The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling

by Shoemaker, David

  That last part of the agreement was no small thing. The NWA was, from its start, functionally a cartel, and a lot of capable promoters were left out. Now, if any of them tried to run shows in an NWA fiefdom, the partners in other regions would send in their top stars to run a show on the same night and guarantee failure for the upstart.* The original six members of the NWA—Paul “Pinkie” George, Al Haft, Anton (Tony) Stecher, Harry Light, Orville Brown, and Sam Muchnick—were soon joined in their racket by other promotions from every reach of the United States, formally locking down the wrestling industry in the country.* There were fifteen major groups at the start; by 1956, as some of the larger territories fragmented and new areas opened up, there were thirty-eight NWA member groups, some operating through several contiguous states, while some states, like Texas, were split up into several parcels. The most influential promotions—Stecher’s Minneapolis territory, Leroy McGuirk’s NWA Tri-State Wrestling, Georgia Championship Wrestling, Jim Crockett Sr.’s Mid-Atlantic Wrestling, Bob Geigel’s Central States Wrestling, Sam Muchnick’s St. Louis office, Championship Wrestling of Florida, Pacific Northwest Wrestling, and the Central Wrestling Association out of Memphis, to name a few—were joined to the north by Stampede in Calgary and Maple Leaf Wrestling in Toronto, and of course promotions in Minneapolis, Dallas, and the Northeast would eventually make some noise on their own. The wrestlers themselves made out well in the deal because they could now venture from territory to territory to keep their acts—and their feuds—fresh, with considerably less risk. There would always be the hometown heroes who stayed in one city for much of their careers, but since no promotion had the wherewithal to employ a vast army of wrestlers, the rest of the roster was mutable. Now a villain could disappear from St. Louis and go to California, a new villain would show up in St. Louis, and the cycle would begin anew. As long as you were working within the confines of the NWA, everybody was happy.

  Founder Orville Brown was the first world champion, and the aforementioned Lou Thesz, who would define the NWA through much of its period of dominance, was the second. (When he claimed the mantle, the National Wrestling Association ceded control of the sport to the National Wrestling Alliance, and the former basically ceased to exist.) Thesz, who learned the grappling art of “hooking” from “Strangler” Lewis himself, would be the champion on and off for a combined period of ten years, and would be the man on whose back wrestling was made into a national enterprise, as he fought, sometimes off script, to ensure the unification of the various titles around the country.

  The system worked well for all parties involved, and terribly for those not invited to the party. One man’s gentleman’s cooperative is another man’s mafia, after all. The member groups fended off the competition, helped one another out financially when necessary, and together brought an air of positivity to the sport; if they weren’t ushering in legitimacy, exactly, they were signaling a sort of organization that afforded them the sheen of propriety.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, this coalition of disparate businessmen was not without its internal politics. Their champion was chosen by a quorum in the owner meetings, but such democracy didn’t leave everyone happy. This was especially so because, while the titleholder traveled regularly from territory to territory to defend the NWA crown, he would naturally be perceived as beholden to the promoter with whom he had made it big—not to mention that each regional manager was predisposed to feel neglected during the vast majority of the time when the champ wasn’t there. And so with Thesz’s ascendance in 1949, the power shifted toward his home turf, Muchnick’s St. Louis Wrestling Club.

  It was during Muchnick’s NWA stewardship that the U.S. government actually intervened in the wrestling world, slapping the NWA with charges of monopoly and racketeering. Muchnick was ultimately able to negotiate down the charges into a “consent decree”—sort of a nolo contendere of the federal judicial world—which formally reduced the power of the NWA without mandating its dissolution. This was in 1956, and while it amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist (the NWA promotions were by then so entrenched that the threat of competition was minimal), the bottom began nonetheless to fall out.

  By the mid-’50s, many of the promoters were ready to see Thesz dethroned, to spread the wealth to the top stars of other areas. But Thesz was entrenched, incredibly popular, and the contrarians within the NWA couldn’t agree upon a successor. And so Thesz’s reign persevered.

  The NWA agreed upon a plan in which Thesz would lose the title to Canadian star Edouard Carpentier in disputed fashion, leading to dueling claims to the title and an eventual high-profile rematch. As is often the case in the bizarro world of pro wrestling, life would imitate art: The dispute not only played out behind the scenes, but it also opened the door to a convention of public title disputes that would characterize the NWA throughout the coming years.

  Eddie Quinn ran Carpentier’s home Montreal promotion and was a part-owner of the St. Louis club; he had a falling-out with Muchnick.* After the (deliberately) disputed first Thesz-Carpentier match, but before the storyline could come to fruition, Quinn ignored the NWA directive and started billing Carpentier as the champ, while Muchnick and most of the rest of the NWA groups stuck with Thesz and denied that the championship dispute had ever even occurred.

  This led to an oddball series of semiofficial championship switches, as Quinn started leasing out Carpentier’s services to have him lose his championship, repeatedly, to various regional headliners. Freddie Blassie* won the title from Carpentier in Los Angeles; Verne Gagne won it in Omaha; and Killer Kowalski won it in Boston. It was a reversion to the pre-NWA norm—multiple “world champions” proclaiming themselves king in their sundry fiefdoms.

  As if that system weren’t fraught enough, there suddenly emerged a new power player in the wrestling world—one bigger than any big-city promoter or world champion: television.

  The FCC gave the green light for national commercial television starting on July 1, 1941. The first two truly national TV networks were NBC—the two-decades-old radio company—and an upstart called the DuMont Network. DuMont—owned by DuMont Laboratories, a television manufacturer, in partnership with Paramount Pictures—went on the air in 1946. (CBS and ABC didn’t go on the air until 1948.) Being much less entrenched than NBC, DuMont was at a serious disadvantage: It had less money than NBC, so it had to scrape for content, and the FCC broadcasting guidelines had been heavily influenced by NBC power player David Sarnoff in such a way so as to handicap any emergent competition. DuMont only lasted ten years, and it’s largely forgotten today, but its impact on the television industry was significant. It was the on-screen pioneer of the sitcom and the soap opera, the original home of Jackie Gleason, and the creator of the multiple-advertiser model for TV commercial sales that persists to this day.

  And it was the first network to broadcast wrestling.

  Fred Kohler, kingpin of the Chicago wrestling world, had been broadcasting his cards locally on two stations (WBKB and WGN) before national TV took hold. He even had a brief show on the nascent ABC network. But it wasn’t until DuMont came calling that he—and pro wrestling—took hold of the mainstream. Wrestling was a natural fit for DuMont; Kohler knew what he was doing, and the shows were cheap to produce—not to mention the fact that his central location and position of power within the NWA meant that he could import the top stars of the “squared circle” to the small screen.

  By the early ’50s, Thursday and Saturday night pro wrestling were two of the top shows on DuMont and a certified national phenomenon. The stars of DuMont—guys like despicable pretty boy Gorgeous George, northeastern sensation Antonino “Argentina” Rocca, Canadian big man Don Leo Jonathan, Italian superstar Bruno Sammartino, reviled showboat Freddie Blassie, African American trailblazers Bobo Brazil and Sweet Daddy Siki, and fighting ballerino Ricky Starr—were among the biggest sports stars in the nation. Kohler signed many of his wrestlers to exclusive contracts—a first in the sp
ort*—because his local guys were becoming more famous than many of the NWA’s entrenched headliners and Kohler wanted to keep a leash on them. He sent them to wrestle in other NWA regions and took a cut of everything they earned. Pro wrestling was more popular than ever, but the new fans wanted to see the TV stars. For the longtime fans, who had for years been taught to accept the primacy of their local product, this new national phenomenon must have been a rude awakening.

  The national wrestling fad would not yet evolve into an institution. By the end of the decade, it had subsided somewhat and wrestling was largely absent from national network programming. DuMont shut down, and the other networks had enough other programming that they didn’t feel compelled to sully themselves with “fake” sports.

  Despite Kohler’s success, it became conventional wisdom that television was bad business for wrestling because, the thinking went, fans wouldn’t want to show up for the live shows if they could see events on television for free. (This tenet held in the larger sports world as well.) This despite the fact that Kohler’s local broadcast, before his shows went national, doubled his gate receipts. Starting in the mid-’50s, though, a maverick DC-area wrestling promoter named Vincent J. McMahon started airing his Capitol Wrestling promotion on regional television stations and shocked the wrestling industry. Not only did his TV exposure not reduce his crowd numbers, it increased them, dramatically. Weeks after he started airing the Capitol Wrestling show in 1956, his arena shows started selling out in advance, with fans driving in from Pennsylvania and Virginia to see the card. “It’s television,” McMahon told The Washington Post and Times-Herald. “If this is the way television kills promoters, I’m going to die a rich man.” Through the TV shows he was able to build much more significance—and detail—into the feuds that were featured on his cards. Television functionally became a weekly commercial for the live events.

  After his brief era of television dominance, Kohler moved on to other matters. He had long been a proponent of Minneapolis champ Verne Gagne—who had by then acquired an ownership stake in the upper Midwest territory after Tony Stecher’s death—but his vote wasn’t enough to give Gagne the belt. In 1960, in a fit of frustration, Gagne seceded his promotion from the NWA with the blessing of Kohler and dubbed his new creation the American Wrestling Association, or AWA. With Kohler’s Chicago territory and the partnership of several other neighboring groups, the establishment of the AWA severed much of the Midwest from the NWA oligarchy. For the appearance of legitimacy and continuity, they acknowledged then-NWA champ Pat O’Connor (whom Kohler detested, for whatever reason) as the AWA champ but demanded that he defend the title against Gagne, which they knew he wouldn’t do, so after a grace period, Gagne was announced as de facto AWA champ, a reign that would continue for years.*

  “Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers beat Pat O’Connor at Comiskey Park on June 30, 1961, to become the NWA World Heavyweight Champion. It was billed as the “Match of the Century,” and to the extent that it marked a sea change in the business, that wasn’t as hyperbolic as it might sound. Rogers was one of wrestling’s transformative figures, one of the first nationally celebrated champions who was more form than substance—more “show” than “go,” as a latter-day wrestler would put it. It was no coincidence that he entered the ring to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance,” after all. With his bleached-blond pompadour, sequined robes, and near-comical arrogance, he brokered in a new era of larger-than-life personality to the wrestling world. (But contra Gorgeous George, he wasn’t an effete preener; he was a self-obsessed tough.) It was a presence perfectly suited to a maturing television generation. The difference between Thesz’s old-school purity—also embodied by the earnest O’Connor—and Rogers’s showmanship was night and day. Thesz was a fighter in the “Strangler” Lewis mold, a clean-cut, corn-fed traditional athlete; Rogers was the distillation of wrestling’s newfound tomfoolery. Even though he didn’t pin Thesz for the championship, Rogers’s rise basically signaled the end of the classical era of wrestling that Thesz proudly represented.

  Some of the NWA bookers were less than enthusiastic about this shift away from shooters, who had legitimacy even if the matches were rigged, and they were all upset at the Capitol Wrestling Corporation—Vincent J. McMahon’s northeastern promotion that served as Rogers’s home base—and its seeming reluctance to send champion Rogers out to their territories. Moreover, though, they were probably uneasy with McMahon’s growing power, just as they had been with Kohler’s. McMahon had gained control of the Northeast in a coup by technological proxy; he started airing his Capitol Wrestling TV program, filmed in DC, in New York in 1955 and was soon selling out venues in Manhattan better than the entrenched New York bookers. McMahon was partnered with Toots Mondt, who had been working with various promoters since the breakup of the Gold Dust Trio, including McMahon’s father, Jess, a respected boxing promoter. Capitol Wrestling had only joined the NWA in 1953, but due to its television prominence and pivotal location, McMahon was practically running the NWA by the time that Rogers won the championship. One can only assume that the NWA was leery of McMahon’s increasingly centralized power in the wrestling world, and that having his man be champion was, to some promoters, a bridge too far. And so, by decree of the NWA dons, Thesz defeated Rogers in Toronto in 1963 to put the title back around a more dependable waist.

  In retaliation, Capitol Wrestling seceded from the NWA, much like Gagne had three years prior. McMahon’s group refused to acknowledge the title change and proclaimed Rogers the first “national” Heavyweight Champion of the rechristened “World Wide Wrestling Federation.” (The putative grievance was that the Thesz match was only one fall rather than the customary “best two out of three falls” championship match format.) With the power afforded McMahon by his dominance of the northeastern corridor of New York–Boston–DC, his separatist movement had a position of power and influence—and, in turn, an appearance of significance—from the start.*

  The NWA carried on after the defections, but the Territorial Era’s death warrant had been signed. Though the NWA didn’t immediately dissolve, the two factors that would spell out its end as a national power had already appeared: the secession of the WWWF and the advent of cable television.

  The conceit that held up the territorial system was obvious but its implications were subtle: Even though the NWA was national, and everyone knew wrestling existed across the country, each territory was able to maintain the perception that what happened there was all that really mattered. The NWA champ coming to town wasn’t so different from a monster heel who would appear in a region for a short run: It was a special attraction that buoyed everything else on the card. There’s a common perception, fueled by the fact that most modern wrestling fans only experienced territorial wrestling in its dying days, that the operations were self-evidently small-time. In fact, the territorial promotions gave every indication of being big-time—many regions had their own TV shows, and in some instances they were the highest-rated shows in the area—and their audiences mostly accepted them as such. If nothing else, they were fully insulated from any of the oddities of wrestling booking, like the incongruity of a wrestler who would play a good guy in Texas and a villain in San Francisco, or disputed title changes.

  When Georgia Championship Wrestling—by then one of the most prominent regional promotions—started airing on a UHF station called WTCG in 1971, a die was cast that would forever alter the wrestling landscape. WTCG would soon be renamed WTBS* by its owner, Ted Turner, and become known nationwide as the “Superstation.” The notion of a national cable network was a novelty at the time, but the impact of TBS and its counterpart, the USA Network, would be significant.

  Just as had happened when national networks started in the ’40s, these first national cable stations were low on content, so they turned to pro wrestling to fill a couple of hours of that void. TBS brought Georgia Championship Wrestling—and the NWA more broadly—back to a national audience. There were renewe
d complaints from rival NWA promoters about the confusion inherent in wrestlers playing different characters on GCW and in other territories—imagine the confusion if a local hero who paraded around on the regional show on Saturday morning appeared on the GCW show on TBS later that night as a bloodthirsty villain. But the complaints didn’t end there: Many NWA members felt that GCW was stealing the spotlight and compromising their product by counterprogramming against their local television shows. GCW, of course, claimed that there was no conflict, that they were just running a local show that happened to be on a national network.*

  The USA Network, meanwhile, started airing wrestling on Sunday (later switched to Saturday) mornings in 1983, and later on Monday nights. Its product was an independent World Wrestling Federation, or WWF—which was a (slightly renamed) heir to the WWWF, now run by Vincent J. McMahon’s son, Vincent K. McMahon, the man all wrestling fans know today as simply “Vince.” After he took over from his father and bought out the ownership stakes McMahon Sr. had left to Mondt and wrestler-cum-announcer (and confidant) Gorilla Monsoon, he aimed to take his promotion national. He started hiring away the stars of other regions—cherry-picking the more outlandish ones—and signing them to long-term, exclusive contracts, something that many of the regional promotions had still never done, despite Kohler’s precedent.

  If the appearance of Georgia Championship Wrestling—a single NWA affiliate—on national TV was mind-blowing to the average wrestling fan, imagine the sudden appearance of the WWF. Here was a separate world, with different wrestlers and a wholly different concept of the wrestling enterprise. Where the NWA as a whole—and GCW in particular—had become increasingly gritty and realistic, the WWF was gaudy and cartoonish, a parade of outsize gimmickry. Where GCW was filled with angst, the WWF was all bombast. If GCW was a well-choreographed brawl in a bar parking lot, the WWF had the glittery sheen of a major boxing spectacle. They were in many ways similar, but to the Southern fan attuned to the traditional NWA sensibility, the WWF couldn’t have been more alien.