred in Richberg, a sawmill and lumber town about a hundred miles from New Orleans, on 8 July 1889. There were three thousand spectators. Muldoon acted as one of the champion’s seconds. From the start Sullivan was far too good for his opponent. He punched the brave but outclassed Kilrain all over the ring.

  At first the challenger attempted evasive tactics, only to be greeted by Sullivan with roars of ‘Stand still and fight like a man!’ The champion won the bout when the exhausted challenger’s seconds threw in the towel after seventy-six rounds occupying a total of two hours and sixteen minutes. Afterwards William Muldoon hastily occupied the high moral ground, stating ‘I am through forever with all ring fights. I never again want to see a man so knocked about and punished as Kilrain was.’

  The victory did not come without its consequences. Prizefighting was still illegal in the USA and the governors of six southern states had refused to allow the championship bout to take place within their borders. Sullivan and Kilrain were first hounded out of the area and then brought back by the authorities to be tried and fined. Those considered to have aided and abetted the proceedings were also arrested, of which William Muldoon was one. In 1928, in an article written for Ring magazine, he described the consequences:

  I had my choice of serving sixty days in Mississippi or paying a $600 fine. I paid the $600. Fortunately I had that much left and I did not go to jail. I did spend one night, and I am sorry to say it was a great benefit to me. It was just a square box, no floor in it, with seats around the edge made of logs, and there was a little slab in there with a Bible on it.

  Without hesitation Muldoon chose to cash in on his newfound reputation. After facing down the mutinous John L. Sullivan for twelve weeks his stock had soared. Almost overnight William Muldoon achieved a reputation as one of the greatest conditioners of professional athletes in the country and a leading expert on the development of health and strength. It was, however, to be many years before John L. Sullivan ever spoke to his tormentor again.

  Muldoon later opened a health farm, where he attracted a distinguished clientele of politicians, businessmen and show business personnel, including Elihu Root, Secretary of State in Theodore Roosevelt’s administration, who grimly adhered to his creed of ‘Men do not fail; they give up trying’, under William Muldoon’s bullying, joyless regime of early rising, supervised diets, total abstinence from tobacco and liquor, and constant exercising and horseback riding. The strongman charged his clients $60 a week for their board and training and treated them cruelly under his ‘Muldooning’ system of physical development, no matter how famous they might be. They took it and came back for more, giving rise to a headline in the Fitchburg Daily Sentinel:

  William Muldoon, Professor of Regularity

  Side Lights on the Builder Up of Rundown Humanity and His System Practical Preacher of All Round Temperance Who Has Been Muldooning Secretary Root. Was the World’s Champion Greco-Roman Wrestler – Bitter Hater of Whisky and Cigarettes. His Guests, from Statesmen Down, Must Obey His Rules or They are Shown the Farm Gate.

  He was not slow to lay down rules for his wealthy pupils: ‘Life is what you make of it. If you live naturally and do not defy the laws of God, you will live to a ripe old age and be able to accomplish that which is expected of all mankind.’ He was not universally popular with his clients. The novelist Theodore Dreiser emerged from a period of rehabilitation at the farm describing Muldoon in 12 Men as ‘a tyrant bullying and humiliating his clientele’. Nevertheless, the author was circumspect enough not to call his former instructor by name, but cloaked his attack under the pseudonym of Culhane. A representative of Munsey’s Magazine also visited the health clinic and, under the heading of ‘Making Men Over’ in the October 1912 edition described is proprietor as ‘the iron-muscled dictator of a unique autocracy’.

  For all his harsh measures with his clients, Muldoon took care to make useful contacts among them, especially with senior Republican politicians. Later they were to remember him and aid his career. So many politicians and government administrators attended Muldoon’s courses that in the San Francisco Call of 15 October 1907, a journalist wrote sardonically:

  It is rumoured that Professor William Muldoon is to become a member of President Roosevelt’s Cabinet, if Congress creates the Department of Physical Culture for the repair or overworked Officers.

  Muldoon certainly earned top marks for endeavour. He was prepared to use his magnificent physique and growing reputation for almost anything that might improve his bank balance and open new entrepreneurial doors. Not all his schemes came off. For a while he organised dog fights, again bringing him into contact with the law. In June 1886, the Olean NY Democrat newspaper said:

  William Muldoon reported passing through here en route to Cincinnati where he is billed for a Graeco-Roman exhibition match with Tom Cannon of London, England… It will be remembered that Muldoon got into trouble at Olean last fall over a dog fight. He says they used him very mean in Olean, and he don’t propose to go there again.

  In 1887, after he had put championship wrestling behind him, a New York newspaper reported, ‘The newest stage star is William Muldoon, slugger and wrestler, who is having a play built around his muscles.’ Making further use of his great stage presence he also appeared on Broadway as the Fighting Gaul in Spartacus. He then transferred to a production of The Winning Hand at another theatre. This caused a writer for the Brooklyn Eagle to comment on the number of boxers and wrestlers becoming thespians:

  Novelty Theater: There will be gloves on ‘The Winning Hand’ this week. Mr William Muldoon, Mr Jacob Kilrain and other celebrated gentlemen will wear them as part of their costume, for, like Mr John Lawrence Sullivan, they are actors now and their scenes in this drama of love and slugging are watched with more interest and received with more enthusiasm than the bouts in Macbeth and Richard II. The play is of a humorous sort and is enlivened by song and dancing.

  Within a couple of years after the Sullivan–Kilrain title fight, Muldoon was famous throughout the land. Coincidentally, this was the period in which Eugen Sandow also became a leading member of the health establishment in Great Britain, commissioned in 1892 to devise a series of exercises for the British army. Both men were reigning supreme on different sides of the Atlantic.

  In later life
Muldoon became dignified and pompous and seldom deigned to talk to newspaper reporters, but during this stage of his career William Muldoon took advantage of every opportunity for publicity that came his way. He was particularly delighted when a supposed prehistoric corpse was found near Beulah in Colorado in 1877. Seven feet tall, the corpse was nicknamed the Solid Man, after the wrestler, gaining Muldoon several headlines (by now Muldoon happily answered to both the Iron Man and Solid Man nicknames as long as they garnered him favourable publicity). The find later turned out to be a hoax perpetrated by a serial jokester called George Hull, a chemist, even though the Denver Daily Times assured its readers: ‘There can be no question about the genuineness of this piece of statuary.’ The ‘corpse’ was made of crushed stone, clay, plaster and meat. Hull succeeded in unloading it as the Solid Man for $2,000 on showman P. T. Barnum.

  Similarly, when a comic song entitled ‘Muldoon, the Solid Man’ became a vaudeville hit, the wrestler was not above letting it be intimated that it had been written in his honour, which certainly was not the case, as the song was a satire on big city politics:

  I am a man of great influence,

  And educated to a high degree,

  I came here when small from Donegal,

  In the Daniel Webster, across the sea;

  In the Fourteenth Ward I situated,

  In a tenement house with my brother Dan;

  By perseverance I elevated,

  And went to the front like a solid man

  Chorus

  Go with me and I’ll treat you dacent;

  I’ll set you down and I’ll fill the can;

  As I walk the street each friend I meet

  Says, There goes Muldoon a solid man.

  In addition to establishing his health farm, Muldoon was simultaneously perfecting his reputation as the nation’s pre-eminent promoter of strongman and physique displays. Some of these he produced in New York, enlisting the aid of his sporting cronies. They did not always meet with success. One of the flops starred Charlie Mitchell, an English prizefighter and professional hooligan, and the first major physique star to cross the Atlantic and work for Muldoon.

  Mitchell was brave, tough, amoral and would do anything for money. For a time he had been the bodyguard, pimp and general fixer for a wealthy English aristocrat called ‘Squire’ Abingdon Baird, a crooked gentleman jockey, arranger of betting coups and general borderline psychopath, who took a delight in beating up strangers he passed in the street. If any of his unfortunate victims should dare to fight back, Baird would call for his minder. Mitchell would come running over and dutifully continue the assault. As a result, he frequently appeared in court pleading guilty to the attacks instigated by his employer. He was often fined for these transgressions and, on at least one occasion, served a prison sentence in lieu of his master.

  When Muldoon came across him, Charlie Mitchell was between jobs. He had fought a courageous 39-round bareknuckle draw with John L. Sullivan at Chantilly in France, and had turned up to fight the champion in a gloved match as well. Unfortunately, true to form, Sullivan had arrived at the venue so drunk that he was unable to go through with the bout.

  As a result, when William Muldoon had suggested that he arrange an engagement for the English fighter at the New York theatre, displaying his muscles in a tasteful manner, Mitchell had accepted the offer with alacrity. Unfortunately, although Mitchell was a skilful, cunning fighter, able to give away weight and hold his own with most leading heavyweights of the day, he most definitely did not possess the ripped muscular physique beloved of audiences, and was not, as billed, ‘the handsomest and most symmetrically formed man living’. In fact his chest was concave and between his pugilistic endeavours he often displayed a marked paunch. His efforts to impress members of the audience at the Grand Opera House with displays of strength met with more ridicule than applause. Outside the ring he was equally mocked by reporters for his airs and graces and peacock garb, being described in one New York journal when he turned up for a court appearance as:

  …mild mannered a man who ever punched a head. He was armed, according to the strictest code of sporting fashion, wearing a drab coat of abbreviated proportion, and a derby of unusual width of brim and height of crown. A three-carat diamond sparkled in his white satin scarf, and he twisted carelessly in his hands a Malacca cane with a massive silver head.

  Some of Muldoon’s big city productions may have closed quickly but his touring shows continued to make his name and fortune. He started sending them out all over the country, usually starring in them himself. The acts he headed would consist of boxers and wrestlers challenging all comers, strongmen lifting weights and performing other feats of strength, and displays of the male body beautiful. In this way the cult of physical fitness and manly competitive sports honed to a spectacular degree were brought to huge areas of the USA that had witnessed nothing like them before. To preserve the dignity of the occasions the displays were always referred to as athletic shows, never sideshows.

  By 1910, a typical lineup of talent in a Muldoon tent show would consist of singers, dancers and comedians, laced with boxers, wrestlers and weightlifters. They would set up on vacant land for a week and produce a number of shows each day. Most acts earned $25 a week but headliners, capable of drawing in the crowds with their names alone, could command $150 for a week’s work. The lesser acts on the bill would usually sleep at night under a sixteen-foot ring pitched in the centre of the tent.

  The Muldoon shows were slick and spectacular, with the emphasis on showmanship, even in the boxing and wrestling performances. Acting purely through self-interest William Muldoon made a number of permanent changes to the way in which sport was presented in the USA.

  For many years he had achieved fame by participating in and promoting wrestling matches in which the moves were rehearsed and the results prearranged. By the 1890s even the less sophisticated audiences in the cities and the sticks alike were beginning to realise this and drift away from the game. The so-called sport received its death-knell as a big-time spectacle at the turn of the century, when the influential Police Gazette declared that 90 per cent of major wrestling bouts and many boxing matches were fixed. You never had to draw Billy Muldoon a picture. As soon as an activity ceased to be profitable he would cut himself adrift from it. It was the same with his connection with wrestling when it became discredited. William Muldoon had already given up his championship and for years washed his hands of the professional game, although he continued to present short, usually ‘fixed’ bouts in his tent shows.

  He continued with his interest in tent show sport, which in turn had become big business, representing as it did in the pre-silent-movie era the only sensational form of entertainment to reach the vast rural areas of the USA. In an effort to cram as many shows as possible into a day’s work, Muldoon revolutionised boxing, wrestling and weightlifting in his touring shows. There were no more six-hour wrestling contests or hundred-round prizefights resulting in dull draws or no-decision verdicts.

  In response to public demand, William Muldoon turned the strongman show into a popular and dramatic entertainment. His house wrestlers and boxers fought each other with mock ferocity in heavily choreographed bouts. Challengers from the audience were taken quietly aside and told that they had the choice of giving in to the booth man or suffering a badly broken limb, either during or after the display. Muldoon made another fortune from side bets on these booth matches. New ‘sleeper’ holds were devised by professional wrestlers to be applied surreptitiously to ultra-frisky local challengers and hasten the inevitable submissions of any foolhardy yokels before the grips caused them to lose consciousness. These shorter bouts were also popular with the tent show boxers and wrestlers as they lessened the chance of their sustaining injuries.

  By this time, Sandow was also touring the USA, recruited by the master showman Flo Ziegfeld, but, while Muldoon took his health and strength displays to the sticks, Sandow kept to the main cities.

  Life on a
William Muldoon tent show was not easy and not for the faint-hearted. Ernest Roeber, now back in the fold as Muldoon’s assistant and gofer, recalled a gifted youthful black fighter called Joe Gans who challenged any of the boxers on Muldoon’s booth. All of the tent show fighters were selected for their strength and durability and included such well-known fighters as Charlie Smith, ‘the Black Thunderbolt’, and Fred Morris, ‘Muldoon’s Cyclone’. In order not to frighten off potential challengers few of them were appearing under their real names. The sensational young Gans defeated two of the booth men with ease and was paid $2.50 for each contest. Muldoon, irritated by this turn of events, ordered Roeber to persuade Gans, now popular with the crowd, to fight once more. He insisted, however, that the wrestler persuade Gans that so far, despite his victories, he had not been boxing particularly well and that he was not worth more than the customary couple of dollars to appear. The gullible young challenger agreed and was matched with a ringer, who was really a vastly experienced fighter known as Old Pik. The contest was well advertised. Old Pik beat Joe Gans up, forcing him to retire, and earned a lot of money for Muldoon and the tent show. But the story had a comparatively happy ending for the challenger. Gans was seen from the crowd in all three of his tent show contests by a professional manager, who took him on and steered him to the lightweight championship of the world.