The Strongest Men on Earth

by Graeme Kent

  Next McLaglen promoted a ju-jitsu match between himself and a Japanese man called Kukamuachi. This time he actually made a profit on the enterprise by the simple expedient of running off with all the gate money in two suitcases.

  It was almost the end of Leo McLaglen’s vaudeville career though there was to be one last hurrah. Soon after the outbreak of World War One, he turned up in Wellington in New Zealand, via India, Shanghai and Singapore. By this time he had written a book on self-defence: Jiu Jitsu: a Manual of the Science. He wasted no time in announcing his presence. Within days posters were declaring:

  Railwayman’s Belgian Effort

  Town Hall Friday 26th March

  Realistic Assault-St-Arms by the khaki boys from Trentham

  UNIQUE JU-JITSU BY CAPT. LEOPOLD MCLAGLEN

  THE WORLD’S CHAMPION

  BAYONET FIGHTING UNDER CAPTAIN MCLAGLEN’S JU-JITSU SYSTEM BY SQUADS FROM TRENTHAM CAMP

  GRAND PATRIOTIC CONCERT

  See Captain McLaglen, the Irish giant, withstand the combined pulling power equal to that of two draught horses. Captain McLaglen is at present in Wellington under engagement to the Government. The McLaglen System of Bayonet Fighting. Captain McLaglen has instructed some 30,000 Australian and New Zealand troops.

  It was too good to last. Within months, suspicious local newspapers were making pointed remarks about the so-called gallant captain’s apparent civilian status in a world racked by war. Never one to outstay his welcome and with a firm belief that it was always harder to hit a moving target, Leopold McLaglen moved on again. There are no more records of any theatrical bookings for him. In 1920, he appeared fleetingly in a silent movie called Bars of Iron. Ten years later, uncharacteristically vague about where he had spent the previous decade, he returned to California. His brother Victor, by now an established part of Hollywood’s English colony, tried to get his brother moved on, on the grounds that there was only room for one McLaglen in the USA. In return, Leopold sued Victor unsuccessfully for attempting to ruin his reputation and prevent him from securing employment. In 1938, Leopold was back in court, charged with trying to extort money with menaces from a millionaire. Described as ‘a former Hollywood physical culture instructor’, he was barred from the USA for five years.

  In Europe, as long as the famous Sandow reigned supreme, so the strongman cult could put up a good fight to retain its shaky status on the halls. When Sandow suddenly faltered, however, the muscleman cult also reeled and never really recovered. Slowly the strength athletes’ routines were relegated once more to the status of ‘dumb acts’, starting and closing the bills. Before long, the manipulation of heavy weights was no longer considered interesting enough for the sophisticated and constantly changing tastes of modern audiences. They were replaced to a certain extent by acrobatic, posing and hand-balancing acts, but by 1914 the heyday of the physique acts in general was over.

  Sandow continued to struggle to maintain his supremacy but he was now in his forties and had lost his taste for touring and appearing on the halls. In addition, he had a vast physical culture empire to run and this took up most of his time. His magazine, gymnasiums and business enterprises were still bringing in the money. Between 1905 and 1906, he went on well-received lecturing tours to India and the Dominions, giving demonstrations of his system. In 1909, when Lord Esher appealed for 11,000 recruits to bring the county of London territorial regiments up to full strength, Sandow offered at his own expense to provide physical education lessons for sub-standard recruits. He also provided free physical training to the Church Lads Brigade. His reputation received a momentary boost when, in 1911, the strongman was appointed Professor of Physical Culture to King George V. Keeping busy, he gave evidence and made recommendations to the royal commission on physical education in Scottish elementary schools.

  Almost inevitably he over-extended himself, branching out into the manufacture of embrocation, cocoa, chocolate, cigars and even corsets. The cocoa business went under first. The major manufacturing companies like Cadbury deliberately undercut the strongman’s prices until he had to go out of business. Before that there had been a long-running court hearing at which the shocked strongman was told that he could not legitimately use the world ‘Health’ to describe his drink. There was further annoying litigation with an actress over his patented Health and Perfect Fitness corset.

  Worst of all, with the approach of World War I and the growth of increasing anti-German sentiment in Britain, the Prussian-born Sandow became the object of mistrust. When the war broke out there were vicious rumours that Sandow was a spy, planted in the community to work for the Kaiser, even though he had been a naturalised English citizen for some years. There were even stories that Sandow had been arrested and incarcerated in the Tower of London for treason. With most of the young men away at the war, purchasers of his bodybuilding courses dwindled. By 1915, his business empire was experiencing difficulties on all sides. A year later Sandow Ltd went into liquidation.

  Having lost its acknowledged leader, the strongman cult was danced off the stage by the emergence of the terpsichorean art. Almost everyone suddenly wanted to perform and witness exhibitions of the tango, the cakewalk, the grizzly bear and the two-step. In Europe and the USA, hundreds of dance halls and academies were opened. Performers who could display a flair for dance were hastily promoted to the tops of the bills. Vernon and Irene Castle, Joe Frisco, Gaby Deslys and from the classical stage even Pavlova and Nijinksky all had their followers.

  With the decline of Sandow and the commensurate lack of interest in weightlifting and posing acts onstage, professional wrestlers continued to top the bills in Great Britain and the USA, but interest in their stage performances was also dying off. It was becoming increasingly obvious that too many professional wrestling bouts were being choreographed. In August 1909, the magazine Health and Strength wrote:

  Professional wrestling is simply a part of a series of music hall turns, ‘a show’ – to be treated as such. Mind you, a man must be above the average as regards skill and strength; then, with a smart manager, and a working agreement with others in the business there is money in the game.

  Most of this money was still to be found on the halls. Hackenschmidt had shown the way by wrestling exhibitions and giving posing and strength displays six nights a week all over the world, with the occasional major bout to keep his name in front of the public, and others were following enthusiastically in his wake. C. B. Cochran, disillusioned and embittered by the way in which the Russian Lion had abandoned him, started to look for a replacement for the Estonian, but with little success. For a time the impresario toyed with the idea of backing Stanislaus Zbyszko, and the Polish wrestler did well for a time on a tour of provincial music halls.

  The promoter even arranged several big-time matches for the Pole in London, with one against the latest sensation, a Turk called Kara Suliman, ‘the Champion of the Bosphorous’. Zbyszko and Suliman put up an exciting music hall scrap and there was talk of matching them again in one of the capital’s major arenas. Then Cochran suffered a major embarrassment when Sporting Life disclosed that Suliman was in reality a Bulgarian called Ivan Offthoroff. What was worse, Offthoroff was a paid employee of both Cochran and Stanislaus Zbyszko, and had even shared the same London address as the latter. Their spectacular music hall bout had been a fake designed to build up interest in a return contest.

  This disaster for C. B. Cochran coincided with another dangerous promotion when he matched Zbyszko against Ivan Padoubney, the Russian Cossack, at the London Pavilion. After what turned out to be a very dirty contest, with much butting, punching and back-handing, the Russian was disqualified after twenty minutes. A disqualification result should really have meant that the purse and any sidestakes were returned to the wrestlers and their backers, but Cochran outwitted Antonio Pierri, the Cossack’s manager, by catching a cab to the office of the editor of the Sportsman, who was holding the stakes, assuring him that Padoubney had been declared a genuine victor and absconding wi
th the money.

  It was a shrewd stroke of business, but with Pierri known to be an extremely dangerous customer who was backed up by Padoubney’s seconds, the enormous Louis Uni and the spiteful Charlie Mitchell, and that, to the horror of its owners, the London Pavilion had subsequently been wrecked by disgruntled patrons after the disqualification, Cochran decided in future to detach himself from the wrestling game and concentrate on his theatrical productions.

  It was bad enough that the general public discovered some of the major wrestling contests in London and New York were being fixed, but when it became public knowledge that the music hall and vaudeville wrestling challenges, the main source of income for professional grapplers at the time, were equally pre-arranged, it sounded the death-knell for the sport as an entertainment. In March 1906, a court case involving Ahmed Madrali, the Terrible Turk, and his manager Antonio Pierri was widely reported in the newspapers.

  On behalf of Madrali and his troupe of wrestlers, Pierri sued a music hall manager called Barney Williams, who refused to pay the wrestlers the sum of £120 which he had agreed to give to Pierri for his wrestling group to top the bill at his theatre for a week. Williams claimed in his defence that the displays of the wrestlers had been dull and sub-standard, while the challenges from the audience had emanated from wrestlers paid by and planted there by Pierri, to fight to order and make the stage performers look better than they were. These wrestlers, claimed Williams ‘were scattered about the hall … [and] … would rise dramatically in response to the challenge issued by Madrali’. The audiences had seen through the subterfuge and attendances had dwindled greatly during the week.

  In addition, Pierri had promised that some time during the week, Madrali would engage in a contest onstage with the celebrated Scottish wrestler Alec Monroe. Monroe had not turned up. Pierri had guaranteed that the bout would be fixed and Monroe, a local favourite, would be allowed to last the full ten minutes. As an excuse, Antonio Pierri explained that Monroe had withdrawn at the last moment because the Scottish grappler wanted to secure a much more lucrative bout against Madrali in London later in the year.

  The magistrates agreed that Madrali’s act had not been the genuine exhibition of wrestling that had been advertised and that the music hall manager did not have to pay the withheld reimbursement.

  He was not aware of it, but Georg Hackenschmidt had selected a course that was to culminate in the ruin of professional wrestling and at the same time put an end to the music hall strongman genre which had nurtured him so well and for so long. At first, after he had parted company with Cochran to manage his own affairs, matters went well enough for the Estonian. He undertook a profitable music hall tour of Australia where, in feature matches, he defeated the touring Indians Buttan Singh and Gunga Brown and also pinned Weber, the Australian champion, in ten minutes. An article in the New South Wales Singleton Argus of 5 November 1904, announced his imminent arrival:

  Hackenschmidt … claims to be the strongest man in the world, and has competed in forty championship matches, and won them all. He is also a champion weightlifter, for which he holds fourteen world records.

  He then criss-crossed the USA with his troupe, with time out to defeat Tom Jenkins again in a major match, and went on with his vaudeville displays to Canada, gaining headlines with the manner in which he threw Maupas, a highly regarded French Canadian, in twenty minutes.

  The Russian Lion then returned to Great Britain to fulfil a number of outstanding variety engagements and personal appearances. By public demand he was called back to the USA for another cross-country tour with his strongman act. Then he made his mistake. He allowed himself to be matched to defend his world title against Frank Gotch, the leading American wrestler of the time.

  Gotch’s local Iowan newspaper the Humboldt Independent gave some idea of the local wrestler’s popularity as he prepared for the bout with Hackenschmidt:

  From the remotest corners of Iowa – and from the vastness of the Dakotas, stalwart sons of the open prairie make their pilgrimages to witness the work of their idol – for in no small measure, Frank Gotch is a deity.

  Gotch was also a ruthless and merciless competitor who was quick to work out deals with competitors who might give him trouble in the ring and equally ready to break the arms and legs of any novices he should come across in the way of duty. Much was made of his ‘good ole boy’ image but he was backed by one of the shrewdest and most influential wrestling cartels in the USA, busily plotting their man’s path to the world championship with clinical efficiency. The group included former champion Farmer Burns, who had both fought the farm boy and then trained him earlier in his career. In 1901, his employers had tested their prospect’s ability to cope under pressure by sending Gotch on a tour of the rougher prospecting areas of the Klondyke Gold Rush, where he worked on a claim belonging to a man called James Brown. Gotch went north as a ringer, the term given to an already experienced wrestler pretending to be a novice. For this purpose he was given the name of Frank Kennedy. In the Klondyke, he teamed up with a conniving manager and former grappler called Joe Carroll, who had adopted the name of Ole Marsh for a separate scam he had already been pursuing in Alaska. With the aid of several crooked associates, the party set about introducing a confidence trick to the goldfields. Carroll would arrive in one of the wealthy mining communities, claiming to be the champion of some remote region. He would make himself feared and unpopular in the area with his swaggering bullying antics around the camp and in its saloons. A few days later Gotch, under the pseudonym of Frank Kennedy, would turn up at the same camp in the guise of a guileless greenhorn young prospector only recently arrived in the goldfields.

  In front of as many spectators as possible, Carroll would pick a fight with the new arrival. One of the accomplices would suggest that ‘Ole Marsh’ should meet ‘Frank Kennedy’ for a sidestake in a wrestling bout. The contest would be arranged, with hundreds of miners paying to watch. Practically the whole camp would bet on the experienced Marsh to win the bout. Secretly Joe Carroll and his co-conspirators would bet all their money on Gotch to win, at very long odds. When the bout started Carroll would put up a reasonably convincing show, but would lose in an upset decision to his callow opponent. The members of the badger game would collect their winnings and move on hastily to the next remote mining area, where the whole performance would be gone through again.

  Only once did Gotch put a foot wrong. After a number of spectacular victories against novice miners, he began to believe in his own publicity. He allowed himself to be matched in a boxing match with a veteran Australian called Frank Slavin who was trying his luck in Alaska as a prospector and part-time barfly. Slavin was not a young man but he was still far too good with his fists for Gotch, and won on a disqualification when his opponent tried to resort to wrestling.

  This blip apart, over the span of one summer Carroll and Gotch made a great deal of money for themselves and their sponsors from their nefarious tricks, and even managed to get out of the territory alive to spend it. In Iowa, the Daily Leader of 19 March 1902, printed an ingenuous account of the scam:

  He (Gotch) left the Klondike two months ago with the sincere respect of the sporting public. In spite of their heavy losses the people bade farewell to the young man who had defeated their every veteran, and wished him well. Gotch is back in Humboldt, leading a quiet life again. But his advice to the wrestler who seeks financial assistance is, ‘go to the Klondike and stay six months’.

  Gotch’s backers were delighted with the way that the young grappler had conducted himself during the lucrative scam. As a reward they saw to it that he won the American wrestling championship from the veteran, and probably at the same time bought-and-paid-for, Tom Jenkins. Then they matched their wrestler with Hackenschmidt for the world title.

  The two men met at Dexter Park Pavilion in Chicago on 3 April 1908. Hackenschmidt had been too busy raking in the money on one of his many vaudeville tours and too complacent to bother to train properly. Gotch, on the ot
her hand, had prepared for the fight of his life. From the opening bell he bullied a bewildered Russian Lion around the ring. Hitherto, Hackenschmidt had been accustomed to intimidated opponents treating him with a respect amounting to awe as he advanced upon them with outspread arms. Instead, the ferocious Frank Gotch was on the attack from the start. He tore into his startled European opponent, head-butted him, slapped the Estonian’s face and kept up a constant stream of abuse directed at his adversary. Hackenschmidt had never been treated in such a cavalier fashion and did not know how to cope with the American. To make things worse, Gotch had coated his body liberally with oil and Hackenschmidt found it difficult to get a secure grip on his opponent. In vain the champion complained to the referee. After two hours and three minutes of mounting pain, indignities and slights he submitted to his opponent, saying with commendable self-control considering the circumstances, ‘I surrender the championship of the world to Mr Gotch.’

  It was not long before Hackenschmidt had abandoned this role of the good-losing nice guy and was accusing Gotch of winning the title by underhand means. Cutting his losses and realising that as an ex-champion his drawing power would soon be considerably reduced, Hackenschmidt went on the road for another three years with his music hall act. At the end of this time, with bookings drying up and the music hall strongman cult in Europe petering out, somewhat reluctantly he decided to go for one last big payday and signed up to meet Gotch in the ring again.

  Gotch too had almost abandoned competitive wrestling in favour of touring the sticks with a vaudeville act, which he later also took to England. He played the lead in a short sketch entitled All About a Bout. He portrayed a college wrestler forced by circumstances to challenge a professional European champion called Atlas. The sketch ended with a well-choreographed wrestling match. While he was reasonably successful with this venture in the USA, the dour, sullen and suspicious Gotch in show business parlance could not draw flies when he ventured too far from home. It became apparent that he was not going to replace the Russian Lion as an international drawing card on the halls.