The Strongest Men on Earth

by Graeme Kent

  He and Georg Hackenschmidt met in the open air on 3 May 1911, at the recently opened Comiskey Baseball Field in Chicago. Hackenschmidt was paid $10,000 while his opponent received more than twice that amount. In addition, each man was scheduled to receive a percentage of the motion picture rights. The size of the attending crowd was estimated as being somewhere between twenty thousand and thirty-five thousand people. Even at the lower end of the estimate it would have been the largest crowd ever to attend a wrestling match in the western world.

  This time Hackenschmidt trained hard for the bout, but towards the end of his period of preparation the Estonian’s knee was badly damaged in a sparring match. For years there were rumours that the ‘accident’ had been carefully arranged by Frank Gotch’s backers, who had inserted one of their own grapplers on to Hackenschmidt’s training staff, with orders to partially disable the challenger. Some asserted that the veteran Dr Benjamin Roller had been the bribed culprit, while others placed the blame on a grappler called Abe Santel.

  Hackenschmidt tried to pull out of his championship challenge but the tough and underworld-connected promoter Jack Curley would have none of it. It was made plain to the Estonian that wrestling with a damaged leg would be immeasurably less painful than the alternative. Hardly able to keep a straight face, Frank Gotch piously promised that he would not touch Hackenschmidt’s knee or apply one of his dreaded toeholds.

  Curley swung into action, even employing a Hackenschmidt lookalike to go on long training runs down dimly lit lanes at night for the benefit of reporters. But it would take more than that to fool the gentlemen of the press. Rumours started to spread that something was amiss with the forthcoming match. Fearful for the safety of his beloved park, owner Comiskey called the promoter, referee, wrestlers and their managers to him an hour before the match. He told them plainly that they could not use his field to stage the robbery of the public. He and some others had taken the matter up with the chief of police, who ordered the referee Smith to call off all bets.

  Frank Gotch’s only contribution to the meeting was that it didn’t matter to him whether the bout was being faked or not; his only intention was to inflict as much damage upon his opponent as possible. Georg Hackenschmidt appeared to be sulking. The New York Times remarked ‘This was a trying day for Hackenschmidt’s trainers. The great wrestler was as petulant as a spoilt child.’

  Just before the contest started, the city chief of police, called McWheens, entered the ring and announced tersely that all bets on the championship were off. This was tantamount to an accusation that the contest was not going to be on the square. An angry roar went up from the crowd as rumours of possible double-dealing spread. Gotch and Hackenschmidt were hustled into the ring. Frank Gotch wore long purple tights while Hackenschmidt’s tights were dark green in colour. Both men were bare-chested. With painful memories of their first bout neither man had been allowed to use oil on his body, allowing each man to secure a grip on his adversary.

  The contest was dull and one-sided. Hackenschmidt hobbled pathetically about the ring, perpetually on the retreat, while Gotch pursued him menacingly. The champion secured the first submission in a little over half an hour and the second in a derisory five minutes. Both men left the ring to boos and catcalls. Hackenschmidt was in tears.

  To his dying day Georg Hackenschmidt swore that he had tried his hardest at Comiskey Field. Most fans of the game and many newspapers disagreed. The Chicago Tribune summed up the general feeling about the Russian Lion:

  The public had no intimation that he would lie down at the first plausible opportunity but that, as since discovered, was exactly what he intended to do – and did.

  It was a significant turning point in many ways. The reputation of professional wrestling was besmirched beyond measure and stopped being considered a sport as it transformed into the meaningless slapstick imbroglio of posturing over-developed clowns that was to persist for a century and continues to exist in its current embarrassing form. Whereas before the second decade of the twentieth century some bouts had been on the level, soon after this watershed all of them were fixed. After Comiskey Field, Jack Curley became the Czar of wrestling, appointing and demoting champions and contenders at will and sending his lesser hired hands out to wrestle all over the country (in those areas in which wrestling had not been banned by the local authorities), sometimes as often as four or five times a week.

  Before long it became increasingly difficult for wrestlers to earn a living on the halls. The strongman cult was almost over. Its practitioners dispersed all over the world.

  Sandow died in 1925. The official medical diagnosis was an aortic aneurism. There were stories that he had been involved in a car crash and had strained his heart attempting to pull the vehicle out of a ditch. It is possible, however, that the notoriously philandering strongman died as the result of complications brought upon by a dose of syphilis. His wife had him buried in an unmarked grave.

  Others among the pioneering strongmen also drifted away from the stage. Chang Woo Gow, the Chinese Giant, one of the most popular of the big men, left Barnum and Bailey, married an English girl and settled in Bournemouth, where he opened a popular teashop. His wife died in 1893. A few months later the Chinese Giant had also passed on; it was said of a broken heart. He was fifty-two. John Holtom, the Swedish original Cannonball Man who took up his dangerous career after a spell as a more orthodox strongman, also retired to England, dying there in 1919.

  For a time the mighty John Marx kept a London public house before returning to Luxembourg where he died of cancer. To keep up his spirits, on his deathbed doctors and nurses pretended that he still retained his once awesome power, and would feign pain when he seized their hands playfully and tried to squeeze them. He was in his forty-fourth year. The Great French Canadian strongman Louis Cyr also died young, at the age of forty-nine. He had spent his last few years bedridden at his daughter’s home, suffering from Bright’s disease, an inflammation of the kidneys, which paralysed his legs and brought with it associated heart problems and asthma attacks.

  Cyr’s great rival Louis Uni, Apollon, kept working for most of his life, and even appeared in a silent movie, but he fell upon hard times. He invested most of his savings in Russian imperial stock which became worthless after the 1917 Revolution. He was reduced to advertising for a post as a guard or caretaker. A heavy smoker for most of his life, he died after suffering from a throat abscess in 1928, at the age of sixty-seven.

  William Bankier continued to resent the fact that Eugen Sandow had beaten him to the title of King of the Bodybuilders, but remained in the strength business. He teamed up with another strongman, Monte Saldo, to open a popular gymnasium, the Apollo-Saldo academy in London’s West End. He was twice elected King Rat, the highest office in the variety artistes’ charitable organisation, the Grand Order of Water Rats. At the age of forty, he won the heavyweight boxing championship of the music halls on a second-round knockout. Later he became a leading wrestling promoter. He died at the age of seventy-nine.

  William Muldoon, the Solid Man, also lived to a good old age. In 1921, he made good use of his political connections to obtain the post of Chairman of the New York Athletic Association, controlling boxing and wrestling in the state. He died at the age of eighty-one. He had claimed to be a lifelong bachelor but after his death it was discovered, in addition to his false claims to have served in the Civil War, he had been married twice.

  Bernarr Macfadden, who had been inspired to become a physical culture guru when he saw Eugen Sandow at the Chicago Exposition, developed a huge magazine publishing consortium with a total circulation of over seven million. One magazine alone, Physical Culture, achieved a readership of half a million. He became eccentric in his old age but lost none of his initiative and courage. He exercised and swam in the sea until the end of his life. He married four times, was imprisoned for non-payment of alimony and was making parachute descents when he was over eighty. He died in 1955, at the age of eighty-seven.

/>   A number of strongmen were affected in different ways by the First World War. Edward Aston, the strongest man in the world, lost several fingers in the conflict. He still returned to the stage in an adagio act with a series of nubile young women. Tom Burrows, the club swinger, treated wounded Australian soldiers as a physiotherapist. Alexander Zass, who performed under the titles of the Amazing Samson and Iron Samson, built up his enormous grip strength by bending green branches as a young man. He served with the Russian army against the Austrians and was badly wounded and taken prisoner. Grimly he rebuilt his strength by bending the bars of his cell and while detailed with other prisoners of war to perform heavy labour on a road gang. After several unsuccessful attempts, he escaped to freedom with a small travelling circus and took up his career again.

  Launceston Elliot, the Olympian, continued with his music hall appearances until he was fifty, spent a few years farming and then went to live in Melbourne. He died of cancer of the spine at the age of fifty-six, in 1930. Towards the end of his strongman career a match had been mooted between Elliot and the new up-and-coming strength star Thomas Inch, but Elliot decided that he could not compete successfully with the next generation. Many years after his death, writer David Walker used Elliot’s story as the inspiration for his novel Geordie, later made into a movie, about a lonely Scottish boy who develops enormous strength via a correspondence course and represents Britain as a hammer thrower in the Olympics.

  Thomas Inch had a gambling habit and lost much of the money he had made with his successful postal bodybuilding courses at the racetrack. Until close to the end of his life in 1963, he could still lift his challenge dumbbell. He never disclosed its secret, if there was one.

  Some of the strength athletes continued performing until ripe old ages, not always by choice. The Scottish all-rounder Donald Dinnie lost most of his savings in ill-advised business deals. He was still doing a strongman act around the London halls when he was in his seventies. He lifted weights and then supported a table while two dancers performed a Highland fling on it. In 1912, as he approached seventy-six, the London County Council withdrew his licence to perform, on the grounds of his advancing years. Friends arranged a public benefit for the Scot, raising about £80, which was used to purchase a small annuity. He then ran a fish and chip shop and accompanying tearoom. He died in London in 1916.

  Rosa Richter who, as Zazel, the Human Cannonball, had become one of the first strongwomen to transfer from the circus to the stage, gave up her cannonball act because it was too dangerous. She became a high-wire walker with Barnum’s Circus. Ironically she fell and injured her back. She retired, married a circus publicist and settled in Great Britain.

  Of the two original Georgia Magnets, Lula Hurst lived a life of contented domesticity with her husband William in Madison until his death in 1931. Lula died in 1950, at the age of eighty-one. Annie Abbott had a much more tormented life, with domestic strife, separations from some of her children, and long departures from the stage. In 1911, she became housebound, dying four years later in Macon, Georgia, aged fifty-four. Some of her neighbours regarded her as a witch and spread rumours that on her deathbed Annie had placed a curse on anyone who ever stood between her grave and the sun.

  Edith Garrud lived to be ninety-nine, dying in 1971. She lost a son in the First World War and later divorced her husband. Almost to the end of her life she was still giving the occasional interview to newspapers about her time as a ju-jitsu expert and tutor to the Suffragette Bodyguards. Florence LeMarr also divorced her husband and gave up her music hall ju-jitsu career. For a time, she coached police in the martial arts and then retired to sell confectionary from a cinema stall.

  Kate Williams, the Welsh strongwoman and heroine, continued to live with her on- and off-stage partner William Roberts for fifty years, but never married him. Towards the end of her life she was for the first time slowed down a little when she was injured in a street accident. Kate Sandwina, the strongest and most beautiful woman in the world, accompanied by her faithful husband Max in a marriage that lasted for fifty-two years, was as successful in vaudeville as she had been in the circuses. Eventually the pair retired to open a restaurant in Queens, New York. She spent her spare time plotting the career and supervising the training of her son Ted, a leading professional heavyweight boxer.

  Several prominent strongmen seemed to disappear. Charles A. Sampson, who was defeated by Sandow in 1889, continued as a headliner for almost another fifteen years, and then vanished from the annals of music hall history. He is recorded as appearing in London in 1904, but after that there is no further record of him.

  Leo McLaglen, the great charlatan, was spotted on a number of occasions after he had been banned from the USA for extortion. In 1938 he was in Australia, selling a strange weapon he had designed, consisting of a combined dagger and cosh, after a postal ju-jitsu course he had attempted to market had failed. In 1948, he turned up for one last time in South Africa. Tromp von Diggelin, a strongman who had once shared a music hall stage with McLaglen, reported that he had encountered the former giant in a dreadful state. He was in very poor health and part of his tongue seemed to have been removed. McLaglen said that he had been captured and tortured by the Japanese in the Far East during the Second World War. Von Diggelin reported that he later heard that the self-anointed ju-jitsu champion had died in Nairobi soon afterwards.

  The fiasco of the second Gotch–Hackenschmidt bout and the anointing of Jack Curley as the new virtual controller of wrestling put an end to the sport as a major attraction. Gotch and Hackenschmidt soon both retired from the ring after their Chicago encounter. Gotch retired to his farm, tried to make a brief comeback and then died from a kidney ailment at the age of thirty-nine. Hackenschmidt, derided as either a quitter or a faker after the Comiskey Field debacle, lived to be ninety-three. He spent the remainder of his life as a philosopher and writer. On 30 December 1950, he was the subject of a short paragraph in the Sydney Morning Herald:

  Georg Hackenschmidt, the greatest wrestler of the classical school in modern times, has become a philosopher. At the age of 74, ‘Hack’ spends his time in a small London flat meditating not on his past triumphs, but on his own ideas for composing the problems of mankind.

  Tom Jenkins, the one-eyed former steel worker who wrestled everyone, everywhere, did as well as any of his contemporaries in later life. He was appointed wrestling instructor at West Point Military Academy, where he remained for thirty-seven years, revered by generations of students, including future President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

  Stanislaus Zbyszko, who attracted the interest of C. B. Cochran and almost inherited the mantle of Georg Hackenschmidt, settled in the USA and spent many years there, ending up as a manager of wrestlers. In 1929, he showed an unexpectedly sensitive side to his nature when he sued the New York American for libel. The newspaper had published a picture of the wrestler, next to one of a gorilla. The caption read ‘Stanislaus Zbyszko, the Wrestler, Not Fundamentally Different from the Gorilla in Physique’. A court agreed that the Pole had been traduced, and ordered that he be paid a few dollars in damages and costs.

  Zbyszko then retired to run a chicken farm in New Jersey. He was rescued from this bucolic life by the film director Jules Dassin, who cast him at the age of seventy as an ageing wrestler opposite Richard Widmark in the 1950 movie Night and the City. The old grappler died in 1968, aged eighty-eight.

  A few less fortunate of the original wrestlers-cum-strongmen continued to roam the world living by their wits. Jack Carkeek, a contemporary of Hackenschmidt and Gotch, who had refused to wrestle the young Russian Lion at the Alhambra, continued to tour the remaining halls and arenas for years, settling back in the USA. In spite of his advancing age he returned to wrestling, but with little success. In 1910, the Steven Points Journal reported that Hali Adali, a gigantic Turk, had failed to throw Carkeek in a Milwaukee bout: ‘The match put the game in bad odour in Milwaukee, it being claimed that the Oriental [sic] deliberately allowed his opponent to
stick out the time.’

  Next, after an inglorious spell as a detective, the wrestler became involved in a notorious series of confidence tricks perpetuated by the notorious Millionaires’ Club, led by J. C. Maybray. A wealthy, gullible victim would be enticed to an alleged wrestling match, prizefight or race meeting, carrying a large sum of money, usually between $10,000 and $50,000, to bet upon what he was assured was a sure-thing, fixed event. The venue would either be out in the sticks or in a small town like Galesburg, Illinois, with a population of about 29,000, whose law-enforcement officers had a relaxed attitude towards tourists being fleeced.

  Carkeek’s role usually was as one of the wrestlers involved. The mark would be persuaded to hand over his bankroll to one of the gang to bet for him. Soon after the bout had started, other members of the gang dressed as policemen would break up the match. The crowd would scatter. As the Washington Post put it in 1910, ‘The club members would rush around in fear for a minute or two and then stealthily decamp.’ The mark would never see his friends or his money again.

  As a variation on a theme, the Millionaires’ Club would sometimes organise a faked race meeting. Soon after the race had started, the jockey on the syndicate’s horse would fake a heart attack and fall dramatically from the saddle, just as the stage police force swung into action and broke up the event. Specialists in playing the part of the lawmen included one John Fletcher, a pseudonym used by Carkeek when his wrestling skills were not needed in the ring. When the criminal group was broken up and most of the participants brought to trial, the fraudsters pleaded in mitigation that they would sometimes slip their dupe enough money for the cheapest railroad ticket home. They were all sentenced to terms of imprisonment. When Jack Carkeek was released he went to live in Cuba, then a wide-open island as far as crime and morality were concerned. Even a hardened globetrotter like Carkeek discovered that this time he had travelled too far from his normal habitat. One night in 1924, he was mugged, robbed, stripped and left dead in an alley in Havana.