The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling

by Shoemaker, David

  *Bischoff supposedly threw his coffee on Guerrero in response; Bischoff maintains that he simply knocked his coffee over.

  *Though the z plural perhaps isn’t now as cool as it seemed in the Attitude Era, it still persists, presumably because it renders a normal word copyrightable.

  *Unlike a normal superplex, which is performed with the aggressor standing on the second rope and flipping his opponent over from a seated position on the top, this move saw them both standing atop the top turnbuckle, increasing the height of the move by a third and probably doubling the torque.

  *After Eddie’s death, Vickie was hired by WWE as an on-screen manager, presumably to give the family a healthy source of income. Improbably, she’s emerged as one of the most inflammatory villains in the company.

  *Among the numerous video eulogies that aired that night, the only outliers are those of Dean Malenko, who has a subtle, if telling, sense of horror coursing through his formal tribute, and William Regal—supposedly one of the people who received text messages from Benoit over the weekend—who has a stoically circumspect take on the situation that, in retrospect, is chilling. He refused to discuss Benoit as a person, despite their close relationship, only focusing on his ringwork; one can only assume that he had considered the possibility of the true tragedy.

  *Also widely known as “catch as catch can.”

  *The “backyard wrestling” of its day.

  *As will become clear, until Lou Thesz, no championship was particularly meaningful (and I guess that one could argue that in the fully staged era that Thesz presided over, no championship has ever been particularly meaningful in a combat competition sense), no matter how profound the honorific sounds.

  *He got his nickname when he appeared at a carnival in Chicago to challenge the then-champion in the overalls of his day job and the announcer dubbed him “Farmer” on the spot—an inversion of the mythological narrative of Gotch.

  *A future world champion, and the original “Man of 1,000 Holds.”

  *The oil was the main point of contention, but lest one think Hack was fibbing about the other illegal tactics, here’s the match recap from the Gotch-sympathetic New York Times: “For two hours he [Gotch] eluded every attempt of the Russian to fasten a grip on him. Gotch side-stepped, roughed his man’s features with his knuckles, and butted him under the chin, and generally worsted Hackenschmidt until the foreigner was at a loss how to proceed.”

  *The perception of Gotch as a dirty fighter was not limited to that bout. As latter-day world champion Lou Thesz once said, Gotch was widely known to be underhanded in the ring. “The picture that emerged of Gotch from those conversations,” Thesz recalled, “was of a man who succeeded at his business primarily because he was, for lack of a kinder description, a dirty wrestler. That’s not to say that he wasn’t competent, because everyone I ever talked with said he was one of the best. But those same people described him as someone who delighted in hurting or torturing lesser opponents, even when they were supposed to be working out, and he was always looking for an illegal edge when he was matched against worthy ones. One of the old-timers I met was a fine man named Charlie Cutler, who knew Gotch very well and succeeded him as world champion. . . . Gotch would gouge, pull hair and even break a bone to get an advantage in a contest, and he was unusually careful to have the referee in his pocket, too, in case all else failed.”

  *Benjamin Roller was a preeminent wrestler in his day who pops up in just about every notable story in the sport’s early history, always referred to as “Dr. Roller” or the “Esteemed Doctor” like some sort of seer of pulp literature. He was an actual doctor, by the way.

  *From here on out, this new Lewis, the Robert Friedrich one, is the only one who will matter, so if there’s any doubt, that’s who I’m referring to.

  *Not to be confused with the original “Terrible Turk,” Yusif Ismail, a certified international sensation who won the world championship from Evan “Strangler” Lewis and then died when the ship he was traveling on sank on his return trip to Europe.

  *As was the case with many promoters of the day, Sandow was himself an ex-wrestler. His real name was Wilhelm Baumann; his public name was borrowed from old-time muscleman Eugen Sandow (and, decades later, has been appropriated by incoming WWE wrestler Damien Sandow), just as he had previously appropriated the ring name “Young Muldoon” from the aforementioned “Solid Man” in his early wrestling days.

  *“Mondt” is the only name of the trio that was written on any birth certificate, for those who are keeping record.

  *And thus wrestling diverged from its longtime cohort, boxing, which eventually went the route of greater legitimacy, probably to the detriment of the sport. But that’s an argument for another day.

  *If this is starting to sound something like an echo of Vince McMahon’s rechristening of the industry as “sports entertainment,” it’s worth noting that at the tail end of his career, Mondt was a close adviser of McMahon’s father, the original owner of what was then called the WWWF. More on that later.

  *The credit for these innovations is sometimes given to another footballer turned wrestler, former Chicago Bears player Jim McMillen, but the historical timeline favors Sonnenberg in this regard.

  *The New York Times once said that “the mischievous Dan Parker once drove the wrestling trust crazy by printing all the results of coming matches in advance. He had a secret pipeline to the inner councils.” It’s unclear when exactly this happened, or if they’re just referencing the Pfefer incident obliquely.

  *Though this exact phrase wouldn’t be coined until years later, I know.

  *Under the leadership of former wrestler William Muldoon (the Roman Gladiator himself), whose tenure ended a few years prior to Pfefer’s revelations, the commission also remade the boxing game into its current shape, reducing matches in length dramatically. Muldoon, heart-healthy puritan that he was, also banned smoking during boxing and wrestling events in Madison Square Garden.

  *There were widespread rumors that he died of syphilis, but uremic poisoning was on the official coroner’s report.

  *The various regions would continue to have champions, but now they would be formally known only as regional titleholders, an acknowledgment of what was all but explicit before.

  *There are widespread rumors that threats of violence were used as well. Throughout the history of the NWA, there was a common insinuation that organized crime was involved, which has never been substantiated to my knowledge.

  *And eventually Japan too.

  *One major point of contention was Muchnick’s association with Jack Pfefer, the same man who had outed pro wrestling in 1933. Though he was often on the outs with the power brokers in the wrestling world, Pfefer had carved out a niche as a purveyor of wrestling oddities and, indeed, was the top promoter in New York and to some extent the country, for a brief period in the late ’30s. Muchnick was more willing to engage him than most other promoters, who were still peeved at his lack of respect for the tradition of kayfabe.

  *Who would go on to be a legendary manager in the WWF.

  *Previously, most wrestlers didn’t have contracts at all other than handshake deals.

  *In 1961, the California federation that was home to Blassie left the NWA too, but with less fanfare. It returned to the cooperative in ’68.

  *The WWWF actually rejoined the NWA in 1971 and seceded again in 1983. This fact is largely lost to history, and the reasons are unclear, though it’s rumored that the WWWF needed financial support that only the NWA could provide. One of the lesser-known beefs by NWA members against the younger Vince McMahon’s national expansion in the ’80s is the professed fact that they had helped bail his father out at times when money was tight or competition was fierce.

  *Short for “Turner Broadcasting Station,” naturally.


  *There are rumors that GCW’s plan was indeed to ditch the NWA and take its promotion national, but there’s no definitive proof of this.

  *McMahon got a majority of the company by buying out the stake of the Brisco brothers, Jerry and Jack, who went to work for McMahon thereafter.

  *Jarrett and Lawler’s CWA may have never reached the kind of scope that the others did, but its rabid local fans kept it going long after most of its contemporaries faded away—and Lawler’s national renown stemming from his memorable angle with comedian Andy Kaufman briefly made it a certifiable national phenomenon.

  *And George was indubitably the financial victor. He was reported to have made $160,000 in the following year, 1951.

  *Or a South African promoter when she was fifteen, or a newspaperman in South Carolina when she was sixteen—exact history is, as always, hazy.

  *Byers was, not incidentally, also his daughter-in-law. Wolfe always chose women over whom he could exercise control.

  *After Moolah caught him in a compromising situation with another lady wrestler several years after she was officially knighted by the NWA, the two divorced, and Buddy Lee went on to backstage fame in a different industry, as the agent for country acts such as Hank Williams Jr. and Garth Brooks.

  *She supposedly dallied with her students and sent them out on jobs where sex was expected of them, and although these rumors are nominally believable, they strike me as very, very unreliable.

  *Elizabeth, New Jersey, was chosen as the locale because it was a rather rough-and-tumble town where sensibilities were least likely to be offended; after the show went off without incident there, lady wrestling was allowed to migrate to the more upscale bastions of Trenton and Newark.

  *From the time of William Muldoon’s run as chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission, everything unbecoming, from wrestling masks on up, was subject to extreme regulation.

  *In Lipstick and Dynamite, Moolah says she’s been with their organization for more than forty-six years.

  *Her onetime student Judy Grable claims to have beaten Moolah in matches now lost to official history, but Moolah denies that that could have happened: “I didn’t teach her everything I knew. I’m too smart for that.”

  *Maxine was supposed to be the evil female star of the Hulk Hogan’s Rock ’n’ Wrestling cartoon, a role that eventually went to Moolah.