Physical Chess

by Billy Robinson

  The English professor also introduced me to Ernest Hemingway. The professor and me, we went to the bullfights one afternoon, and Hemingway was there. We got talking because he liked to box and spar. We talked about wrestling, my uncle, and my father. Later that night, he even came to the wrestling matches to watch me fight. I had a great day with him, though I didn’t realize his importance then. I read his books after that point; he was a great guy, and he was a big man, a big, barrel-chested man. I don’t know if he was six feet, but he reminded me of my father, with that big barrel chest.

  One day, the English professor called me. He said, “Billy, your name is in the newspapers.” At the Plaza de Toros, the big bull arena in Madrid, they put a ring in the center of the bullring on Sundays and had pro wrestling after the bullfights. I was the semi-main event there, so I called the promoter. I said, “Excuse me, are you using my name?”

  He said, “Yes. As you didn’t wrestle for Jesus Chausson and you haven’t been against Joint Promotions, we’ll take you in. Come down to the office, and we’ll talk money.” I went and talked money and spent two summers in Spain, 1960 and 1961. I had a great time there.

  Pro wrestling in a lot of countries is a seasonal event. In England, it’s year-round. In Belgium and France, it’s year-round. But in Germany, Spain, and Austria, it is just in the summer. So in the summers, I’d go to tournaments in Spain, doing single matches in all the major cities.

  After Spain, I came back to England and then went to the German tournaments in 1961. People were starting to talk about how I was from Wigan and how good I was. Now, I was good as an English amateur, a British amateur champion, but compared to the top catch wrestlers, I wasn’t really that good in those days. I understood that because it was driven into me, regularly. Every time I won something or beat somebody, I hated going back to the gym the next day, because I knew what would happen. I wouldn’t be sparring with somebody who should be able to beat me. I would be sparring with an old-timer who I was a lot bigger than, a lot younger than, a lot stronger than. And he’d beat the living shit out of me.

  The cross-body suplex.

  I was starting to improve, though, because I was getting more experience competing with the top wrestlers of different countries. I ran into a lot of good wrestlers—Ivan Martinson from France; Spanish guys like Jose Arroyo and Pedro Bengochea, the Spanish champion in those days. I wrestled everybody of note in Europe.

  In Germany, I wrestled Peter Kaiser, who was Gustl Kaiser’s nephew and the German amateur champion, in a private training session. He said, “Come on. I want to see how good you can wrestle.” I pinned or submitted him 13 times, and he pinned me once. Josef Kovacs was there, and since I beat Peter easily, I had to wrestle him that night, too.

  Kovacs was trying to show me how good he was, but he didn’t quite get away with it. We finished up wrestling a draw, a 20-minute draw, because that’s what the matches were in Germany—five four-minute rounds. Further on in the tournament, it would go to 30-minute matches, and then the final would be six ten-minute rounds.

  I remember Gustl Kaiser used to go into a big speech every night about his athletes, his “gladiators.” He’d challenge anybody to come down and work out if they wanted to try, and they could pick anybody they wanted out of the tournament to work out with. This was the year before I won my first tournament. It was great for me, a great learning experience. I loved it. I was beating these guys who thought they were so tough. They were street fighters, mostly. Some of them did know how to wrestle, too, and there were judo and karate guys. Oddly, the judo and karate guys were the easiest to beat because they had discipline. A street fighter had no discipline, so it was difficult to size up what they were going to do just by looking at where their body was going. They’d kick from the wrong angle or throw a punch from the wrong angle, and if you were not aware, they’d catch you, so it was a good learning experience for me.

  Normally, in a two- or three-week tournament, you’d get all the guys from the dock areas who thought themselves tough. Maybe two or three would come down during a three-week tournament—one a week or so. This tournament was no different. Then something odd started to happen. Every day at the tournament, there were two or three guys who wanted to train with me. They didn’t want to train with anybody else. At the next tournament, it was the same thing. It was odd!

  What had happened was Geoff Portz, another English wrestler and a very good friend of mine, was going out to the toughest bars in the roughest areas in all these different towns, saying, “Billy Robinson thinks all you guys are Nazis. Nazis are bullies, and all bullies are cowards.” Now, it’s true that I felt bullies were cowards. It was a thing that I picked up from my father—if anybody was a bully, don’t worry about him, because if you faced him, he’d back down. If he knocked you down five times, get up again, and he’d quit on you. Anyway, Geoff was challenging all these guys, every night, and I didn’t know about it. When I finally found out at the last tournament of the season, I chased him up and down the different aisles of the Circus Krone arena in Munich. I couldn’t catch him, and everybody was laughing because they knew what he had done. Guys would pull tricks like that, but they’d watch your back, too, which was great about wrestling.

  The double arm suplex.

  After Germany, I went to Belgium, because my uncle wrestled over there. He was a big name there, having fought American Jack Sherry, the world champion at that time. Karl Gotch was from Antwerp, Belgium, a country that had some good catch wrestlers. Not as good as the Wigan guys, but still pretty tough. The promoter would book us for two weeks at a time or a week at a time, and we’d go to Antwerp and up into the different towns in Belgium and France, because it was right on the French border where they promoted.

  In Belgium, you’ve basically got two languages—one half of Belgium speaks French, and the other half speaks Flemish, which is like what Germans used to speak 300 years ago. The people from Antwerp who spoke Flemish wouldn’t speak French to the people from the French part of Brussels, and vice versa. They used English with each other. Neither would back down and speak the other’s language.

  I loved Antwerp, especially the zoo. The King of Belgium loved gorillas, so the zoo had a special section for them; it was unbelievable! There were no bars or cages. It was all glass, and this was 1962, when all the great zoos in the world had cages, not glass. You could walk in and see all kinds of gorillas—from the big lowland and highland gorillas to the silverbacks. Everything inside the area was wired up to an electric scale outside so that if they hit or grabbed or squeezed something, the scale would show the pressure they could generate. I could spend all day there just watching the gorillas.

  In France, I had a lot of challenge private matches—guys who thought they were tough or guys who wanted to show what they could do. Maybe because I’m English, I didn’t like France that much. It used to be pretty dirty, unlike Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, which were very clean countries. Pigalle and other areas of France were fun to have a night out. Nice, in the south of France, and those areas towards Spain—Provence and Normandy, they were different. They had a lot of well-educated people with big yachts and money. It was a completely different atmosphere.

  The French also invented a lot of champions. They’d call the French heavyweight champions the world champions, but anytime one of them got into trouble, they’d send to Wigan—to Dempsey, Foley, the Belshaw brothers, or to Billy Joyce—to come over and take care of the problem for them.

  One country that I loved visiting was Lebanon. When I was visiting, there were no wars there. From Arabia to Iran to Iraq, big oil countries were all around Lebanon, and it was the oil sheiks’ playground. You had casinos like in Vegas. You had beaches like in Hawaii. You could go out a quarter of a mile into the Mediterranean and see the bottom of the ocean. The ocean was that clean. Surfing, swimming, everything was there. As far as cuisine went, Lebanon was where the East
met the West; there were so many great restaurants. The weather was fantastic.

  As a history buff, I loved Lebanon. If you went 30 miles down the coast, you’d reach Byblos, where Richard the Lionheart landed during the Third Crusade. He built a castle around Byblos, and that’s where he started his crusade to take Jerusalem back. Around 1908, some guy going through the desert tripped over what seemed to be a piece of rock in the sand. He started to dig, and out came the entire Roman city of Baalbek. They cleaned it out, and there was the arena along with other beautiful buildings. Starting in 1955, all the greatest musicians and dancers have come to Baalbek every year to perform at the old coliseum for the International Festival. I saw Nureyev and Fontaine dance there, and I listened to different orchestras. It was just beautiful. They would put me in for one match, and every time, I’d stay a couple of weeks and visit Baalbek and Byblos, looking at the places where the gladiators lived, fought, and died.

  After the first war with Israel, things changed. But before that, if you went down the main street of Beirut, there would be something like three Mercedes taxis, a Rolls-Royce, four camels, and then a donkey and cart. It was a mixture of the East and West, of money and poverty. Everything was there. I had a friend in Lebanon, Ray Joseph, a.k.a. Ray Apollon, from Trinidad. His father was a very famous doctor. He went to school in Paris, but he got into pro wrestling and spent his money on it instead of going to the University of Paris. He was a big black man with great weightlifting strength. We became very good friends.

  In 1962, I went to India, and on the way back I stopped in Lebanon. Ray was wrestling, and his cousin Al Rodagua was there. Al was from Venezuela. He was having a private match with some guy in Lebanon, so Ray asked me if I could work out with him. So every morning I would go to the gym when I really wanted to be on the beaches looking at all these beautiful girls from England and Paris. They were there because the oil millionaires were feeding them money just to be around them. It was gorgeous!

  In Trinidad with Ray Apollon and a fan.

  One day, there’s this big guy standing with his arms folded, saying, “Pas possible, pas possible,” whenever I showed Rodagua different things to do. I was getting pissed off at him. He was a lot bigger than I was—about 70 or 80 pounds heavier, though probably my height—and he was on the Olympic team for Greco-Roman and freestyle. I went over to Ray and asked, “What’s going on?”

  Ray said, “Oh, he’s just saying that what you are showing can’t be done with him. He’d beat you easily from it.”

  I said, “Okay, tell him to come on the mat and let him show me. A little bit into it, I’m going to wink at you, and I want you to just say, ‘Billy, stop playing around and finish it.’”

  As soon as we came to hook up with each other, I hooked his bottom rib with the heel of my hand and put my elbow in my body and just walked him right off the mat. Well, he was so much bigger than me, so he got really embarrassed. He tried to do the same thing to me, but I wouldn’t let him. I kept on slipping to the side, bobbing and getting a single, trying to go behind him. I didn’t really want to go behind him. I wanted to give him the chance to come straight at me.

  So once I got him set up straight on the mat, I winked at Ray. He said, “Okay, Billy, stop playing around.” I went in to push him again, and he drove forward, of course. I popped his elbow up, dropped down my knees, grabbed his heel, and hit his kneecap with my other shoulder. But his body weight was so far over that, when I hit the knee, his body weight couldn’t get back in time, and the knee joint snapped. His leg was bent the wrong way at a 45-degree angle. He went to the hospital.

  The next day, after I’d been working out with Al Rodagua again, I was swimming in the pool. The big guy was there with a cast on his leg, and there were some other guys around. They were all multimillionaires who were backing the guy for the Olympics. I got introduced to all these guys, and they took me out to all the different casinos. We became friends. But that two-week visit was the only time I met him, because the war broke out not too much later. I remember I was on the beach in Beirut, and the police came over to take me back to the hotel. I thought I had done something wrong. I didn’t know they were just getting me out because they knew the war was coming in only two days; I got my ticket on the plane.

  I was very lucky. My father always said, “Billy, when you go abroad, forget you’re English. You try to understand the language, try to learn the language, try their foods, and try to understand their customs. No matter what country you’re in, if the people see you trying, they will help you.” That advice has worked for me in every country I’ve been to.

  I had a great experience in India, too. Because India was under the British rule for centuries, the country was very pro-English. The promoter there was Dara Singh, and two guys that I’d wrestled with in England—George Gordienko and John da Silva—were there already. Dara Singh had wanted somebody else from England to come over, and they suggested me.

  When I first got there, there was nobody to meet me at the airport in Bombay, so I took a taxi downtown and stayed at the Taj Mahal Hotel, by the Gateway of India. I had told Dara Singh that I wanted a return booking, and if somebody didn’t contact me within two days, I was leaving. Because of what I’d learned from my earlier experience in Spain, I’d got my return airfare beforehand. Fortunately, they contacted me within two days.

  The ride from the airport to the Taj Mahal Hotel was shocking. I mean, there were dead beasts on the road with carrion birds pecking away at them. People were going around with death carts, picking up bodies and throwing them into the cart. In those days, Bombay and Calcutta each had a million people sleeping on the streets. And if they’d earned enough money that day, they could rent a little bamboo cot to raise them six or eight inches off the roadway so rats would run underneath their bed and wouldn’t start nibbling at their toes. I had heard stories about the conditions in India, but to see it for the first time was horrible.

  Wrestling was a big thing in India. They had their own style of wrestling—Gusti. For a long time, it has been debated whether the Indian clubs and the Indian squats were originally Indian or brought by Persians to India. It’s like Muay Thai in Thailand and Savate in France; whether that style of kickboxing originated in Thailand, or in France, or whether the navy people had picked it up somewhere, nobody will ever know.

  Bombay, 1962.

  While in India, I wrestled a top Gusti wrestler who had challenged the visiting pro wrestlers, and I beat him in his own style in about a minute and a half. He was like 360 or 370 pounds. I was about 215 pounds in those days. He stood about six inches taller than me, though the photographs in the newspaper made me look ridiculously small.

  I was fortunate enough to wrestle the original Dara Singh (not the promoter). Now, Dara Singh was a champion equal to all the Bholu brothers and everybody else in his day. But his brother got murdered over a family dispute, and he went and killed three brothers and got put into prison for it.

  But his name was so good in wrestling in those days that when Khrushchev visited India, he wanted to see Dara Singh. So they arranged for Singh to have a wrestling match outside the prison. And Khrushchev said to Nehru, “Listen. You shouldn’t keep a lion like this imprisoned in a cage.” Nehru pardoned Singh. He got out, but he was a lot older then, and I wrestled him in a match and beat him. He was huge, a big, strong guy, but I beat him like I beat a lot of guys—because I was young and coming up while they were old and going out. That happens in wrestling often. It’s like Billy Joyce and George Gregory or me and Billy Joyce. When I won the British Championship from Billy Joyce, that was a real match. I mean it wasn’t a pro wrestling match. I had to beat him on the level to get the British Championship belt, because that’s how you do it in Wigan.

  In 1962, when I went to India, there wasn’t television there. When we had matches in Bombay, New Delhi, Calcutta, Madras, and other places, wrestlers and promoters would go
around the city in rickshaws for two or three days before the matches, and they’d stop every so often to announce through their megaphones: “Ladies and gentlemen, in three days’ time, this champion, Billy Robinson, the British Lion, is going to fight Dara Singh, the Indian Lion, at seven o’clock at Cricket Station.” That would go on for three days. Now, times are different. You log onto the Internet and see what movie is playing or who is wrestling or who is playing football. Living has become a lot easier.

  In India, it was against the law for a Muslim to wrestle or fight with a Hindu, so the Muslim faith inaugurated me to be their champion in India. Consequently, it went over very, very big. While I was there, the beautiful young granddaughter of the Nizam of Hyderabad followed me everywhere I was wrestling, from Bombay to Delhi. She’d be there in the front row of the crowd. We had dinner, and we became very good friends. Now, the Nizam of Hyderabad was the richest man in the world. He owned the Koh-i-noor, once known as the largest diamond in the world. That’s the big jewel in the front of Queen Elizabeth’s crown.

  One of the big deals of knowing the shahzadi (princess) was that I got to go to the Nizam’s palace in Hyderabad, and she took me around the museum. In Lebanon, I’d seen where Richard the Lionheart landed on the Third Crusade. As a child, I’d seen Richard the Lionheart’s sword in the Tower of London, and now I’m in this museum of the Nizam of Hyderabad, and there’s Saladin’s sword and all stuff from the Crusades! I mean, I’m a 20-year-old that’s into the history of England. So that was fantastic.

  Meeting the Governor in Bombay, 1962.

  The Nizam of Hyderabad asked me what I would like to do. I said, “Well, I’ve always wanted to sail.” Two hours later, there’s a Rolls-Royce picking me up and taking me to the lake near Hyderabad, and I’m sailing a yacht with a captain teaching me how to tack and everything else.