Lou was older than Karl Gotch, and Gotch was 12 years older than me, so Lou had to be, say, 15 or 16 years older than me. I never actually wrestled him, but he knew Gotch and so knew that I could get the job done. One time Lou refereed a match with Verne Gagne and me when Gagne and I weren’t getting on very well. During that match, I was having my way with Gagne. “Look at this, Lou. What do you think of this, Lou?” And Thesz said, “Billy, take it easy. He’s the boss.” Thesz knew a few of the moves from the time that he had spent with the old-timers before he got into the nwa.
Thesz had a strong bias against Pesek. That came about because Pesek tried to beat Ed Lewis—anytime Ed Lewis was up to match his opponents, it was in the contract that the match was open. If you want to shoot or try to beat me, do it.
Ed Lewis was very sick with boils in those days, and it was a championship match at the Garden. Pesek was a middleweight-cum-light-heavyweight. So what happened was Pesek tried to beat Lewis. It was a hard match, and Lewis won. Lou never forgave Pesek for trying to beat Lewis, and Ed Lewis, I guess, was pissed off about it, too, because Pesek never got promoted around that area again, unless, of course, they had a problem and needed some policing. Lou would never admit that Pesek was a great wrestler, even though he really was. Pesek was probably the best in the world in his weight class in his time. Later on, when Pesek was at the end of his career and wanted to go into the nwa, old as he was then, Lou blackballed Pesek from being able to wrestle in the nwa; Lou had a lot of power in the nwa at that time.
Bert Assirati once challenged Lou Thesz when Thesz wrestled at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Assirati was a street fighter, an exceptionally powerful guy who could wrestle, plus he had the heart of a lion. He was like five-foot-six or five-foot-seven, 280 pounds, and as thick as he was wide. He was a catcher on the high trapeze in the circus when he was 13 years old; that’s how strong he was. He could get two 90-pound dumbbells, one in each hand, and hold them out wide in the crucifix position. I’ve seen him with a 56-pound dumbbell in each hand, swinging them once into a back somersault. He was a sadist and a masochist. He not only liked to hurt people (two of his opponents died in the ring while wrestling him), but he also didn’t mind getting hurt.
Assirati had broken away from Joint Promotions and organized an opposition promotion in England. George Gregory and Billy Joyce both challenged him because they were wrestling for Joint Promotions, but he wouldn’t have anything to do with either of them. Assirati didn’t have the technique needed to be thought of as a good catch wrestler, but he was still very dangerous. However, when Thesz was the world champion and he came to England, Assirati made it known in the newspapers that he was challenging Thesz. So, in response, they had the police waiting for him when he came to the arena. Though they didn’t arrest Assirati, they would not allow him into the Royal Albert Hall either.
When I first came to the United States, Lou Thesz had a lot of respect for Karl Gotch, and Karl had a lot of respect for Lou. But then something happened and things changed. They were both extremely stubborn. If their mind was set and you disagreed with them, that was it. Karl and I nearly got into a street fight in Tokyo because I named my son Spencer. He hardly spoke to me for three months. To Karl, I should have called him “Thor” or “Odin” or some other Nordic god’s name. I called him Spencer after Winston Churchill, who I thought of very highly, but Gotch couldn’t see it. If I had been hard-headed about it, we’d have got into a street fight, or he wouldn’t have spoken to me again. That’s how a lot of the old-timers were.
Billy Riley was no different. I never heard Billy Riley say anything good about any of the old-time greats; nor did he ever say anything good about me to my face, because, as he explained to me, that would have made me big-headed and I’d stop learning. I never heard him talk about Billy Joyce or Joe Robinson or George Gregory. He never said bad things about them, but he never said they were great, either.
Nobody gave any credit to anybody else. Maybe it was because publicity was mostly word-of-mouth then. So if you said somebody was good, it might get into the minds of the populace that the person you were complimenting was better than you. It is difficult for college wrestlers or Olympic wrestlers nowadays, or even today’s mma guys, to understand something like this, but I can understand because I was among the last really great catch wrestlers.
Back then, you’d have rugby stadiums full just to watch two guys wrestle on the grass. No mats. No fancy stuff. No time limit. It was a lot harder, especially during spring rains. The second-biggest holiday in England, after Christmas, is Boxing Day, which was the sports day; people would go out and see bare-knuckle fighters or a horse race or a wrestling match or a boxing match. Nowadays, “pro-wrestlers” practise the matches before they go into the ring for a worked match. That would never happen in the old days.
In America, wrestlers used to talk to each other in the ring. English wrestlers from the old catch school didn’t need to talk. They knew if somebody got a headlock, and they didn’t throw a guy across the ring. If you’re going to throw a guy to the ropes, use your shoulder to bump your head out, and throw him in the ropes to do something. It had to be, at the most, three feet away from the ropes; any more than that, and a guy can stop himself. I could tell what my opponent was going to do just by his body position, because I’d learned the basics of catch-as-catch-can. I know what a guy is going to do well before he does it, even in a shoot, because that’s what I’m trained to do. I’m trained to know where his weight is, the alignment, so I know where his power is coming from, which direction the power is going to—that’s the direction the danger is coming from.
When I turned to pro wrestling, I was shown the pro wrestling game. We never talked there, either. The idea was, who was a good worker? A good worker was someone who could have a match and the people watching, even other wrestlers, would not know that it wasn’t real. But that was in Europe. American politics were completely different.
In Europe, you wrestled for any match. You agreed with your promoter in a private meeting what you wanted to be paid for that match. Now, whether the arena was sold out or empty didn’t make a difference. Even if the arena was empty, your promoter still paid up. There was no backstabbing like there was in America, especially with the showmen. The showmen in America would slander the old-time wrestlers because they wanted to be in the main event, not the old-timers. They’d say something like, “Oh, he’s no good. Don’t use him.”
Today, for wrestling conditioning, you’ve got these different machines—you’ve got all these different calisthenics, like hitting a big tire with these big hammers. That’s good if you don’t have a sparring partner, but the only way to get into shape for any particular sport is to do it. Billy Riley used to say, “If you want to be a weightlifter, lift weights. If you want to be a runner, go run. But if you want to wrestle, you’ve got to get on the mat and wrestle and spar. That will give you conditioning faster than any of the other things.” With a sparring partner, you’re going to get yourself a lot stronger, your technique is going to be advanced, and so is your speed, your knowledge, and your timing. You’re going to better understand how to react to whatever an opponent does. Hitting a rubber tire or doing 5,000 squats will not make you a better wrestler.
Billy just before his famous match against Antonio Inoki.
That’s why even big, strong weightlifters and the strongest men in the world, when they get on the mat, are amazed at how strong the wrestlers are. A weight doesn’t move; it’s just one solid thing that you can control. It’s dead weight. Whereas when you’re wrestling, you’ve got a moving weight, and a guy who knows how to use his weight can go from 180 pounds to 500 pounds just by using the angle moving away from you.
For example, look at the sumo wrestlers. All sumo wrestlers, whether the 350- and 400-pounders or the smaller ones, practise splits from when they are three or four years old through to when they retire. They have the big belt,
and they grab the belt, try to lean back and lift the opponent’s 300 pounds and walk him off the mat. Well, what the opponent does then is arch the legs out backwards and open into the splits position. Now, instead of having 300 pounds close to their body, it’s like trying to hold 300 pounds out at arm’s length. It just can’t be done.
In the old Wigan gym, the coach would get five or six good guys, and you’d go on the mat for an hour and a half or two and a half hours, non-stop. He would send a new guy in every three to five minutes. If you were getting the better of a guy too easy, he’d send somebody else in. Then you learn how to make your opponent do all the work, and you don’t get tired. That’s why some of these old matches were so long, like the Olympic match that lasted 11 hours 40 minutes. That’s when they started to cut the time down, because you can’t have 700 matches at 11 hours apiece.
When I first came in and started to get mixed up with the mma and stuff, I said, “Get out of that guard position. You’ve got to learn to stand up and get away.” Ten years later, they’ve started to realize that what I was telling them was correct. Now, they can’t hold guys on the mat, but I was telling them that from my experience years ago.
In a street fight or in a catch match, you don’t want to be underneath. If you’re underneath with a guy who knows what he’s doing, and you can’t escape, you’re in trouble because you run out of gas. You’re using twice or three times the amount of energy by being underneath—carrying his weight and defending yourself. He’s using that against you.
With any kind of fight—and both my dad and Billy Riley told me this—you’re never fast enough, and you’re never good enough. No matter how good or fast you are or how easily you beat a guy, you very well might have a lot of trouble with the next guy because of the difference of styles, even though the next guy may not be as good as the first guy. When two of the greatest fighters in the world fight each other, the match can turn miserable and boring because of the clash of styles.
Most fighters or boxers now don’t even know how to throw a power punch. When the older fighters threw a punch, it had the full body behind it. They’d rotate the hip and shoulder so the actual punch only travelled six inches but had all the body behind it. Nowadays, the hip goes backwards when the arm goes forward, so there’s no power.
I’ve written this book and made videos so those who are interested can learn these things. The only reason anyone knows about Billy Riley and Pop Charnock is because of Karl Gotch and me. Nobody else was talking about them. It’s like Waino Ketonen: he beat everybody, and there were plenty more like him—for example, the winners of the German tournaments in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Ketonen came from Finland, and the Finns had some great wrestlers in the old days. Technique-wise, they were very good. But Ketonen was one of those guys who comes around only once in a hundred years. When he was champion, and even before that, he went all over the world and beat everybody. I think he was only about 155 or 165 pounds. All top wrestlers were tall and lanky. These huge guys with muscles you see in drawings, they are not wrestlers, and that is not a wrestling body; a wrestling body is supple. You’ve got to be loose. If you saw Billy Joyce, you wouldn’t be impressed by his looks, but if you saw him wrestling, you’d realize what an amazing wrestler he was. Power is a combination of strength and speed. Add technique, and you become good.
For example, if you get into a front headlock and you’ve got to do the switch behind, there’s a technique that makes it easy. All amateurs make the switch, but they do it with power alone. There’s a technique, and there’s a great counter to it as well. It’s not easy, though. When I was first shown the move, for some reason, I just couldn’t get it.
For one month, I went to the gym three or four times a week, for two to three hours at a time; all I did on the mat was try to do the switch. “Do it again.” “Do it again.” These words rang inside my head, giving me nightmares. After one month, Billy Riley said to me, “Forget it. You’re never going to get it. I don’t want to see you try it again.”
Well, the next week, the same guy comes in and goes up to the gym to work out. Billy Riley calls me to come up to spar. First thing, I grab his head and arm; he kneels down in a position to do the switch. I do the counter so perfectly that the guy is flat down, and I’ve got a top wristlock submission. It was all over in about 15 seconds, and Billy was smiling.
Afterwards, Billy Riley, Joe Robinson, and I went back to Billy’s house. The three of us are having tea, and Billy’s telling me how I could have got it better! He never said I did anything well. Billy Riley was that way even with the best, like Bob Robinson, a.k.a. Billy Joyce. Riley said, “For 12 years, Bob was the dumbest guy we ever had in the gym.” Both Joe (Bob’s brother) and Billy spent more time with him than anybody: when Bob finished his shift at the coal mine, either Joe or Billy would be waiting for him.
Bob would go straight to the gym, work out there, and then he’d go home. But when he got home, Joe would be there and would go over it all again with him. This went on for 12 years, and he just didn’t get it. Then, overnight, something just clicked. It was like somebody opened his mind to learning how to learn. Then, all that training over the years, it just mushroomed out. He was unbelievable, technique-wise. If you were to ask Karl Gotch, he’d tell you. Billy Joyce played with Gotch. Billy Joyce played with me, until the age difference caught up with him. As he got older and started to go down, I was coming up and learning, reaching my prime.
It’s all about being loose and open to learning. Today, nobody knows how to ride. It’s not just the jiu-jitsu guys; even amateur wrestlers have no idea of how to get pressure and control. You go back in my time, or well before, and you had guys that were pure leg-wrestlers. Guys like Joe Robinson, who was so loose or supple he could put a dime on his toe and pick it up with his teeth.
Today, promoters use football and basketball players to draw crowds. Football players aren’t wrestlers. As my dad or Billy Riley would say, they couldn’t even fight their way out of a bloody paper bag. Their immense strength and their popularity as football players brings them into pro wrestling. Think about all the big-mouthed, showy football and basketball players nowadays; how many of them have you seen do any good in mma? No football player has beaten any of the decent mma guys, no matter how big and strong he is, or how good a shape he thinks he’s in. It’s a completely different game.
In earlier days, if promoters and tv management liked a certain guy—“Oh, he’s a good-looking guy; I’d like to watch him fight”—they’d push that guy to get him in the forefront, giving him matches with guys he could beat. Later, they changed the game so all the guys would be “show” guys that anyone could beat. There’s immense money involved today.
With the old-timers, this didn’t work, because the “show” guys couldn’t beat them. For instance, Dick Hutton was a great amateur wrestler, the smoothest of all the American heavyweight wrestlers during his time. When I say he was smooth, I mean technique-wise. He was as much power as knowledge. His style was like catch-as-catch-can. He became a very good professional wrestler. He didn’t have the “show” or the “drawing power,” but he had the ability to beat everybody.
Though football players had immense drawing power for pro wrestling promoters, they always had a real wrestler around them. Verne Gagne would use Karl Gotch, me, Khosrow Vaziri, Brad Rheingans, and other guys as policemen. It was really TV that changed everything. Real catch wrestling champions weren’t good-looking, athletic young guys with fantastic bodies. They were knowledgeable men that have been through the mill, and to become a champion anywhere, you had to be the best.
THE GUYS
In my day, probably one of the most dangerous guys was Danny Hodge. Danny was a great amateur wrestler; he had great hand strength. He boxed professionally, too. He was a Golden Gloves champion, and he had the heart of an elephant. He wouldn’t say no or quit for anybody, anytime. Danny has to be, without dou
bt, one of the American greats of all times. I don’t know how he’d have done against the old-timers. Once I asked Riley who the best was. He said, “Any dog on a given day can win a fight. But if you really want to get to the heart of the whole matter, you’d have to have them fight or wrestle 10 times and see who wins the most matches of the 10.” I never got to spar with Lou, but with Gotch, I did. I could take him down and get behind him, and control the thing the whole time. However, the 12 years difference in age between us made a big difference. Gotch was getting close to 50, I think he was 48 when I did that, so I’d be 34 or 35. I could have made him tap-out in my prime, but I had too much respect for him. I beat Billy Joyce, but it’s the same thing—age difference. I don’t know how it would have been if Gotch or Joyce were at their best and I was at my best.
Hall of Fame, 2003, with Danny Hodge.
In Japan, when I was coaching uwfi, the two top young guys were Sakuraba and Tamura. Although Tamura beat Sakuraba the last two times they fought, I would say that Sakuraba at his best would beat Tamura at his best seven or eight out of ten. Tamura is exceptionally dangerous because he is unpredictable. Sometimes, out of nowhere, he does really goofy, out of this world stuff—even he doesn’t know that he’s going to do. Just like a street fighter, he can always catch his opponent unawares. But, based on one match, you cannot say about anyone, “Okay. He beat him. He can beat him anytime.” It doesn’t work that way.
UWFi Wrestling.
The business side of pro wrestling was different; that’s why what we call a policeman comes into it. Like Ray Steele protected Thesz. You’d have to go through Ray Steele to get to Thesz, and Thesz would watch the match to see the challenger’s ability (there were no videos or tv, so this was a way to watch the challenger). I’ve done it in many countries for different promoters, and four or five times for Gagne, against guys who have challenged.
Physical Chess Page 6
