Physical Chess

by Billy Robinson

  After India, I went up into Kathmandu, Nepal, and had a great time there. Champions would come over from Persia or the various maharajahs would bring their champions up from India to wrestle, and we wrestled private matches for the king of Nepal. When Dara Singh, Gordienko, and others left Nepal, I stayed there with the American economic advisor to Nepal at that time, one William Tweet. He later became an economics professor at Vanderbilt in Tennessee. I stayed with him and his wife and kids.

  While in Nepal, I was introduced to Father Moran from the Catholic school and orphanage, where they have a Billy Robinson Sports Day every year, even to this day! He used to call me “Robinson” all the time, and I absolutely hated it. It came from being raised in England because, with the British military controlling the world for so many hundreds of years, if you addressed a lower-ranked person by their surname, it was a big insult. I mean, you could call somebody a bastard and they would laugh at it, but if you called somebody by their surname, it could very well start a fight. It was Father Moran that got me out of that old custom, and then, being away from England for so long helped, too. I started to coach wrestling in the orphanages there, the very same orphanages that were founded by Hillary and Tenzing, the first people to climb Mount Everest. Tenzing’s son, Sherpa Tenzing, was in one of the orphanages.

  One day, after coaching, Father Moran asked me to join him for dinner. During the conversation afterward, he asked me to fetch him an open wooden box at the other end of the pool. I went to get it. It was just going dark, and as I neared the box, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. A pair of huge green eyes was staring at me from about 10 feet away. It was a black leopard. For a moment, I thought I was going to be his dinner, until I heard Father Moran chuckling. He assured me that I shouldn’t worry, and to just get the box slowly and come back. He told me that the leopard was wild, but that they left food out for him every night in that box, and he left them alone. I was mad, but he was laughing. That was the first time ever that I felt fear.

  One time, the Americans in Nepal put on a play about magic called Bell, Book and Candle for the king and the Nepalese royal family. Later, it was made into a big movie with James Stewart, Kim Novak, and Jack Lemmon. I was the stage manager for the play. At this time, Bill Tweet introduced me to a person from the German embassy. He was a huge Bavarian and weighed at least 350 pounds. He wanted to finger wrestle. I didn’t know what finger wrestling was, but he explained that you interlocked your middle fingers and put your feet so you were standing toe-to-toe, and pulled until one finger straightened out. He beat me quickly. I really had no chance with this guy, and it pissed me off that I let myself get talked into it.

  After the play, the royal family had a big ball. The royals had never seen jazz dancing, rock and roll, and the twist. So I danced the twist and the jitterbug. Bill Tweet’s wife was a ballerina, so we did a dance where we started off doing the jive and the twist, then the music changed into ballet, and she went into ballet steps and the pirouettes. Toward the end, we had it choreographed in such a way that she’d spin about and her legs would hit into my legs and I’d take a bump. Every time, I’d get up, she’d still be spinning, and I’d take another bump and then another. I had a good time, except that it was hardwood floors, and I’m break-falling like on a wrestling mat. It was hard, but the king enjoyed it so much that he even asked for an encore.

  After our dance for the king, the ball turned back to formal dancing, but I’ve got this big German on my mind. I am still furious and looking for him. I really want to make an example of him because I got really conned into doing the finger-wrestling bit. The next thing I know, somebody’s grabbed me from behind around the neck. Well, I’m pissed off thinking about the German, so I turn around and, without looking at his face, do a backbreaker lift. Then, instead of doing the backbreaker, I am going to grab him around the waist, lift him shoulder-high, throw my feet back and do a belly flop. I’d have landed with all my weight on him. In Derby, England, I had beaten a jiu-jitsu guy in a challenge match with this move, and he was knocked out for 25 minutes. Anyway, as I’m picking him up, I realize that whoever it is, they’re a lot lighter than 350 pounds.

  The music stops, and I see all these Gurkha soldiers taking a step forward, all pulling their kukris out. Gurkhas are very famous Nepalese soldiers, and they have a knife called a kukri. If they draw it from its sheath, they have to draw blood. If they don’t get somebody else’s blood, they have to cut themselves. Anyway, I’ve got the guy up in the air and I look up; it’s the king’s younger brother. Oh boy, you’ve never seen anybody put down on the floor on his feet so softly in your life. As I gently set him down, he burst out laughing, so then, the Gurkhas retreated and the ballroom dance started again.

  I was sweating, though, because earlier that year, a guy had gotten a new truck and he’d accidentally hit a cow and killed it in the middle of the street downtown. People killed him. They hung him from a lamppost because cows were holy for them. In certain areas of the town, rats were holy or monkeys were holy. You could see a stake through a cat in the middle of the street because that cat had killed a rat. If the king’s brother had been hurt, it would have turned very bad for me.

  India, 1962.

  When I was in Kathmandu, Prince Carlos of Spain came with his bride, the princess of Greece, on their honeymoon. Franco was still in charge of Spain, and he was setting up Prince Carlos to become the king. I was invited to the honeymoon party, which was full of dignitaries and ambassadors and different people of note. Prince Carlos was a black belt in judo and enjoyed talking to me about wrestling and judo.

  On the way back to England, I returned to Germany. When in India, I had got very ill with jaundice. My eyes went yellow, my skin turned yellow, and I lost a lot of weight. In Germany, Gustl looked at me and said, “Oh, he’s too small for my tournament.” So a wrestler named Dennis Mitchell said, “Listen, Gustl, I’ll wrestle him. Let’s see how he does.” I had a great match with Dennis, who later became a close friend. So Gustl kept me on in the tournament.

  At this time, I got a lot of challenges from wrestlers, like Molnar and a Turk called Mustafa. They were national champions, and they thought they were very good at catch wrestling. And because I was so weakened, they thought this was the time to have a shot at me. But they made a mistake, because catch wrestling is knowledge. If you’re strong, that helps you a lot, but the basics are just pure knowledge. Catch wrestling is a combination of knowledge, heart condition, and strength, in that order. That’s why catch-as-catch-can is great.

  Brunswick Ten-pin Bowling was just then being pushed in Germany. We were doing a promotion at the wrestling tournament, and that’s where I met my wife, Ursula. Ulla, we called her. Ulla was doing a world tour with the American female world champion who was promoting Brunswick Bowling. I met her in Nuremberg, where Brunswick Bowling had just started. They came down to the wrestling tournament, and I was in the ring. She was in the front row, and our eyes met; that was the start of the end of my single days. Then we got invited to play ten-pin bowling, and the next day to promote bowling in Germany. She was there, and later on, she began to teach me how to bowl. About 18 months later, she came to England and we got married.

  A few years later, before the birth of my son, Spencer, I was reading the Sunday newspaper, and she was making dinner (she was a great cook). On the front page of the newspaper was the headline “The Richest Man in the World, the Nizam of Hyderabad, Is Dead.” So I turned the paper to show her. I said, “Look what I gave up for you.” There was a picture of the Nizam’s granddaughter, the one who had shown considerable interest in me when I was in India. The next thing I knew, I was wearing the dinner she was making. That’s how my mother was, too: a wildcat.

  The Sambanderak family of Thailand, connected with the royal family there, sent their children to the University of Manchester and Salford while I was in Japan. They stayed at my mother’s house. They used to send my mother t
o Thailand. Once, they gave her a very rare solid gold and jade standing Buddha and a gold chain. She was at a bus stop one night, going home, and some young toughs came up and tried to snatch it off her neck. Well, she beat the living shit out of them with her umbrella and protected it. She’d give nothing up. Like I said earlier, I come from a complete fighting family.

  Now, in England at the time, everyone who could look after himself got introduced to the Sabinis and the British mafia. They put a guy named Bill Benny into running all the clubs in the north of England—the sporting men’s clubs in Liverpool, Blackburn, Bolton, and all those places around Lancashire. He also had the high society clubs in Manchester. He would bring over people like Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland. The Beatles and all those rock bands started in the workingmen’s clubs. The Beatles started at a very minimal wage. Through Benny, I got to meet a lot of people, like the Beatles. When ten-pin bowling came to England and the Beatles were starting to get famous, I was just getting to the British Championship stage and was getting famous, too. Brunswick Bowling set up matches with entertainers; we’d play the wrestlers against the Beatles, or we’d play soccer against the boxers or the jockeys, for charity. I got to meet comedians, like Harry Secombe, and a lot of the British actors, movies stars, and sports people, including the players for Manchester United.

  About that time, I headed over to Japan. In Japan, iwe (International Wrestling Enterprise) and the jwa (Japan Pro Wrestling Alliance) were opposition promoters, and the latter had Karl Gotch. I landed in Japan for iwe, as a counter to Gotch.

  World Champion.

  From Japan, I was going to go back to England, but Dave Ruhl, who was with Stu Hart’s promotion, told me to come to Calgary. Ruhl’s uncle was Pete Sauer (a.k.a. Ray Steele). In England, I’d heard a lot about how good Ray Steele was. In Calgary, I wrestled Jack Bence. The match was so good that Stu said, “Come back and wrestle at Calgary Stampede.” I finished up wrestling Dory Funk Jr. to a one-hour draw. And then Dory Funk said, “Billy, you’ve got to come to America.” That’s how I got my first introduction into the Americas. I went back briefly to England, and then to Japan again, followed by Singapore and Hong Kong. There, someone got in touch with me and said, “Come out for Jim Barnett.” So I won the World Championship in Australia that Barnett was promoting.

  Wrestling in those days was very hard. A lot of the matches had no time limits. Back then, there was no “Mixed Martial Arts,” only what we used to call private matches. They were private because a lot of it was against the law. For most private matches, only about 20 to 50 people were there, but most bettors made a lot of big money.

  If you go back to around 1912, the biggest promoter of sports was the National Sporting Club, which was made up of the English lords. They controlled most sport in those days. For example, they brought Jack Johnson over to fight the British champion. He won. Then they backed him to go to Australia to fight Burns for the World Boxing Championship. They’d pay all the expenses, plus they’d pay for him to go over on the ship, the Queen Elizabeth, but he had to promise to do two things: pay them back from the money that he won by winning the World Championship, and defend the title in England one time, which he never did. Because of that, no black man was allowed to fight for a British Championship from 1912 until 1948, when Dick Turpin (Randy Turpin’s older brother) became the first black middleweight champion.

  The great wrestler from the East in those days was the Great Gama, and Stanislaus Zbyszko was the American heavyweight champion. The British invited both to wrestle at the Harringay Arena, which was the largest arena in Great Britain. Gama beat Zbyszko inside of 12 or 18 seconds or some such ridiculously short time. Ten years earlier, when Zbyszko was in his prime, he had gone through India and wrestled Gama. They’d wrestled an hour draw in the Gusti style. Ten years later, the British wanted to find out who was the best, so they brought Gama from India and Zbyszko from America. Zbyszko was at the end of his career. Ed Lewis was the world champion, but they brought the American champion Zbyszko over instead.

  Up until the ’40s, guys in pro boxing and real wrestling had to make money any way they could. Wrestlers would try to find promoters who could promote a match to the rugby stadiums or the soccer stadiums. There was no television. Very little was heard on the radio, because the average working-class person couldn’t afford a radio. A lot of people couldn’t read and write, so posters or newspapers didn’t work. People went around with town criers, saying something like, “In two weeks from now, Zbyszko is going to fight the Great Gama” or “Gotch is going to fight Hackenschmidt.” That’s how it was done in the old days. With television, you’ve got 15 and 20 matches on the card, lots of lights and glitter, and thousands of people watching; there was none of that in the old days. It was just two fighters, like in the old bare-knuckle days or the early days of pro boxing.

  Alf Robinson with his belt, working for a carnival in Ireland, taking all comers.

  Being a champion wasn’t enough. Fighters had to make money for their families. So they’d fight at state fairs or local fairs. They’d rig up a tent for what they call “carnivals” in America or what we call “fairs” in England. They’d show a bit of a match of guys sparring and challenge anybody in the audience. They’d invite everybody in to see these guys wrestle, but then there was an open challenge for anybody to come in and challenge the wrestler. The audience had to pay to see these challengers take on the touring fighters.

  A week’s wage in those days was around $12. The challengers might get $24 if they won or if they could last three rounds with any of the fighters. But, of course, none of them won or lasted that long. That’s not the point, though. There were all these guys who thought they were tough and came to challenge the carnies. And the carnival wrestlers knew a few submissions, which they learned from guys like John Pesek, Clarence Ecklund, or Ray Steele, and with which they could beat anyone if they got challenged. Unfortunately, it’s like having dessert without having the salad, soup, and main course.

  My excruciatingly painful set-up for the banana-split pin.

  These carnival guys weren’t facing other catch wrestlers. They just needed to beat the local coal miner or tough guy. So although they called themselves great catch wrestlers, they were second-rate guys—with great hearts, no doubt—who knew a few submissions. They never knew how to set up a guy without using brute force. Later on, as the old-timers started retiring, promoters didn’t want great wrestlers anymore, since they couldn’t control them. By that time, it had become a game of big money. With television, the promoters wanted control of everything.

  In the early days, though, when arena matches were offered, most promoters were retired wrestlers. The wrestling business was still very good then. The promoters selected the guys who would wrestle and choose where to promote the match—in New York, Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, or wherever. Obviously, wrestling being as tough as it was, the fighters were not going to go through five matches in a short time without somebody getting really badly hurt. So what they used to do is go to the gym and have a private gym match with their two top guys; they would wrestle—“out to shoot,” as Americans would say, or “have the pull” as the Wigan guys would say—to find out who was the best. Then they’d go to the next town and do exactly the same thing, except this time they wouldn’t be trying to hurt each other. The match would be the same, so they could get paid for five different matches instead of just one; the private gym match was a shoot and the rest were “re-enactments” of that match. Somebody was going to get hurt if they didn’t do it that way, because they were very good. But there were those who would try to double-cross you and shoot during one of the “re-enactments.” We always needed to watch out. Such matches were called working matches. Nobody watching, not even great wrestlers, knew if it was real or not.

  Later on, wrestling matches became a show where audiences wanted to see very young, athletic-looki
ng guys instead of older guys, even though the old-timers were actually far superior in their skills than the younger wrestlers. Young guys sold the television shows a little better, which is what’s happening even now in pro wrestling. Guys like Gorgeous George, who was a carnie wrestler, really accelerated the change of pro wrestling into more show than sport. At least now they don’t sell it as real wrestling. They sell it as “show wrestling,” and, no doubt, it’s a great show to watch. Vince Jr. has done more than any other promoter in the history of wrestling worldwide. He’s got real wrestlers doing the show wrestling. You’ve got Olympic wrestlers in there, and mma fighters who have come from pro wrestling. But the actual show is a show.

  Unfortunately, the people outside watching it think all wrestlers are showmen. That’s not true. There’s real wrestling out there, and there are still real wrestlers, and the champions are still real champions. Lou Thesz was probably the greatest of all professional world champions, and for one reason: he conducted himself professionally inside the ring, in the gym, outside the ring, in the business world, and with the gentry (royal families) around the world. Everybody respected professional wrestling because of Lou Thesz. He may not have been the best competitive catch wrestler, but he certainly was the best world champion for the pro wrestling business.

  Lou Thesz and I became good friends. He always tried to tell me that Ed “Strangler” Lewis was the best wrestler in the same way that I felt Billy Joyce was the best. Billy Joyce told me that George Gregory was the best. I guess I’ve been known as the best, in my time. A lot of the greats have a certain period of time when they’re unbeatable, but nothing lasts forever. In most cases back then, with the old-time mats and wrestling on grass, and no sports medicine, injuries were a big reason why the best often lasted a very short period of time.